GPT based “Denial of Information” attack

Academic journals, archives, and repositories are seeing an increasing number of questionable research papers clearly produced using generative AI. They are often created with widely available, general-purpose AI applications, most likely ChatGPT, and mimic scientific writing. Google Scholar easily locates and lists these questionable papers alongside reputable, quality-controlled research. Our analysis of a selection of
— Read on misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/gpt-fabricated-scientific-papers-on-google-scholar-key-features-spread-and-implications-for-preempting-evidence-manipulation/

I think we can define a new type of attack on the Internet. Much like the Denial of Service attack makes a service unavailable to ordinary users, a Denial of Information attack makes readily searchable information obscure by inundating it with generative AI based nonsense or outright misinformation.

This can be both a malicious attack or negligence.

A malicious attack would be threat actors specifically targeting information silos such as social media or SEO with misinformation intended to influence society.

A negligent attack is either in the form of misguided attempts by end users to use LLMs to churn out content faster, thereby inundating traditional systems with unverifiable data; or a negligent attack can come in the form of data retrieval infrastructure (such as search engines or LLMs) using generative AI to compile information without adequate gates to verify such information.

A Denial of Information attack is more insidious than a Denial of Service attack because it’s much more difficult to detect and even harder to neutralize due to the individualistic nature of information retrieval and consumption.

Comment for Colin Walker Blog – Sep 9, 2024

My MacBook is getting very tired so I want to mainly use it for music to get the most life out of it.

Source: Colin Walker – Sep 9, 2024

Say, Colin, doesn’t it make sense to try to get base Linux on your MacBook? I’ve heard people say it really gives a new life to old Macs, and not just a fresh coat of paint.

Drivers are fully supported, things seem to be snappier and RAM is used better than if you were on Windows or ChromeOS Flex or anything else.

From what I recall, base Ubuntu or Debian or Linux Mint are good options.

Dare I say, I’m sending you down a new rabbit hole? 😀

On responding using your blog

but I don’t think I would like to make my blog mainly about conversing with others
Meadow over at their blog

I respect that. I follow hundreds of blogs, exactly what Meadow is musing about not doing. But I don’t converse with them all, and certainly not on my blog.

My blog sits idle most of the time, until I have something I want to write. This may be private or public. But writing goes here. (Journaling, of course, goes into Day One.) That may involve responding to someone, as this post is, or utterly random musing, as the one by Meadow.

I like this about blogs. They’re not one thing. They’re defined by whatever is important to the steward. That’s why I follow so many.

On Threads

I love blogging. It’s a world unto itself. Sites reflecting people’s personalities, their lives, the ebbs and flows of their writing muscle (or photo posting muscle – I do love photo blogs), the business of their lives.

Social media is not like that. Well, some are and some aren’t.

I was reading this post by Ally Bean over on her website where she asked and answered the question – What is Threads (the Facebook-owned twitter clone)? It’s a conundrum, she says. It’s got so many users and yet not enough interaction. Threads calls itself a social network, yet everything is algorithm-led, so you can’t really do your own discovery. And, as Ally puts it –

The thing about Threads is there is no center to it to draw people to a communal “What’s Happening” section or a Writing Prompt or a Weekly Topical Challenge. It’s all random all the time.
Ally Bean writing on thespectacledbean.com

My take on this is that there are two types of social media services and mirroring them, two types of social media users. There are the public-first services and the private-first services. There are always exceptions to the rule too.

Public-first services basically take their cue from forums – there’s less or no focus on private messaging. It’s all meant to be open. Whether they’re link aggregators like reddit, or stream of posts sites like twitter, the main goal is that whatever you do on the site is public. Your likes, comments, shares, posts are all visible to everyone. Over time, through user feedback, these services do introduce private accounts, private communities, private messaging. But they pull these features back as quickly as they create them. The intrinsic value they create for their ad-supported profit hungry shareholders is in people doing things publicly.

Private-first services take their cue from email – the first focus is on private communication, which is thoroughly monitored for profiling, again for ad-dollars. Of course, there’s a massive public component of these sites too, including public groups and communities, public profiles, etc. But these are focused mainly on creating starlets with the aim of using these to drive traffic to the site till either the starlets crash and burn, or the algorithm changes and the starlets are left in the lurch. This behavior is similar to that of the music industry, which would assiduously create the persona of a pop singer, only to push them towards drugs and then tear them down as “bad influences”. Rinse and repeat. Facebook and Instagram are examples here. It’s sad that the two main examples I have are both owned by the same company. Snapchat is a competitor service too, but I don’t talk about it because I’m not on it. No network effects for me there. (I’m not on Threads either, but Ally is, and this post is wholly based on her experience and her blogpost. Quick! Someone write a critique of Snapchat!)

