Sometimes our duty's extramural Then little butterflies we chase We like to gamble in things rural Commune with nature face to face Unto our beat then back returning Refreshed by nature's holy charm We run them in, we run them in We run them in, we run them in We show them we're the bold gendarmes We run them in, we run them in We run them in, we run them in We show them we're the bold gendarmes.
A very good piece Gardenwalker. A couple of tweeks to squeeze out the last few vestiges of Torydom (like getting rid of the TV license) and it would get my vote.
A very interesting piece, Mr Gardenwalker. Several of our PB posters have admired it, and said if only.....
But how far is it really from existing Lib Dem policy? I would have thought very close.....
Thank-you. I’ve been gratified by response from “left” and “right” posters.
But has it struck a chord with the radical centre?
If we can finish this season in the Top 4 it'd be a miracle.
I know a perpetually pessimistic Everton fan, he's convinced Everton will finish fourth and Liverpool outside the top four but Liverpool will win the Champions League in a miracle bigger than Istanbul thus taking away Everton's CL place.
If we can finish this season in the Top 4 it'd be a miracle.
I know a perpetually pessimistic Everton fan, he's convinced Everton will finish fourth and Liverpool outside the top four but Liverpool will win the Champions League in a miracle bigger than Istanbul thus taking away Everton's CL place.
Doesn't it need Arsenal or Spurs to win the EL too?
If we can finish this season in the Top 4 it'd be a miracle.
I know a perpetually pessimistic Everton fan, he's convinced Everton will finish fourth and Liverpool outside the top four but Liverpool will win the Champions League in a miracle bigger than Istanbul thus taking away Everton's CL place.
Unless the rules have changed yet again they won't lose their space if that happens. Just as they didn't lose their spot after Istanbul (they failed to win their qualifier, there's a difference).
Last I checked the only way 4th loses their space is if the Champions League and UEFA Cup are BOTH won by an English club that have BOTH finished outside the top 4.
Which came remarkably close to happening two years ago from memory.
If we can finish this season in the Top 4 it'd be a miracle.
I know a perpetually pessimistic Everton fan, he's convinced Everton will finish fourth and Liverpool outside the top four but Liverpool will win the Champions League in a miracle bigger than Istanbul thus taking away Everton's CL place.
Everton would still be in then. It is up to 5 from each country now. You'd need Spurs, United or Arsenal to win the Europa League as well, and finish out of the Top 4.
Edit. I see that's been done. All Everton fans are pessimists. And tend to be introverted. That's why we support EFC. Ps. We'll get beat by Saints tomorrow.
Passed by a table in a small park today on my run. The rule of six (might have been seven) was being utilised early.
The amount of traffic on the roads was incredible. Sunday is usually visiting folks day round here and I’d suggest we are pretty much back to normal. The psychologists were right - people cannot stay in lock down forever. I think aside of the pubs and non essential shops, for many, many people, life is almost back to normal, whatever the government might tell us.
It's a self correcting cycle.
Good news = People head out to visit other people Bad news = People lock themselves up at home.
If we can finish this season in the Top 4 it'd be a miracle.
I know a perpetually pessimistic Everton fan, he's convinced Everton will finish fourth and Liverpool outside the top four but Liverpool will win the Champions League in a miracle bigger than Istanbul thus taking away Everton's CL place.
Doesn't it need Arsenal or Spurs to win the EL too?
Yes, he was convinced Brendan Rodgers would win it for Leicester.
@Philip_Thompson Delurking for a moment to say I had Covid in April last year and the hot scratchy chest thing was what stood out...for me it was more like a hot buzzing, combined with tightness that came and went. Fever stayed mild the whole time, no cough at all, lost taste and smell very temporarily. Shortness of breath came later (that was horrible). Very tired throughout. Was hard to be properly believed by NHS 111 back then without the 'classic' symptoms (until the loss of smell and taste made them listen a bit better). Good to hear you've booked a test and best of luck.
If you do test positive, and feel rotten enough to think you might need it, consider getting a pulse oximeter, though the NHS might give you one these days - worth asking. I would have found it useful in the days 7-10 phase.
PS. This site has been at its very best over the coronavirus outbreak, better than even the mainstream press and broadsheet papers. Appreciate all the stats, collated news and considered thoughts! ( @Andy_Cooke@MaxPB@Malmesbury to name a few) `
I'm just a random AI rotating through the solution space....
On a serious note (shout out to Foxy for his advice from last year) -
these are what I got, and advised several friends to get. Some, who got COVID found them invaluable....
I am not sure how useful the peak flow meter is now that we know more of covid. I think it useful for airways disease like asthma, but the lung function problems of covid pneumonitis perhaps less so.
Pulse oximeter is essential though. "Happy hypoxia" with sats in the 60s or 70s, but no distress is pretty characteristic.
In my experience Peak Flow meter is good in warning you when you are vulnerable to a sudden further deterioration causing a really serious situation.
If it goes say 30% below your normal value due to a cold or cough or whatever, then your situation is fragile to any further problems as your resilience margin may have gone.
Specially useful for people with eg mild asthma. I have that and only have a problem once every several years when eg particular sorts of pollen or solvents that trigger me.
I once went into A&E after being badly affected by inkjet fumes, and when they made me blow into the Peak Flow meter I had a respiratory arrest.
Certainly a peak flow meter is an inexpensive tool for self management of asthma. It is perhaps less useful in covid though.
I can find a study of peak flow where 3/12 cases dropped their peak flow by more than 20%, but that is a pretty small study.
If we can finish this season in the Top 4 it'd be a miracle.
I know a perpetually pessimistic Everton fan, he's convinced Everton will finish fourth and Liverpool outside the top four but Liverpool will win the Champions League in a miracle bigger than Istanbul thus taking away Everton's CL place.
Everton would still be in then. It is up to 5 from each country now. You'd need Spurs, United or Arsenal to win the Europa League as well, and finish out of the Top 4.
2018-19 came very, very close to this happening. It was a plausible possibility after the European Semi Finals.
Had Man Utd finished 4th. And had Spurs won the Champions League final. And had Arsenal won the Europa League final.
Then Man Utd would have finished 4th but missed out on the Champions League as 5th and 6th Spurs and Arsenal would have taken the spots instead.
However none of it happened. Utd had a terrible end to the season and finished sixth rendering it moot, while Spurs and Arsenal both lost the finals to Liverpool and Chelsea.
If we can finish this season in the Top 4 it'd be a miracle.
I know a perpetually pessimistic Everton fan, he's convinced Everton will finish fourth and Liverpool outside the top four but Liverpool will win the Champions League in a miracle bigger than Istanbul thus taking away Everton's CL place.
Either that or West Ham will pip them to 4th with a superior goal difference. Thwarted by Moyes, oh the irony
Passed by a table in a small park today on my run. The rule of six (might have been seven) was being utilised early.
With the arrival, at last, of some nice weather the town centre was heaving yesterday, even though there's still not very much open (mainly take away food and our little market, although one woman with a clothes shop in one of the more secluded corners had decided to chance it and put a couple of sale rails outside.) Most people are more-or-less keeping to the rules, but the mood abroad is that it's coming towards the end, I think.
If we can finish this season in the Top 4 it'd be a miracle.
I know a perpetually pessimistic Everton fan, he's convinced Everton will finish fourth and Liverpool outside the top four but Liverpool will win the Champions League in a miracle bigger than Istanbul thus taking away Everton's CL place.
Doesn't it need Arsenal or Spurs to win the EL too?
Yes, he was convinced Brendan Rodgers would win it for Leicester.
Our injury crisis worsened today. I think Harvey Barnes will be out for at least 6 weeks, most likely the season, Johnny Evans perhaps just a few weeks. With Vardy not on form since his groin op, I think Leicester won't make the top 4.
Deepfakes will also, entirely, fuck up the legal system. Video evidence will always be challenged, it will become virtually useless (photo evidence too, of course). Witnesses or complainants will no longer be able to give evidence via a screen?
That’s just the law
Why pay an actor £10m when you can deepfake Laurence Olivier for ten quid?
Movie making suddenly got a hundred times cheaper
The more you go down this rabbit hole, the darker yet deeper it gets
Why bother with humans at all? Surely this technology makes electronic replacements easier and cheaper. No unions, no toilet breaks, no repeat fees, whatever body shape is thought desirable...I think I will stop there.
