Tag: server

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Summing up AI 2023

So the last 12 months have been amazing, if not rather dramatic with regards to AI. Things have improved a lot and we will see and hear more of this over 2024 I’m sure.

These are some of the things that I’ve found interesting…

We of course have had the big dwrama over at openAI, with Sam Altman being fired / Quitting? and then the board being fired and Sam getting his job back. Rolling stone has an interesting write up about this.

Everyone is wondering and predicting what this Q* (Pronounced Q star) product at open AI is – some think it may be an AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) but very few people have had access to this product so far. Although there is a lot of speculation.

We still don’t know what’s happened with googles LAMBDA and Blake Lemoine is still I think the canary in the coal mine with regards this technology.

The issue of building your own “Bad version of chatGPT” is a very real possibility. We should beware of Bad Robots! And I mean Bad Robots- you could theoretically hook your own bent version of chatGPT up to a mechanical device and let it lose(Who knows what the military are up to with this idea).

In addition to this is the issue of copyright and the fact that everyone is ignoring the importance of related links and knowledge that back up the statements made by AI (not to mention the issue of AI hallucinations) . Although it is possible for these platforms to supply and reference sources, most of the commercial products don’t include this functionality. This I think is going to pan out in interesting ways. Already a number of Authors are attempting to sue OpenAI.

But I think the most interesting thing you could do is build your own chatGPT and train it on your own data. I’ve set up something on an old machine I run my self and gave it a number of my old blog articles and various other bits and bobs to play with. The results were solid and interesting (with references!).

But two things come to mind with regards this. You need CPU and Ram and ideally a few GPU’s to run this sort of software. In short a grunty machine or an expensive virtual machine, that runs at a reasonable speed (although I did manage to get this running on a machine with 4 cores, 8 gig of ram – it was very slow) but the scenario that comes to mind is this.

If you have your own company and fast access to your own data (files, emails databases, financial data etc), and can hook it up to your machine, you could probably gain all sorts of interesting insight. What was the most profitable project? How many emails were sent? What were the time frames for this project. These and a whole lot more questions could be asked about your data. The stinger comes though when you get around to the speed of the computer running this and the connectivity of your expensive AI brain to the content.

If you only have a 100 megabit to all that data sitting in the cloud, it’s going to slow things down. If you have invested in local hardware (and say have 10 gigabit or more connectivity) to your data your going to get results much much more quickly. I see an argument for employing your own sysadmin percolating!

In short 2024 is going to be just as crazy as 2023 it’s sort of amazing to be alive and witnessing all this. Thanks for reading and stay safe over the holiday season!

Steve

 

Related links quoted! _____________________________

Blake Lemoine
https://www.newsweek.com/google-ai-blake-lemoine-bing-chatbot-sentient-1783340

WTF Is Happening at OpenAI?
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/sam-altman-fired-open-ai-timeline-1234889031/

This new AI is powerful and uncensored… Let’s run it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyllRd2E6fg

Authors sue OpenAI over ChatGPT copyright: could they win?
https://www.businessthink.unsw.edu.au/articles/authors-sue-openai-chatgpt-copyright

Let’s build GPT: from scratch, in code, spelled out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCc8FmEb1nY

 

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Sarah Jamie Lewis and “The Dark Web”!

I have spent the afternoon researching the work of Sarah Jamie Lewis. A very interesting person and among other things she used to work for GCHQ! The irony is that she is now an independent security researcher who is pro anonymity and privacy advocate.

She is also the author of an interesting product called onionscan, which is a tool that can be used for mapping the dark web.

This particular talk I found rather interesting

Sarah Jamie Lewis: OnionScan: Practical Deanonymization of Hidden Services
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8hr0nlfJRc

Among other things it gives rise to the fact that if you want security you should find your self a great Sys admin! Put simply a lot of sites on the “Dark Web” are not well configured and if you use such services you could be at risk.

She covers such topics as why you should be careful if you use apache as a dark web server. Why not to use a google analytics id (don’t use the same id for all your sites) and be aware that if your using it in the real world as well as the dark web this is a rather incriminating vector!

Other things discussed are exif metadata (from photographs for instance) that give away your geolocation, phone type etc!!

Most importantly though she mentions a lot of the good things that the dark web can be used for including, that a lot of the dark web is blog sites, forums that help drug users with regards catching addiction before it happens and harm reduction. Also that the dark web is used to monitor human rights abuses, and censorship data gathering.

She sums up buy proposing that peer to peer may be the future of creating secure communications due to the fact that the client server model is rather difficult to secure and anonymise. Some very interesting, important and thought provoking work. Her twitter feed is also an interesting read and rather humorous but probably NSFW!

Related links
Source for onionscan
https://github.com/s-rah/onionscan

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Recent outage and snow flake servers!

This is a Wombat not a snow flake!

My server hasn’t been working too well over the last 24 hours due to it becoming a bit of a snow flake, that and the fact the the plumber always has leaky pipes! Not to mention that I was running a rather old version of Debian.

What’s a snow flake server you may ask? It’s what all system admins should avoid! It’s a server that does all sorts of things (often rather well) and as such is a precious little snow flake! The problem with this is that the server will not, or is not, easy to manage or update or improve due to lack of documentation, configuration issues, and / or as was my issue- software and hardware conflicts.

There are a number of ways to manage machine production and developer working environments. These include approaches such as blue green servers, machine imaging with products like puppet and Ansible. As well as a VM approach with products like Vagrant or a software container product like  Docker.

Whats also interesting is that with good old fashioned tools like password less key managed ssh access, and shell scripting you can control a lot of the process that the above products like to take claim for.

I’m going to think quite a bit about this snowflake problem some more in the coming weeks. I shall probably write more about how I, as someone with a “production server” and a number of other needs keeps all the ducks on the wall.  The end result is that I hope I can create a machine from scratch in a very short space of time. Or at least learn a few things.

Stay tuned!