The fact is that I’m ignoring two behemoths here – TikTok and YouTube. But are they social media services? No. They’re Media Consumption services. The Social aspect of these services is purely incidental and meant only as a growth vehicle. If tomorrow they are free of the constant user growth requirement, they’ll gladly rip out all of the social aspects of their apps and sites and happily serve their existing users all the content they can shove down their throats.

Within the private-first but public-stream services, the trend is algorithmic feeds. This is a little unfair, because this push into algo-based feeds is by one company – Meta. Their unbenevolent dictator believes that everything becomes better when decided by an algorithm. So that’s what he’s pushing across every one of his properties. But you can’t talk about any other service doing better when there’s one monopoly and the others are fledglings.

That brings us back to Threads. Facebook and Instagram already lean heavily on algorithms for their home feeds. You’re not allowed to see what you want to. You’re forced to see what the algo decides will create more engagement.

But what does this lead to? Silence. Almost everyone I know who is active on Instagram no longer uses their home feed. It’s the list of folks you’ve subscribed to, yes. But never shown in the manner you want to, so might as well use the Explore feed to browse and the private messages to chat with friends about the latest news/memes/gossip (that’s why Instagram uses your private messages to create your profile too). Also, Silence in that, those who I’ve talked to about this no longer comment or hit like on instagram posts. Comments on public pages almost always lead to harassment and unnecessary visibility. Likes are exclusively used by the algo to make your feeds progressively worse by trying to push the same content at you over and over. So why hit like? Incidentally, this is why TikTok prefers to use “seconds watched” as the metric for whether the person was engaged rather than Likes.

Ally complains that it feels rude when people do not interact with her comments on Threads – forget replying, they don’t even hit Like. I argue that this is because the users on Threads are a reflection of the social media service they’re coming from. Almost all the users of Threads have come over from Instagram. They’ve been trained not to interact with content, as that’ll either train the algo or cause unnecessary headache. They’re not rude, they’re simply a reflection of Facebook’s vision of “users”.

Threads isn’t doomed to fail. It can recover and it’ll definitely keep trudging along as long as Meta is willing to lose money on it. Once they decide it’s not the next billion dollar idea though, they’re sunset it post haste. Looking forward to it. Till then, Ally’s words about Threads ring true –

it just kind of bores me.

Playing with a new iOS app

Playing with new quick notes app called Funnel. Pointed by Agam on his blog.

The power of such apps is to quickly get to a writing place. The problem with such apps is that they need a prominent place on your homescreen.

My homescreen has been locked to the current set of apps since a very long time. The second page is flexible. But I don’t see how the first page would be. I’m not sure what the fate of this app will be either.

I mean, I literally have the free version of Drafts sitting on the second page and I rarely use it. Maybe I should just use the back tap feature of iOS to do quick thoughts capture?

Parents on Art Advice

She said that you have to be willing to disappoint other people in order to be a writer.

Source: How Do You Write a Book?

What an interesting thought! And so true, not just for writing but for all art, all hobbies, all creativity; heck, even spirituality and meditation. All of these are deeply personal. The satisfaction from these is almost never monetary, by which you could justify the time spent on the activity to the world, but more importantly your friends and family. Instead, the satisfaction is deeply personal too. You’ll be called selfish and greedy. “Your time and your energy”, instead of being devoted to this abstract thing, “should be devoted to people around you”, they’ll say. You’re going to ignore children and thus force your partner to take up more work. You’re going to eat into their personal time or into shared personal time, which is even rarer for parents.

But it’s worth it. In the end, you get a book, a piece of art, a more settled personality, or none of these. But the journey is important, no matter who it may disappoint.

I changed the title from “How do You Write a Book?” to “Parents on Art Advice” simply because there’s so much more that this advice applies to. Maybe it shouldn’t be “Art” but “Life”, because Life is all about balancing other people’s disappointments with your own needs.

DNR’d two books back into 2023

Not a 2023 roundup post.

Just wanted to note that I was trying to finish 2023 with two audiobooks – To Her Credit and Classic Women’s Short Stories. Could not finish either of them. To the point that these are the only books that I picked up in 2023 that I will not finish.

“Classic Women’s Short Stories” is just too dated to read. There are a few short stories in there by some famous authors – Katherine Mansfield, Kate Chopin, Virginia Woolf. But most of the stories were just too… boring… to read. Ultimately had to drop the entire book. Woolf’s story, A Mark on the Wall, and Mansfield’s The Garden Party and Daughters of the Late Colonel, were the only ones I finished. I would recommend you to read these stories individually instead of through this book.

I thought To Her Credit would be similar to Figuring by Maria Popova, the book that kick-started my love for Feminist Memoirs. Instead, it was just a series of “here’s a woman who did amazing things and here’s a man we want to put down through her”. We need more writing like Popova’s which celebrates women’s accomplishments (or non-accomplishments, like Three Women by Lisa Taddeo) without demeaning them with comparisons. I’m still looking for anything as well written as Figuring.