Agree, it sounds scaremongery, but I think we should be seriously worried about this. There was a Sam Harris podcast with Nina Schick which explored the possible issues in terrifying detail. Once we're over Covid, I'd put some money on this being the next societal upheaval to deal with.
I'd suggest banning the technology lock stock and barrel (a bit like the US export restrictions for PGP cryptography back in the day), if it wasn't completely unworkable in this day and age.
It happens that this is a technology that I know a great deal about. And I'm not as worried as some of you here about veracity. It is entirely possible to build verification technology into cameras and webcams, such that the recipient can tell that the content has not been faked (and, optionally, who originated the image or video). I think this will make reliable photo and video journalism possible again, but there may be an intermediate period where faking is easy and verification is not widespread.
That doesn't deal with the Holywood question, of course, but I expect the unions to have something to say about that. Indeed there are already rules about using an actor's likeness (at least in the US, after the Back to the Future II incident).
As for the technology, watch this space!
--AS
You don’t think a bad actor might make cameras that don’t have that built-in tech? Like, say, China?!
I might sound a bit afeared, but remember the famous saying
‘Fear is a species of excitement’
So true. I’m really just excited.
Which famous philosopher said that?
No one. It’s a quote invented from scratch by an AI computer
No, because everyone would know that the photo or video it produced was unverified. This isn't like DRM for music (that completely failed for the reason you suggest) but an opt-in for those wishing to produce photographs that they can claim are genuine.
So then it would be: photo taken with a Nikon camera and verification intact = genuine, photo taken with a Sinocam = don't trust, especially if Sinocam have been found to produce fake photos in the past.
--AS
That sounds utopianly optimistic to me, however this is your field, so you may be right. Let’s hope so
However, it occurs to me that it’s more likely you are a deepfake commenter, a bot generated by a Chinese computer, which has sent you on here to calm us down with phoney good news, so we don’t actually take steps to stop AI taking over.
I know your game.
It is worth remembering that the same technology that allows Deep Fakes to be made, also allows them to be identified. What seems very real to a human, will seem very fake to a neural net trained on millions of videos of deep fakes.
Actually I don't entirely agree with you here. Increasing the Deep Fakes will be created with GANs, and unless the detector uses a very different architecture the fake will have been effectively designed to avoid that detector (and even different architectures might not save you). I have a lot of respect for the work on deep fake detection -- indeed, the academics doing it are my friends -- but I don't think they win that race in the long run.
To Leon's point that one cannot replace doubt with trust, I also disagree. Consider authentication online. Internet banking was impossible in the 90s, because the customer could not authenticate their bank (the other way around could have been done with passwords, a truly 1990s technology!). That problem has been largely solved, though some kinks remain in terms of phishing. However even that has technologically-available solutions, which will be deployed in a few years' time.
EU current project is to impose standardisation on border closures.
The European Commission has written to Germany, Belgium, Hungary, Finland, Denmark and Sweden, urging them to obey to the travel restrictions recommendations of the European Council.
These six member states have introduced, to some extent, a ban on entry or exit from the country on public health grounds during the current wave of the coronavirus pandemic.
"The commission wants to recall to the European member states that it is a necessity to go back to a coordinated approach on all the measures taken in relation to the free movement of people and goods," EU justice commissioner Didier Reynders said on Tuesday (23 February) in a video posted on social media.
Now the six states have 10 days to justify these decisions.
These restrictions have "gone too far," Reynders said, arguing that "maybe a discouragement" from travelling could be admissible, but "not a ban on travel from one member state to another one."
EU current project is to impose standardisation on border closures.
The European Commission has written to Germany, Belgium, Hungary, Finland, Denmark and Sweden, urging them to obey to the travel restrictions recommendations of the European Council.
These six member states have introduced, to some extent, a ban on entry or exit from the country on public health grounds during the current wave of the coronavirus pandemic.
"The commission wants to recall to the European member states that it is a necessity to go back to a coordinated approach on all the measures taken in relation to the free movement of people and goods," EU justice commissioner Didier Reynders said on Tuesday (23 February) in a video posted on social media.
Now the six states have 10 days to justify these decisions.
These restrictions have "gone too far," Reynders said, arguing that "maybe a discouragement" from travelling could be admissible, but "not a ban on travel from one member state to another one."
Deepfakes will also, entirely, fuck up the legal system. Video evidence will always be challenged, it will become virtually useless (photo evidence too, of course). Witnesses or complainants will no longer be able to give evidence via a screen?
That’s just the law
Why pay an actor £10m when you can deepfake Laurence Olivier for ten quid?
Movie making suddenly got a hundred times cheaper
The more you go down this rabbit hole, the darker yet deeper it gets
Why bother with humans at all? Surely this technology makes electronic replacements easier and cheaper. No unions, no toilet breaks, no repeat fees, whatever body shape is thought desirable...I think I will stop there.
Agree, it sounds scaremongery, but I think we should be seriously worried about this. There was a Sam Harris podcast with Nina Schick which explored the possible issues in terrifying detail. Once we're over Covid, I'd put some money on this being the next societal upheaval to deal with.
I'd suggest banning the technology lock stock and barrel (a bit like the US export restrictions for PGP cryptography back in the day), if it wasn't completely unworkable in this day and age.
It happens that this is a technology that I know a great deal about. And I'm not as worried as some of you here about veracity. It is entirely possible to build verification technology into cameras and webcams, such that the recipient can tell that the content has not been faked (and, optionally, who originated the image or video). I think this will make reliable photo and video journalism possible again, but there may be an intermediate period where faking is easy and verification is not widespread.
That doesn't deal with the Holywood question, of course, but I expect the unions to have something to say about that. Indeed there are already rules about using an actor's likeness (at least in the US, after the Back to the Future II incident).
As for the technology, watch this space!
--AS
You don’t think a bad actor might make cameras that don’t have that built-in tech? Like, say, China?!
I might sound a bit afeared, but remember the famous saying
‘Fear is a species of excitement’
So true. I’m really just excited.
Which famous philosopher said that?
No one. It’s a quote invented from scratch by an AI computer
No, because everyone would know that the photo or video it produced was unverified. This isn't like DRM for music (that completely failed for the reason you suggest) but an opt-in for those wishing to produce photographs that they can claim are genuine.
So then it would be: photo taken with a Nikon camera and verification intact = genuine, photo taken with a Sinocam = don't trust, especially if Sinocam have been found to produce fake photos in the past.
--AS
That sounds utopianly optimistic to me, however this is your field, so you may be right. Let’s hope so
However, it occurs to me that it’s more likely you are a deepfake commenter, a bot generated by a Chinese computer, which has sent you on here to calm us down with phoney good news, so we don’t actually take steps to stop AI taking over.
I know your game.
It is worth remembering that the same technology that allows Deep Fakes to be made, also allows them to be identified. What seems very real to a human, will seem very fake to a neural net trained on millions of videos of deep fakes.
Actually I don't entirely agree with you here. Increasing the Deep Fakes will be created with GANs, and unless the detector uses a very different architecture the fake will have been effectively designed to avoid that detector (and even different architectures might not save you). I have a lot of respect for the work on deep fake detection -- indeed, the academics doing it are my friends -- but I don't think they win that race in the long run.
To Leon's point that one cannot replace doubt with trust, I also disagree. Consider authentication online. Internet banking was impossible in the 90s, because the customer could not authenticate their bank (the other way around could have been done with passwords, a truly 1990s technology!). That problem has been largely solved, though some kinks remain in terms of phishing. However even that has technologically-available solutions, which will be deployed in a few years' time.
--AS
In theory, its worse than that, due to the way GANs work, a really good DeepFake detector can be repurposed to aid in producing better DeepFakes, which the detector can no longer identify. Effectively resulting in an arms race, where the only winner is ever higher quality DeepFakes.
Although...there are some big issues with GANs, like mode collapse. But this is just the start of the journey.
If we can finish this season in the Top 4 it'd be a miracle.
I know a perpetually pessimistic Everton fan, he's convinced Everton will finish fourth and Liverpool outside the top four but Liverpool will win the Champions League in a miracle bigger than Istanbul thus taking away Everton's CL place.
Everton would still be in then. It is up to 5 from each country now. You'd need Spurs, United or Arsenal to win the Europa League as well, and finish out of the Top 4.
2018-19 came very, very close to this happening. It was a plausible possibility after the European Semi Finals.