I’m starting 2024 with a wondering book named Berlin by Bea Setton. It’s very along the lines of A Year of Rest and Relaxation. I’m loving the inner monologue of the main character and the audio narration by Ell Potter.

Setting Up a Local Webserver on Debian: Solving the Mystery of .local Domain Advertisement with Avahi

I recently purchased an Intel N100 based mini PC with the idea of turning it into a local webserver hosting many services like RSS feed reader, pi-hole, an open source memos app, and a few other smaller open source projects. I currently host all of these on an ailing Macbook Pro which has a tendency to go into “darkwake”, i.e. it wakes up when I send it a Wake-on-LAN command, and then within 15 seconds it goes back to sleep. Rather a lethargic fellow, that.

Initially wanting to install ubuntu on this new machine, I opted for debian because I’ve recently had some interaction with the OS at work and I’ve found it to be very stable and light. I’m sure someone might disagree and I’ll gladly experiment with other Linux OS somewhere down the line.

While I was installing debian, it asked me what the domain should be and I answered “local” because I want to access the server on my local network with the completely innovative domain name “server.local”. My other machines are “laptop.local” and “macserver.local”.

The latter two are Macbooks, so they automatically advertise the .local domain on the network using Apple Bonjour. But the debian wasn’t doing so. I was googling around but didn’t even know what to ask. Some stackoverflow answers spoke of how Ubuntu automatically advertises the “.local” while debian does not.

Before I rued my fate and having to wipe out my just setup server, I decided to ask the AI powers how I can solve this problem. My go-to is Bing Chat, since it has internet access. I asked the

Does debian 12 advertise itself on the lan with a .local domain name like Ubuntu and MacOS do?

Bing Chat looked around and regurgitated an answer I’d already found on Stackoverflow – that while it is possible to do so, the SO answer author decided to leave out the vital detail of what the heck this service is called on the Linux side of things (Apple Bonjour is a damn well known name in tech circles). The alternatives that the SO answer mentioned and Bing Chat vomited were to setup a local DNS server or to use /etc/hosts. The latter option is NOT available on iOS devices, which are painfully inadequate in terms of actually completely owning your device.

Before I gave up, I went to ChatGPT and pasted the question above exactly as is. I wasn’t really expecting a different answer, but I sure got it.

According to ChatGPT, as of its January 2022 cutoff date, Debian 12 hadn’t been released. But, the technology I’m talking about is called Avahi. Ubuntu and MacOS have it preinstalled and I can check if Avahi is installed using the following command –

dpkg -l | grep avahi

My debian install was of the netinstall flavor, which means it installed all the basic packages it thought were relevant and everything else was left to this poor user to figure out. I googled and found a method to install avahi-daemon on debian and the tutorial even mentioned that after installing it, I basically have to do nothing.

Lo and behold! One quick install step later, I can now access “server.local” on my LAN. Nice!

I don’t often do this, but I dropped the following feedback to the ChatGPT team regarding this excellent answer their LLM provided to me –

Though it doesn’t know that Debian 12 has been released after its cutoff date, ChatGPT was nevertheless point me in the right direction because the underlying technology – avahi – has been around for a while and is clearly the answer to the question I was looking for. In contract, Bing Chat was not able to come to the same answer even though I asked it the same question.

Spelling mistake and all.

The title of this post was created by ChatGPT after I fed it the entire post above and asked it what to name the post. I gave it the title “ChatGPT still wins over Bing Chat”, but that felt too sensational.

Cheers.

Thoughts on Parisian Lives by Deidre Bair

I started listening to Parisian Lives on the third of July and only just finished it. That’s almost three full months of interrupted listening, mostly in my car. But also while doing the dishes and grocery shopping.

A couple of things struck me about this book.

Firstly, I didn’t know what I was expecting going in. I’ve never been much into reading biographies, let alone autobiographies. But due to my recent interest in feminist memoirs and the “women writing women” idea, I’ve been diving into a lot of non-fiction. It surprised me to see that this book is semi-autobiographical and semi-biographical of the two Subjects Deidre Bair wrote about in her first two biography books – Samuel Beckett and Simone De Beauvoir. It contained equal parts an examination of Deidre Bair’s own life and struggles and her writer jitters and apprehensions when meeting literary giants; and an equal part her interactions with her Subjects, their reactions, and reasons for allowing her into their lives, the doors they opened and closed for her, the way they wanted themselves to be remembered and not. So it was quite the satisfying read.