Had Man Utd finished 4th. And had Spurs won the Champions League final. And had Arsenal won the Europa League final.
Then Man Utd would have finished 4th but missed out on the Champions League as 5th and 6th Spurs and Arsenal would have taken the spots instead.
However none of it happened. Utd had a terrible end to the season and finished sixth rendering it moot, while Spurs and Arsenal both lost the finals to Liverpool and Chelsea.
Did Chelsea win the european champions league a bit ago , denying 4th placed Spurs a chance to play in the competition ?
EU current project is to impose standardisation on border closures.
The European Commission has written to Germany, Belgium, Hungary, Finland, Denmark and Sweden, urging them to obey to the travel restrictions recommendations of the European Council.
These six member states have introduced, to some extent, a ban on entry or exit from the country on public health grounds during the current wave of the coronavirus pandemic.
"The commission wants to recall to the European member states that it is a necessity to go back to a coordinated approach on all the measures taken in relation to the free movement of people and goods," EU justice commissioner Didier Reynders said on Tuesday (23 February) in a video posted on social media.
Now the six states have 10 days to justify these decisions.
These restrictions have "gone too far," Reynders said, arguing that "maybe a discouragement" from travelling could be admissible, but "not a ban on travel from one member state to another one."
Absolute insanity. Its none of their frigging business.
In Australia they ban travel within the country, its illegal to travel from Melbourne to Sydney if Melbourne has cases. Let alone travel between countries.
Is it gauche of me to admit that I've lost nearly three stone since March 2020?
No. It is inspiring.
So the diet starts now. Jesus. And that was basically my last pleasure
I have to admit whilst all the exericising I've done played a part, I think the lack of weekly working and social three course at places like The Ivy, The Adam Reid, and Gauchos has helped as well.
Passed by a table in a small park today on my run. The rule of six (might have been seven) was being utilised early.
The amount of traffic on the roads was incredible. Sunday is usually visiting folks day round here and I’d suggest we are pretty much back to normal. The psychologists were right - people cannot stay in lock down forever. I think aside of the pubs and non essential shops, for many, many people, life is almost back to normal, whatever the government might tell us.
It's a self correcting cycle.
Good news = People head out to visit other people Bad news = People lock themselves up at home.
Traffic on the roads is for me less worry than traffic on public transport, which Google stats seem to say is still 2/3 down on pre-Covid.
If we can finish this season in the Top 4 it'd be a miracle.
I know a perpetually pessimistic Everton fan, he's convinced Everton will finish fourth and Liverpool outside the top four but Liverpool will win the Champions League in a miracle bigger than Istanbul thus taking away Everton's CL place.
Everton would still be in then. It is up to 5 from each country now. You'd need Spurs, United or Arsenal to win the Europa League as well, and finish out of the Top 4.
2018-19 came very, very close to this happening. It was a plausible possibility after the European Semi Finals.
Had Man Utd finished 4th. And had Spurs won the Champions League final. And had Arsenal won the Europa League final.
Then Man Utd would have finished 4th but missed out on the Champions League as 5th and 6th Spurs and Arsenal would have taken the spots instead.
However none of it happened. Utd had a terrible end to the season and finished sixth rendering it moot, while Spurs and Arsenal both lost the finals to Liverpool and Chelsea.
Did Chelsea win the european champions league a bit ago , denying 4th placed Spurs a chance to play in the competition ?
From memory yes, but that was before the rules were changed to allow five in.
Now you need six qualifiers to deny the 4th placed spot.
Is it gauche of me to admit that I've lost nearly three stone since March 2020?
No. It is inspiring.
So the diet starts now. Jesus. And that was basically my last pleasure
I have to admit whilst all the exericising I've done played a part, I think the lack of weekly working and social three course at places like The Ivy, The Adam Reid, and Gauchos has helped as well.
Are you going to be on the promotional material for Peleton?
Passed by a table in a small park today on my run. The rule of six (might have been seven) was being utilised early.
The amount of traffic on the roads was incredible. Sunday is usually visiting folks day round here and I’d suggest we are pretty much back to normal. The psychologists were right - people cannot stay in lock down forever. I think aside of the pubs and non essential shops, for many, many people, life is almost back to normal, whatever the government might tell us.
8 weeks into Lockdown 1.0 was Bank holiday weekend/VE day.
I don't think its much of a surprise tbh. Lovely weather, especially 2 weeks after that mid-Feb freeze.
No one is saying it is "new" or "novel", only that it is the first time it has been detected in the UK. Given what happened with the Kent strain I think this is downplaying it quite a bit.
We didn’t have a huge vaccine rollout at that point.
But with lower efficacy?
The tweet is contradictory, saying "We know the vaccines can neutralize this variant, and updated boosters should they be needed are already in development."
If the vaccines are effective, why would boosters be needed? More twitter bollocks.
“A Harvard immunologist said current vaccines appear to be effective enough to end the pandemic, despite growing concerns that more infectious COVID-19 variants would severely blunt the effectiveness of the preventative treatments and set the nation back in its fight against the disease.
Galit Alter, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard, said the fast-spreading U.K. variant seems able to evade some vaccine protection, and the South African variant appears able to skirt even more. Despite that, she said, none have completely escaped the body’s post-vaccination immune responses.
That’s because, Alter said, though much attention has focused on how antibodies boosted after vaccination target their attack on the virus’ spike protein, the immune system has an array of other defenses that vaccination also mobilizes, including antibodies that attack other parts of the virus, and, importantly, T-cells that attack the infected cells the virus hijacks in order to replicate.“
Passed by a table in a small park today on my run. The rule of six (might have been seven) was being utilised early.
The amount of traffic on the roads was incredible. Sunday is usually visiting folks day round here and I’d suggest we are pretty much back to normal. The psychologists were right - people cannot stay in lock down forever. I think aside of the pubs and non essential shops, for many, many people, life is almost back to normal, whatever the government might tell us.
It's a self correcting cycle.
Good news = People head out to visit other people Bad news = People lock themselves up at home.
I also think many of the olds are now assuming they are immune. Definite shift in ‘feel’ about my small Wiltshire town over the weekend.
Deepfakes will also, entirely, fuck up the legal system. Video evidence will always be challenged, it will become virtually useless (photo evidence too, of course). Witnesses or complainants will no longer be able to give evidence via a screen?
That’s just the law
Why pay an actor £10m when you can deepfake Laurence Olivier for ten quid?
Movie making suddenly got a hundred times cheaper
The more you go down this rabbit hole, the darker yet deeper it gets
Why bother with humans at all? Surely this technology makes electronic replacements easier and cheaper. No unions, no toilet breaks, no repeat fees, whatever body shape is thought desirable...I think I will stop there.
Agree, it sounds scaremongery, but I think we should be seriously worried about this. There was a Sam Harris podcast with Nina Schick which explored the possible issues in terrifying detail. Once we're over Covid, I'd put some money on this being the next societal upheaval to deal with.
I'd suggest banning the technology lock stock and barrel (a bit like the US export restrictions for PGP cryptography back in the day), if it wasn't completely unworkable in this day and age.
It happens that this is a technology that I know a great deal about. And I'm not as worried as some of you here about veracity. It is entirely possible to build verification technology into cameras and webcams, such that the recipient can tell that the content has not been faked (and, optionally, who originated the image or video). I think this will make reliable photo and video journalism possible again, but there may be an intermediate period where faking is easy and verification is not widespread.
That doesn't deal with the Holywood question, of course, but I expect the unions to have something to say about that. Indeed there are already rules about using an actor's likeness (at least in the US, after the Back to the Future II incident).
As for the technology, watch this space!
--AS
You don’t think a bad actor might make cameras that don’t have that built-in tech? Like, say, China?!
I might sound a bit afeared, but remember the famous saying
‘Fear is a species of excitement’
So true. I’m really just excited.
Which famous philosopher said that?
No one. It’s a quote invented from scratch by an AI computer
No, because everyone would know that the photo or video it produced was unverified. This isn't like DRM for music (that completely failed for the reason you suggest) but an opt-in for those wishing to produce photographs that they can claim are genuine.
So then it would be: photo taken with a Nikon camera and verification intact = genuine, photo taken with a Sinocam = don't trust, especially if Sinocam have been found to produce fake photos in the past.
--AS
That sounds utopianly optimistic to me, however this is your field, so you may be right. Let’s hope so
However, it occurs to me that it’s more likely you are a deepfake commenter, a bot generated by a Chinese computer, which has sent you on here to calm us down with phoney good news, so we don’t actually take steps to stop AI taking over.
I know your game.
It is worth remembering that the same technology that allows Deep Fakes to be made, also allows them to be identified. What seems very real to a human, will seem very fake to a neural net trained on millions of videos of deep fakes.
Actually I don't entirely agree with you here. Increasing the Deep Fakes will be created with GANs, and unless the detector uses a very different architecture the fake will have been effectively designed to avoid that detector (and even different architectures might not save you). I have a lot of respect for the work on deep fake detection -- indeed, the academics doing it are my friends -- but I don't think they win that race in the long run.
To Leon's point that one cannot replace doubt with trust, I also disagree. Consider authentication online. Internet banking was impossible in the 90s, because the customer could not authenticate their bank (the other way around could have been done with passwords, a truly 1990s technology!). That problem has been largely solved, though some kinks remain in terms of phishing. However even that has technologically-available solutions, which will be deployed in a few years' time.
--AS
Hmmm...
But surely - given enough training - the GAN created will effectively be tuned to notice the artifacts and features that Deep Fake GANs produce?
Deepfakes will also, entirely, fuck up the legal system. Video evidence will always be challenged, it will become virtually useless (photo evidence too, of course). Witnesses or complainants will no longer be able to give evidence via a screen?
That’s just the law
Why pay an actor £10m when you can deepfake Laurence Olivier for ten quid?
Movie making suddenly got a hundred times cheaper
The more you go down this rabbit hole, the darker yet deeper it gets
Why bother with humans at all? Surely this technology makes electronic replacements easier and cheaper. No unions, no toilet breaks, no repeat fees, whatever body shape is thought desirable...I think I will stop there.
Agree, it sounds scaremongery, but I think we should be seriously worried about this. There was a Sam Harris podcast with Nina Schick which explored the possible issues in terrifying detail. Once we're over Covid, I'd put some money on this being the next societal upheaval to deal with.
I'd suggest banning the technology lock stock and barrel (a bit like the US export restrictions for PGP cryptography back in the day), if it wasn't completely unworkable in this day and age.
It happens that this is a technology that I know a great deal about. And I'm not as worried as some of you here about veracity. It is entirely possible to build verification technology into cameras and webcams, such that the recipient can tell that the content has not been faked (and, optionally, who originated the image or video). I think this will make reliable photo and video journalism possible again, but there may be an intermediate period where faking is easy and verification is not widespread.
That doesn't deal with the Holywood question, of course, but I expect the unions to have something to say about that. Indeed there are already rules about using an actor's likeness (at least in the US, after the Back to the Future II incident).
As for the technology, watch this space!
--AS
You don’t think a bad actor might make cameras that don’t have that built-in tech? Like, say, China?!
I might sound a bit afeared, but remember the famous saying
‘Fear is a species of excitement’
So true. I’m really just excited.
Which famous philosopher said that?
No one. It’s a quote invented from scratch by an AI computer
No, because everyone would know that the photo or video it produced was unverified. This isn't like DRM for music (that completely failed for the reason you suggest) but an opt-in for those wishing to produce photographs that they can claim are genuine.
So then it would be: photo taken with a Nikon camera and verification intact = genuine, photo taken with a Sinocam = don't trust, especially if Sinocam have been found to produce fake photos in the past.
--AS
That sounds utopianly optimistic to me, however this is your field, so you may be right. Let’s hope so
However, it occurs to me that it’s more likely you are a deepfake commenter, a bot generated by a Chinese computer, which has sent you on here to calm us down with phoney good news, so we don’t actually take steps to stop AI taking over.
I know your game.
It is worth remembering that the same technology that allows Deep Fakes to be made, also allows them to be identified. What seems very real to a human, will seem very fake to a neural net trained on millions of videos of deep fakes.
Actually I don't entirely agree with you here. Increasing the Deep Fakes will be created with GANs, and unless the detector uses a very different architecture the fake will have been effectively designed to avoid that detector (and even different architectures might not save you). I have a lot of respect for the work on deep fake detection -- indeed, the academics doing it are my friends -- but I don't think they win that race in the long run.
To Leon's point that one cannot replace doubt with trust, I also disagree. Consider authentication online. Internet banking was impossible in the 90s, because the customer could not authenticate their bank (the other way around could have been done with passwords, a truly 1990s technology!). That problem has been largely solved, though some kinks remain in terms of phishing. However even that has technologically-available solutions, which will be deployed in a few years' time.
--AS
Hmmm...
But surely - given enough training - the GAN created will effectively be tuned to notice the artifacts and features that Deep Fake GANs produce?
But then the DeepFake GAN can be retrained, using whatever approach the detector is employing to spot fakes, in their system to produce new images that the detector then sees as genuine and ultimately be a superior image.
Remember a GAN is a joint training approach, where you have a counterfeiter generating new images and an "expert" who decides if the generated image is genuine or not, and training a GAN is deemed complete when the counterfeiting process is producing such good quality images that the "expert" can't tell if they are real or fake. The better the "expert", the better the counterfeiter can get via this feedback loop.
It is like telling a human counterfeiter of money exactly what all the checks will be on any notes. They will ensure their fake notes pass these tests. The better the tests get, the more sophisticated the counterfeit has to get to pass them.
However, unlike human counterfeiting, machine learning based ones, it is just more about throwing more training time at it.
Passed by a table in a small park today on my run. The rule of six (might have been seven) was being utilised early.
The amount of traffic on the roads was incredible. Sunday is usually visiting folks day round here and I’d suggest we are pretty much back to normal. The psychologists were right - people cannot stay in lock down forever. I think aside of the pubs and non essential shops, for many, many people, life is almost back to normal, whatever the government might tell us.
It's a self correcting cycle.
Good news = People head out to visit other people Bad news = People lock themselves up at home.
Traffic on the roads is for me less worry than traffic on public transport, which Google stats seem to say is still 2/3 down on pre-Covid.
Fair point. I think the ‘stay home’ message has long since stopped working though.
Deepfakes will also, entirely, fuck up the legal system. Video evidence will always be challenged, it will become virtually useless (photo evidence too, of course). Witnesses or complainants will no longer be able to give evidence via a screen?
That’s just the law
Why pay an actor £10m when you can deepfake Laurence Olivier for ten quid?
Movie making suddenly got a hundred times cheaper
The more you go down this rabbit hole, the darker yet deeper it gets
Why bother with humans at all? Surely this technology makes electronic replacements easier and cheaper. No unions, no toilet breaks, no repeat fees, whatever body shape is thought desirable...I think I will stop there.
Agree, it sounds scaremongery, but I think we should be seriously worried about this. There was a Sam Harris podcast with Nina Schick which explored the possible issues in terrifying detail. Once we're over Covid, I'd put some money on this being the next societal upheaval to deal with.
I'd suggest banning the technology lock stock and barrel (a bit like the US export restrictions for PGP cryptography back in the day), if it wasn't completely unworkable in this day and age.
It happens that this is a technology that I know a great deal about. And I'm not as worried as some of you here about veracity. It is entirely possible to build verification technology into cameras and webcams, such that the recipient can tell that the content has not been faked (and, optionally, who originated the image or video). I think this will make reliable photo and video journalism possible again, but there may be an intermediate period where faking is easy and verification is not widespread.
That doesn't deal with the Holywood question, of course, but I expect the unions to have something to say about that. Indeed there are already rules about using an actor's likeness (at least in the US, after the Back to the Future II incident).
As for the technology, watch this space!
--AS
You don’t think a bad actor might make cameras that don’t have that built-in tech? Like, say, China?!
I might sound a bit afeared, but remember the famous saying
‘Fear is a species of excitement’
So true. I’m really just excited.
Which famous philosopher said that?
No one. It’s a quote invented from scratch by an AI computer
No, because everyone would know that the photo or video it produced was unverified. This isn't like DRM for music (that completely failed for the reason you suggest) but an opt-in for those wishing to produce photographs that they can claim are genuine.
So then it would be: photo taken with a Nikon camera and verification intact = genuine, photo taken with a Sinocam = don't trust, especially if Sinocam have been found to produce fake photos in the past.
--AS
That sounds utopianly optimistic to me, however this is your field, so you may be right. Let’s hope so
However, it occurs to me that it’s more likely you are a deepfake commenter, a bot generated by a Chinese computer, which has sent you on here to calm us down with phoney good news, so we don’t actually take steps to stop AI taking over.