Second, I wanted to know more about the lives of these two people. They are philosophers and interesting ones. Absurdism and Feminism. Both interesting worlds. So it was a nice introduction to their lives. Something the author says struck me as the perfect reason to read a biography – her goal has always been to make it so that the reader of her biographies whets their appetite for the Subject’s work and after finishing the book, dives right into the published works of the Subject. That’s what this book did for me. Though I’m wont to meander my way through some other works before carrying on with the “original” strain of thought I was following (I’m listening to Bird By Bird by Anne Lamott now instead of digging into either of the Subjects’ works), I do see this book as an important milestone for me to dive into more philosophy and also into more “women writing women”.

Third, and this is something I noticed in Figuring by Maria Popova, I love and hate that the final chapter in such books is chock full of “homework”. No where does Deidre Bair mention so many names, so many influences and inspirations for her Subjects as she does in the Final Chapter. In Figuring too, the final chapter had me taking copious notes and marking multiple books as “to be read”.

Deidre Bair says at one point that she writes the introduction at the end of her book writing arc, because she wants to summarize why the reader should read the book. This explains so well as to why I despise reading introductions. Once I’ve picked up a book, I want to quickly get to the meat of it, not keep navel gazing upon why I should be reading it. So I skip the introduction. But the final chapter, oh I need to keep coming back to it. This is partly why I dislike audiobooks. For all their convenience, there’s no way for me to highlight passages and make good notes. Oh well. Trade offs.

Overall, loved this book. It was unexpected and yet exactly what I needed in my reading journey.

Onwards!

Ortho Roulette

For about a week, I’ve been suffering from an affliction. The ring finger of my ~~write~~ right hand has been hurting since Monday or Tuesday of last week. On Wednesday last, the pain became so much that I shuffled off to an Urgent Care center nearby to ask them to look at it. Before I did that though, I had to call to confirm that they have an X-ray machine. No point going to any kind of hospital facility if they just punt me to another location to get the definitive test to tell me if I’d fractured my finger. I also had to confirm that they’re in-network for my health insurance.

After the nurse had asked me a bunch of intake questions and the doctor had looked at it and ordered the X-ray, I was taken to a long, dark room with a focused X-ray machine aimed at where I would place the palm of my hand. The technician was Indian-origin and curious as to where in India I’m from. The doctor gave me a preliminary report that it doesn’t seem to be a fracture. He asked a nurse to set me up with a splint and send me off. I had a nice discussion where I learnt that instead of calling it crepe bandage, which is what it is, people in the US health industry refer to it by the brand name 3M gave to their product – Coban.

The doctor came back and prescribed a strong painkiller, to be taken thrice daily for five days. (Spoiler Alert – I didn’t take it thrice daily. I’m not that mad.) He also said that after a discussion with a radiologist, he’ll inform me if there’s something that’s concerning, but in the meanwhile he also gave me a referral to an Orthopedic Surgeon at the other end of the world (downtown Redmond) “in case the pain gets unbearable”.

Over the weekend, my parents insisted that I find the X-ray report and send it to them for analysis in India. I discovered that the X-ray slides themselves had not been uploaded (because, who actually needs patients to have the freedom to get a second opinion, right?) but a report had been uploaded that said that I have a “possible avulsed fracture” in the offended finger.

I started looking up Orthopedic doctors. One large facility in the area, which is apparently accepting new patients, told me that in truth they’re booked out till the end of February but will look to see if they can accommodate me. The other, a one-doctor outfit, told me on Monday to come over on Wednesday.

Today, in fear and anticipation, I landed at the Indian doctor’s offices (no, they were rented offices, one of three he operates out of. That business seems to be booming!) and was left waiting in the patient room (consultation room?) for a good fifteen minutes after the initial nurse intake. When the doctor came in, he tested my finger physically, then looked me in the eyes and said it’s a sprain.

I asked, “are you sure?”

He replied, his deadpan eyes not giving even a glimmer of doubt, “we looked at the X-ray for a good ten minutes before we came in. There’s nothing in there to suggest that it’s a fracture. You don’t have a magical painless fracture. The fact that your pain is reduced and there’s no swelling around it… Use your common sense.”

I… don’t want to use my common sense. That’s why I’m visiting a specialist. Whatever.

It’s not a fracture!

But I have a six week recovery ahead of me. I’ve been told to buddy tape my ring finger with my middle finger if I can’t be careful in not further hurting the point which I’ve sprained. I also have been downgraded from heavy painkillers to the Over the Counter stuff and “only if you need it”.

When I sat in the Lyft on the way back, I breathed a sigh of relief. The driver, in turn, told me that he’d just been to Hyderabad for two months for medical tourism for his father. He commented, “the people are so nice there! No one lies to you. They give you all your records in a nice file and let you know exactly what tests they performed and what the results are, in very simple language. I loved it there!”

Yeah. All common sense things to do in a good medical system.