I know your game.
It is worth remembering that the same technology that allows Deep Fakes to be made, also allows them to be identified. What seems very real to a human, will seem very fake to a neural net trained on millions of videos of deep fakes.
Actually I don't entirely agree with you here. Increasing the Deep Fakes will be created with GANs, and unless the detector uses a very different architecture the fake will have been effectively designed to avoid that detector (and even different architectures might not save you). I have a lot of respect for the work on deep fake detection -- indeed, the academics doing it are my friends -- but I don't think they win that race in the long run.
To Leon's point that one cannot replace doubt with trust, I also disagree. Consider authentication online. Internet banking was impossible in the 90s, because the customer could not authenticate their bank (the other way around could have been done with passwords, a truly 1990s technology!). That problem has been largely solved, though some kinks remain in terms of phishing. However even that has technologically-available solutions, which will be deployed in a few years' time.
--AS
Hmmm...
But surely - given enough training - the GAN created will effectively be tuned to notice the artifacts and features that Deep Fake GANs produce?
I'm familiar with that article. Indeed, one of my friends demonstrated the effect several years before the research that it cites. However, it's not an insoluble problem, and it's not really related to the GAN arms race. The key is that machine learning algorithms should learn that they sometimes don't know something.
One might also say that machine learning researchers should also consider the same lesson.
Passed by a table in a small park today on my run. The rule of six (might have been seven) was being utilised early.
The amount of traffic on the roads was incredible. Sunday is usually visiting folks day round here and I’d suggest we are pretty much back to normal. The psychologists were right - people cannot stay in lock down forever. I think aside of the pubs and non essential shops, for many, many people, life is almost back to normal, whatever the government might tell us.
It's a self correcting cycle.
Good news = People head out to visit other people Bad news = People lock themselves up at home.
I also think many of the olds are now assuming they are immune. Definite shift in ‘feel’ about my small Wiltshire town over the weekend.
The polling is generally supportive of lockdown but it’s also self reporting of the “how many units of alcohol do you drink a week” kind. No one wants to admit to breaking the rules and many justify to themselves anyway.
Passed by a table in a small park today on my run. The rule of six (might have been seven) was being utilised early.
The amount of traffic on the roads was incredible. Sunday is usually visiting folks day round here and I’d suggest we are pretty much back to normal. The psychologists were right - people cannot stay in lock down forever. I think aside of the pubs and non essential shops, for many, many people, life is almost back to normal, whatever the government might tell us.
8 weeks into Lockdown 1.0 was Bank holiday weekend/VE day.
I don't think its much of a surprise tbh. Lovely weather, especially 2 weeks after that mid-Feb freeze.
In all honesty that May bank holiday didn’t cause a measurable increase in cases. That didn’t happen until late August/early September.
EU current project is to impose standardisation on border closures.
The European Commission has written to Germany, Belgium, Hungary, Finland, Denmark and Sweden, urging them to obey to the travel restrictions recommendations of the European Council.
These six member states have introduced, to some extent, a ban on entry or exit from the country on public health grounds during the current wave of the coronavirus pandemic.
"The commission wants to recall to the European member states that it is a necessity to go back to a coordinated approach on all the measures taken in relation to the free movement of people and goods," EU justice commissioner Didier Reynders said on Tuesday (23 February) in a video posted on social media.
Now the six states have 10 days to justify these decisions.
These restrictions have "gone too far," Reynders said, arguing that "maybe a discouragement" from travelling could be admissible, but "not a ban on travel from one member state to another one."
Absolute insanity. Its none of their frigging business.
In Australia they ban travel within the country, its illegal to travel from Melbourne to Sydney if Melbourne has cases. Let alone travel between countries.
Deepfakes will also, entirely, fuck up the legal system. Video evidence will always be challenged, it will become virtually useless (photo evidence too, of course). Witnesses or complainants will no longer be able to give evidence via a screen?
That’s just the law
Why pay an actor £10m when you can deepfake Laurence Olivier for ten quid?
Movie making suddenly got a hundred times cheaper
The more you go down this rabbit hole, the darker yet deeper it gets
Why bother with humans at all? Surely this technology makes electronic replacements easier and cheaper. No unions, no toilet breaks, no repeat fees, whatever body shape is thought desirable...I think I will stop there.
Agree, it sounds scaremongery, but I think we should be seriously worried about this. There was a Sam Harris podcast with Nina Schick which explored the possible issues in terrifying detail. Once we're over Covid, I'd put some money on this being the next societal upheaval to deal with.
I'd suggest banning the technology lock stock and barrel (a bit like the US export restrictions for PGP cryptography back in the day), if it wasn't completely unworkable in this day and age.
It happens that this is a technology that I know a great deal about. And I'm not as worried as some of you here about veracity. It is entirely possible to build verification technology into cameras and webcams, such that the recipient can tell that the content has not been faked (and, optionally, who originated the image or video). I think this will make reliable photo and video journalism possible again, but there may be an intermediate period where faking is easy and verification is not widespread.
That doesn't deal with the Holywood question, of course, but I expect the unions to have something to say about that. Indeed there are already rules about using an actor's likeness (at least in the US, after the Back to the Future II incident).
As for the technology, watch this space!
--AS
You don’t think a bad actor might make cameras that don’t have that built-in tech? Like, say, China?!
I might sound a bit afeared, but remember the famous saying
‘Fear is a species of excitement’
So true. I’m really just excited.
Which famous philosopher said that?
No one. It’s a quote invented from scratch by an AI computer
No, because everyone would know that the photo or video it produced was unverified. This isn't like DRM for music (that completely failed for the reason you suggest) but an opt-in for those wishing to produce photographs that they can claim are genuine.
So then it would be: photo taken with a Nikon camera and verification intact = genuine, photo taken with a Sinocam = don't trust, especially if Sinocam have been found to produce fake photos in the past.
--AS
That sounds utopianly optimistic to me, however this is your field, so you may be right. Let’s hope so
However, it occurs to me that it’s more likely you are a deepfake commenter, a bot generated by a Chinese computer, which has sent you on here to calm us down with phoney good news, so we don’t actually take steps to stop AI taking over.
I know your game.
It is worth remembering that the same technology that allows Deep Fakes to be made, also allows them to be identified. What seems very real to a human, will seem very fake to a neural net trained on millions of videos of deep fakes.
Actually I don't entirely agree with you here. Increasing the Deep Fakes will be created with GANs, and unless the detector uses a very different architecture the fake will have been effectively designed to avoid that detector (and even different architectures might not save you). I have a lot of respect for the work on deep fake detection -- indeed, the academics doing it are my friends -- but I don't think they win that race in the long run.
To Leon's point that one cannot replace doubt with trust, I also disagree. Consider authentication online. Internet banking was impossible in the 90s, because the customer could not authenticate their bank (the other way around could have been done with passwords, a truly 1990s technology!). That problem has been largely solved, though some kinks remain in terms of phishing. However even that has technologically-available solutions, which will be deployed in a few years' time.
--AS
Hmmm...
But surely - given enough training - the GAN created will effectively be tuned to notice the artifacts and features that Deep Fake GANs produce?
But then the DeepFake GAN can be retrained, using whatever approach the detector is employing to spot fakes, in their system to produce new images that the detector then sees as genuine and ultimately be a superior image.
Remember a GAN is a joint training approach, where you have a counterfeiter generating new images and an "expert" who decides if the generated image is genuine or not, and training a GAN is deemed complete when the counterfeiting process is producing such good quality images that the "expert" can't tell if they are real or fake. The better the "expert", the better the counterfeiter can get via this feedback loop.
That's an excellent point.
BUT
It works both ways. So long as people are generating new deep fakes (and they are known to be deep fakes), then they can be used in training.
It is, as you say, an arms race. But I'm not convinced the fakers have all the advantages.
No one is saying it is "new" or "novel", only that it is the first time it has been detected in the UK. Given what happened with the Kent strain I think this is downplaying it quite a bit.
We didn’t have a huge vaccine rollout at that point.
But with lower efficacy?
The tweet is contradictory, saying "We know the vaccines can neutralize this variant, and updated boosters should they be needed are already in development."
If the vaccines are effective, why would boosters be needed? More twitter bollocks.
Uggghhh.
Stop with the 'step function' thinking.
The vaccines will have some efficacy against any mutation CV19 can throw at us, the only question is how much.
The way I like to think of it is this.
Imagine that you are in a City, and you have an air force.
The virus is a fleet of bombers coming to bomb your city.
Vaccines give you radar, so you can scramble that air force early and get them to knock them out the sky before they reach you.
Now, a mutation *might* make it slightly harder to see the incoming bombers. It might mean that instead of three hours notice, they only get one. Perhaps a few planes will get through and unleash a couple of bombs. But you're highly unlikely to get really sick, because you still have radar and you still get some advance warning.
If you have a booster in the Autumn, you'll get that full three hours (or maybe it'll increase it to five) of notice again, and then there's next to no chance that the bombers get through.
But there's more good news from vaccines. The number of bombers that are sent against you matters too. And the more people that are vaccinated, the fewer bombers will be thrown against you. If only six take off and fly towards your City, then it doesn't matter if you only get one hours notice, because you're not getting the same "dose" of bombers you were previously.
My umbrage was with the tweet implying there was nothing to worry about, not to mention the contradictory statements. If there wasn't anything to worry about, it wouldn't be classified as a variant of concern.
Passed by a table in a small park today on my run. The rule of six (might have been seven) was being utilised early.
The amount of traffic on the roads was incredible. Sunday is usually visiting folks day round here and I’d suggest we are pretty much back to normal. The psychologists were right - people cannot stay in lock down forever. I think aside of the pubs and non essential shops, for many, many people, life is almost back to normal, whatever the government might tell us.
It's a self correcting cycle.
Good news = People head out to visit other people Bad news = People lock themselves up at home.
I also think many of the olds are now assuming they are immune. Definite shift in ‘feel’ about my small Wiltshire town over the weekend.
The polling is generally supportive of lockdown but it’s also self reporting of the “how many units of alcohol do you drink a week” kind. No one wants to admit to breaking the rules and many justify to themselves anyway.
I think people have moulded the lockdown to their own rules. Most are trying to be good, but as my families ever expanding bubble shows, it’s not always in line with the actual rules...
EU current project is to impose standardisation on border closures.
The European Commission has written to Germany, Belgium, Hungary, Finland, Denmark and Sweden, urging them to obey to the travel restrictions recommendations of the European Council.
These six member states have introduced, to some extent, a ban on entry or exit from the country on public health grounds during the current wave of the coronavirus pandemic.
"The commission wants to recall to the European member states that it is a necessity to go back to a coordinated approach on all the measures taken in relation to the free movement of people and goods," EU justice commissioner Didier Reynders said on Tuesday (23 February) in a video posted on social media.
Now the six states have 10 days to justify these decisions.
These restrictions have "gone too far," Reynders said, arguing that "maybe a discouragement" from travelling could be admissible, but "not a ban on travel from one member state to another one."
Absolute insanity. Its none of their frigging business.
In Australia they ban travel within the country, its illegal to travel from Melbourne to Sydney if Melbourne has cases. Let alone travel between countries.
Within Italy too.
Amidst rising cases, Italy has now apparently adopted a system of four escalating regional tiers. Now, where have we heard something like that before?
In other Italian news, research on immune response in healthcare workers suggests that the obese produce only around half as strong an antibody response as the healthy. Che sorpresa.
Deepfakes will also, entirely, fuck up the legal system. Video evidence will always be challenged, it will become virtually useless (photo evidence too, of course). Witnesses or complainants will no longer be able to give evidence via a screen?
That’s just the law
Why pay an actor £10m when you can deepfake Laurence Olivier for ten quid?
Movie making suddenly got a hundred times cheaper
The more you go down this rabbit hole, the darker yet deeper it gets
Why bother with humans at all? Surely this technology makes electronic replacements easier and cheaper. No unions, no toilet breaks, no repeat fees, whatever body shape is thought desirable...I think I will stop there.
Agree, it sounds scaremongery, but I think we should be seriously worried about this. There was a Sam Harris podcast with Nina Schick which explored the possible issues in terrifying detail. Once we're over Covid, I'd put some money on this being the next societal upheaval to deal with.
I'd suggest banning the technology lock stock and barrel (a bit like the US export restrictions for PGP cryptography back in the day), if it wasn't completely unworkable in this day and age.
It happens that this is a technology that I know a great deal about. And I'm not as worried as some of you here about veracity. It is entirely possible to build verification technology into cameras and webcams, such that the recipient can tell that the content has not been faked (and, optionally, who originated the image or video). I think this will make reliable photo and video journalism possible again, but there may be an intermediate period where faking is easy and verification is not widespread.
That doesn't deal with the Holywood question, of course, but I expect the unions to have something to say about that. Indeed there are already rules about using an actor's likeness (at least in the US, after the Back to the Future II incident).
As for the technology, watch this space!
--AS
You don’t think a bad actor might make cameras that don’t have that built-in tech? Like, say, China?!
I might sound a bit afeared, but remember the famous saying
‘Fear is a species of excitement’
So true. I’m really just excited.
Which famous philosopher said that?
No one. It’s a quote invented from scratch by an AI computer
No, because everyone would know that the photo or video it produced was unverified. This isn't like DRM for music (that completely failed for the reason you suggest) but an opt-in for those wishing to produce photographs that they can claim are genuine.
So then it would be: photo taken with a Nikon camera and verification intact = genuine, photo taken with a Sinocam = don't trust, especially if Sinocam have been found to produce fake photos in the past.
--AS
That sounds utopianly optimistic to me, however this is your field, so you may be right. Let’s hope so
However, it occurs to me that it’s more likely you are a deepfake commenter, a bot generated by a Chinese computer, which has sent you on here to calm us down with phoney good news, so we don’t actually take steps to stop AI taking over.
I know your game.
It is worth remembering that the same technology that allows Deep Fakes to be made, also allows them to be identified. What seems very real to a human, will seem very fake to a neural net trained on millions of videos of deep fakes.
Actually I don't entirely agree with you here. Increasing the Deep Fakes will be created with GANs, and unless the detector uses a very different architecture the fake will have been effectively designed to avoid that detector (and even different architectures might not save you). I have a lot of respect for the work on deep fake detection -- indeed, the academics doing it are my friends -- but I don't think they win that race in the long run.
To Leon's point that one cannot replace doubt with trust, I also disagree. Consider authentication online. Internet banking was impossible in the 90s, because the customer could not authenticate their bank (the other way around could have been done with passwords, a truly 1990s technology!). That problem has been largely solved, though some kinks remain in terms of phishing. However even that has technologically-available solutions, which will be deployed in a few years' time.
--AS
Hmmm...
But surely - given enough training - the GAN created will effectively be tuned to notice the artifacts and features that Deep Fake GANs produce?
I'm familiar with that article. Indeed, one of my friends demonstrated the effect several years before the research that it cites. However, it's not an insoluble problem, and it's not really related to the GAN arms race. The key is that machine learning algorithms should learn that they sometimes don't know something.
One might also say that machine learning researchers should also consider the same lesson.
--AS
IMO, it is not so much that these algorithms don't know something, it is the model we humans think they have learned, isn't what they actually have and then determine that the NN has successfully learned the task we desire due to certain tests the human puts in place.
e.g. lots of experts (and many still do) used to talk about CNNs learning object recognition by building up component parts i.e. its learns a car, by taking pixels, learning edges, edges become shapes, shapes become the doors, the wheels etc.
This belief came about because humans looked at the output of various layers of the CNN and saw edges and shapes they recognized and jumped to the conclusion that what the CNN was learning was this hierarchy.
Except that has now been proven to be incorrect. It has been shown switching textures causes mayhem with CNN based object detection, which if it really had learned the hierarchy described above, a texture change shouldn't make any difference to this.
Thus, CNN's aren't learning (solely) via the model most humans thought and then we are shocked when it falls down because a few pixels have been flipped.
If we can finish this season in the Top 4 it'd be a miracle.
I know a perpetually pessimistic Everton fan, he's convinced Everton will finish fourth and Liverpool outside the top four but Liverpool will win the Champions League in a miracle bigger than Istanbul thus taking away Everton's CL place.
Doesn't it need Arsenal or Spurs to win the EL too?
Yes, he was convinced Brendan Rodgers would win it for Leicester.
Our injury crisis worsened today. I think Harvey Barnes will be out for at least 6 weeks, most likely the season, Johnny Evans perhaps just a few weeks. With Vardy not on form since his groin op, I think Leicester won't make the top 4.
Everyone has injuries though. I mean look at Sheffield United.
Passed by a table in a small park today on my run. The rule of six (might have been seven) was being utilised early.
The amount of traffic on the roads was incredible. Sunday is usually visiting folks day round here and I’d suggest we are pretty much back to normal. The psychologists were right - people cannot stay in lock down forever. I think aside of the pubs and non essential shops, for many, many people, life is almost back to normal, whatever the government might tell us.
It's a self correcting cycle.
Good news = People head out to visit other people Bad news = People lock themselves up at home.
I also think many of the olds are now assuming they are immune. Definite shift in ‘feel’ about my small Wiltshire town over the weekend.
The polling is generally supportive of lockdown but it’s also self reporting of the “how many units of alcohol do you drink a week” kind. No one wants to admit to breaking the rules and many justify to themselves anyway.
I think people have moulded the lockdown to their own rules. Most are trying to be good, but as my families ever expanding bubble shows, it’s not always in line with the actual rules...
The new definition of bubble is meeting someone you know. Clearly the virus is only carried by strangers, a natural human assumption dating back centuries.
Deepfakes will also, entirely, fuck up the legal system. Video evidence will always be challenged, it will become virtually useless (photo evidence too, of course). Witnesses or complainants will no longer be able to give evidence via a screen?
That’s just the law
Why pay an actor £10m when you can deepfake Laurence Olivier for ten quid?
Movie making suddenly got a hundred times cheaper
The more you go down this rabbit hole, the darker yet deeper it gets
Why bother with humans at all? Surely this technology makes electronic replacements easier and cheaper. No unions, no toilet breaks, no repeat fees, whatever body shape is thought desirable...I think I will stop there.
Agree, it sounds scaremongery, but I think we should be seriously worried about this. There was a Sam Harris podcast with Nina Schick which explored the possible issues in terrifying detail. Once we're over Covid, I'd put some money on this being the next societal upheaval to deal with.
I'd suggest banning the technology lock stock and barrel (a bit like the US export restrictions for PGP cryptography back in the day), if it wasn't completely unworkable in this day and age.
It happens that this is a technology that I know a great deal about. And I'm not as worried as some of you here about veracity. It is entirely possible to build verification technology into cameras and webcams, such that the recipient can tell that the content has not been faked (and, optionally, who originated the image or video). I think this will make reliable photo and video journalism possible again, but there may be an intermediate period where faking is easy and verification is not widespread.
That doesn't deal with the Holywood question, of course, but I expect the unions to have something to say about that. Indeed there are already rules about using an actor's likeness (at least in the US, after the Back to the Future II incident).
As for the technology, watch this space!
--AS
You don’t think a bad actor might make cameras that don’t have that built-in tech? Like, say, China?!
I might sound a bit afeared, but remember the famous saying
‘Fear is a species of excitement’
So true. I’m really just excited.
Which famous philosopher said that?
No one. It’s a quote invented from scratch by an AI computer
No, because everyone would know that the photo or video it produced was unverified. This isn't like DRM for music (that completely failed for the reason you suggest) but an opt-in for those wishing to produce photographs that they can claim are genuine.
So then it would be: photo taken with a Nikon camera and verification intact = genuine, photo taken with a Sinocam = don't trust, especially if Sinocam have been found to produce fake photos in the past.
--AS
That sounds utopianly optimistic to me, however this is your field, so you may be right. Let’s hope so
However, it occurs to me that it’s more likely you are a deepfake commenter, a bot generated by a Chinese computer, which has sent you on here to calm us down with phoney good news, so we don’t actually take steps to stop AI taking over.
I know your game.
It is worth remembering that the same technology that allows Deep Fakes to be made, also allows them to be identified. What seems very real to a human, will seem very fake to a neural net trained on millions of videos of deep fakes.
Actually I don't entirely agree with you here. Increasing the Deep Fakes will be created with GANs, and unless the detector uses a very different architecture the fake will have been effectively designed to avoid that detector (and even different architectures might not save you). I have a lot of respect for the work on deep fake detection -- indeed, the academics doing it are my friends -- but I don't think they win that race in the long run.
To Leon's point that one cannot replace doubt with trust, I also disagree. Consider authentication online. Internet banking was impossible in the 90s, because the customer could not authenticate their bank (the other way around could have been done with passwords, a truly 1990s technology!). That problem has been largely solved, though some kinks remain in terms of phishing. However even that has technologically-available solutions, which will be deployed in a few years' time.
--AS
Hmmm...
But surely - given enough training - the GAN created will effectively be tuned to notice the artifacts and features that Deep Fake GANs produce?
But then the DeepFake GAN can be retrained, using whatever approach the detector is employing to spot fakes, in their system to produce new images that the detector then sees as genuine and ultimately be a superior image.
Remember a GAN is a joint training approach, where you have a counterfeiter generating new images and an "expert" who decides if the generated image is genuine or not, and training a GAN is deemed complete when the counterfeiting process is producing such good quality images that the "expert" can't tell if they are real or fake. The better the "expert", the better the counterfeiter can get via this feedback loop.
That's an excellent point.
BUT
It works both ways. So long as people are generating new deep fakes (and they are known to be deep fakes), then they can be used in training.
It is, as you say, an arms race. But I'm not convinced the fakers have all the advantages.
But you have to know which are the deep fakes. That's fine if it is all "good actors" doing this i.e. academics who wish to spread knowledge.
But just like real world counterfeiters, there will be groups of people who don't do this and are carefully and quietly deploying their DeepFakes, just as the best art, wine and cash counterfeiters do (and we know how incredibly hard detecting some of these are).
So the arms race is always weighted towards the bad guy, as the good guy is a reactive position that requires finding the bad guys work to then find out how to react to it.
Anyway, why is anyone worried about Liverpool winning the Champions League? It's not happening.
1) We're European Royalty, we've won more Champions Leagues/European Cups than Manchester City, Manchester United, Chelsea, Everton, Spurs, Arsenal, Leicester, Dirty Leeds, and Villa combined
2) 2005 says hello, we won the Champions League with Djimi Traore, anything is possible with Liverpool, we can win it no centre backs in 2021.
Is it gauche of me to admit that I've lost nearly three stone since March 2020?
No. It is inspiring.
So the diet starts now. Jesus. And that was basically my last pleasure
I have to admit whilst all the exericising I've done played a part, I think the lack of weekly working and social three course at places like The Ivy, The Adam Reid, and Gauchos has helped as well.
Are you going to be on the promotional material for Peleton?
No one is saying it is "new" or "novel", only that it is the first time it has been detected in the UK. Given what happened with the Kent strain I think this is downplaying it quite a bit.
We didn’t have a huge vaccine rollout at that point.
But with lower efficacy?
The tweet is contradictory, saying "We know the vaccines can neutralize this variant, and updated boosters should they be needed are already in development."
If the vaccines are effective, why would boosters be needed? More twitter bollocks.
Uggghhh.
Stop with the 'step function' thinking.
The vaccines will have some efficacy against any mutation CV19 can throw at us, the only question is how much.
The way I like to think of it is this.
Imagine that you are in a City, and you have an air force.
The virus is a fleet of bombers coming to bomb your city.
Vaccines give you radar, so you can scramble that air force early and get them to knock them out the sky before they reach you.
Now, a mutation *might* make it slightly harder to see the incoming bombers. It might mean that instead of three hours notice, they only get one. Perhaps a few planes will get through and unleash a couple of bombs. But you're highly unlikely to get really sick, because you still have radar and you still get some advance warning.
If you have a booster in the Autumn, you'll get that full three hours (or maybe it'll increase it to five) of notice again, and then there's next to no chance that the bombers get through.
But there's more good news from vaccines. The number of bombers that are sent against you matters too. And the more people that are vaccinated, the fewer bombers will be thrown against you. If only six take off and fly towards your City, then it doesn't matter if you only get one hours notice, because you're not getting the same "dose" of bombers you were previously.
My umbrage was with the tweet implying there was nothing to worry about, not to mention the contradictory statements. If there wasn't anything to worry about, it wouldn't be classified as a variant of concern.
Splitting hairs maybe but the Tweet was suggesting there was no cause for “alarm” which is several stops ahead of “concern”. Also the Tweeter is a Molecular Biologist whose research focuses on uncovering “mechanisms of viral pathogenesis and host immunity”. While I admit he’s not verified, he’s been tweeting on the topic since April 2015, when interest was more niche than it is now, and he links to actual and factual scientific sources.
Is it gauche of me to admit that I've lost nearly three stone since March 2020?
No. It is inspiring.
So the diet starts now. Jesus. And that was basically my last pleasure
I have to admit whilst all the exericising I've done played a part, I think the lack of weekly working and social three course at places like The Ivy, The Adam Reid, and Gauchos has helped as well.
Are you going to be on the promotional material for Peleton?
I have a face for radio.
As we are discussed, that can be fixed via DeepFakes ;-)
Anyway, why is anyone worried about Liverpool winning the Champions League? It's not happening.
1) We're European Royalty, we've won more Champions Leagues/European Cups than Manchester City, Manchester United, Chelsea, Everton, Spurs, Arsenal, Leicester, Dirty Leeds, and Villa combined
2) 2005 says hello, we won the Champions League with Djimi Traore, anything is possible with Liverpool, we can win it no centre backs.
I hugged my daughter today for the first time in a year. We both burst into tears.
That is heartwarming.
It's going to make my handshake with my dad seem a bit underwhelming.
You are permitted a 0.5 second quiver of the upper lip.
I reserve that exclusively for pixar movies, thank you.
If you can keep it to 0.5 seconds for the start of Up, you really do have a heart of stone......
I'm actually quite emotional (damn you, scene in Inside Out when Riley comes home), but some people hugging seems more natural, for others handshakes are more appropriate.
Rob, nobody gave a toss about EU flags and I doubt I ever saw one. If you do not think this is insane then you are crazy. Try to imagine if everything in England was to be covered in saltires, you think that would go down well. Nothing partisan about it , these people are either really really stupid or insane.
Anyway, why is anyone worried about Liverpool winning the Champions League? It's not happening.
1) We're European Royalty, we've won more Champions Leagues/European Cups than Manchester City, Manchester United, Chelsea, Everton, Spurs, Arsenal, Leicester, Dirty Leeds, and Villa combined
2) 2005 says hello, we won the Champions League with Djimi Traore, anything is possible with Liverpool, we can win it no centre backs.
I'm confused - why cannot whichever officials are supporting the committee make any redactions?
It is a clusterfcuk of huge proportions, government being investigated by parliament but they insist they decide what evidence is made available to parliament. Banana republic does not cut it. More votes of No Confidence coming up I think.
I can only imagine all those parents who just spent months doing home schooling reaction to this....
Militant teachers are calling for a strike to disrupt the plan for all children to return to school on March 8.
Union activist Martin Powell-Davies has said school chiefs will be 'failing in their responsibilities' of health and safety measures if they 'recklessly' open their doors.
Passed by a table in a small park today on my run. The rule of six (might have been seven) was being utilised early.
The amount of traffic on the roads was incredible. Sunday is usually visiting folks day round here and I’d suggest we are pretty much back to normal. The psychologists were right - people cannot stay in lock down forever. I think aside of the pubs and non essential shops, for many, many people, life is almost back to normal, whatever the government might tell us.
8 weeks into Lockdown 1.0 was Bank holiday weekend/VE day.
I don't think its much of a surprise tbh. Lovely weather, especially 2 weeks after that mid-Feb freeze.
In all honesty that May bank holiday didn’t cause a measurable increase in cases. That didn’t happen until late August/early September.
Exactly. Same with people whining about the Cummings effect. I'm no fan of his, but the dates just don't fit.
Rob, nobody gave a toss about EU flags and I doubt I ever saw one. If you do not think this is insane then you are crazy. Try to imagine if everything in England was to be covered in saltires, you think that would go down well. Nothing partisan about it , these people are either really really stupid or insane.
That analogy doesn’t work. The flag of England is 🏴. No one is suggesting papering Scotland with St George’s Cross (save insofar as it forms part of the Union Flag).
Deepfakes will also, entirely, fuck up the legal system. Video evidence will always be challenged, it will become virtually useless (photo evidence too, of course). Witnesses or complainants will no longer be able to give evidence via a screen?
That’s just the law
Why pay an actor £10m when you can deepfake Laurence Olivier for ten quid?
Movie making suddenly got a hundred times cheaper
The more you go down this rabbit hole, the darker yet deeper it gets
Why bother with humans at all? Surely this technology makes electronic replacements easier and cheaper. No unions, no toilet breaks, no repeat fees, whatever body shape is thought desirable...I think I will stop there.
Agree, it sounds scaremongery, but I think we should be seriously worried about this. There was a Sam Harris podcast with Nina Schick which explored the possible issues in terrifying detail. Once we're over Covid, I'd put some money on this being the next societal upheaval to deal with.
I'd suggest banning the technology lock stock and barrel (a bit like the US export restrictions for PGP cryptography back in the day), if it wasn't completely unworkable in this day and age.
It happens that this is a technology that I know a great deal about. And I'm not as worried as some of you here about veracity. It is entirely possible to build verification technology into cameras and webcams, such that the recipient can tell that the content has not been faked (and, optionally, who originated the image or video). I think this will make reliable photo and video journalism possible again, but there may be an intermediate period where faking is easy and verification is not widespread.
That doesn't deal with the Holywood question, of course, but I expect the unions to have something to say about that. Indeed there are already rules about using an actor's likeness (at least in the US, after the Back to the Future II incident).
As for the technology, watch this space!
--AS
You don’t think a bad actor might make cameras that don’t have that built-in tech? Like, say, China?!
I might sound a bit afeared, but remember the famous saying
‘Fear is a species of excitement’
So true. I’m really just excited.
Which famous philosopher said that?
No one. It’s a quote invented from scratch by an AI computer
No, because everyone would know that the photo or video it produced was unverified. This isn't like DRM for music (that completely failed for the reason you suggest) but an opt-in for those wishing to produce photographs that they can claim are genuine.
So then it would be: photo taken with a Nikon camera and verification intact = genuine, photo taken with a Sinocam = don't trust, especially if Sinocam have been found to produce fake photos in the past.
--AS
That sounds utopianly optimistic to me, however this is your field, so you may be right. Let’s hope so
However, it occurs to me that it’s more likely you are a deepfake commenter, a bot generated by a Chinese computer, which has sent you on here to calm us down with phoney good news, so we don’t actually take steps to stop AI taking over.
I know your game.
It is worth remembering that the same technology that allows Deep Fakes to be made, also allows them to be identified. What seems very real to a human, will seem very fake to a neural net trained on millions of videos of deep fakes.
Actually I don't entirely agree with you here. Increasing the Deep Fakes will be created with GANs, and unless the detector uses a very different architecture the fake will have been effectively designed to avoid that detector (and even different architectures might not save you). I have a lot of respect for the work on deep fake detection -- indeed, the academics doing it are my friends -- but I don't think they win that race in the long run.
To Leon's point that one cannot replace doubt with trust, I also disagree. Consider authentication online. Internet banking was impossible in the 90s, because the customer could not authenticate their bank (the other way around could have been done with passwords, a truly 1990s technology!). That problem has been largely solved, though some kinks remain in terms of phishing. However even that has technologically-available solutions, which will be deployed in a few years' time.
--AS
Hmmm...
But surely - given enough training - the GAN created will effectively be tuned to notice the artifacts and features that Deep Fake GANs produce?
I'm familiar with that article. Indeed, one of my friends demonstrated the effect several years before the research that it cites. However, it's not an insoluble problem, and it's not really related to the GAN arms race. The key is that machine learning algorithms should learn that they sometimes don't know something.
One might also say that machine learning researchers should also consider the same lesson.
--AS
IMO, it is not so much that these algorithms don't know something, it is the model we humans think they have learned, isn't what they actually have and then determine that the NN has successfully learned the task we desire due to certain tests the human puts in place.
e.g. lots of experts (and many still do) used to talk about CNNs learning object recognition by building up component parts i.e. its learns a car, by taking pixels, learning edges, edges become shapes, shapes become the doors, the wheels etc.
This belief came about because humans looked at the output of various layers of the CNN and saw edges and shapes they recognized and jumped to the conclusion that what the CNN was learning was this hierarchy.
Except that has now been proven to be incorrect. It has been shown switching textures causes mayhem with CNN based object detection, which if it really had learned the hierarchy described above, a texture change shouldn't make any difference to this.
Thus, CNN's aren't learning (solely) via the model most humans thought and then we are shocked when it falls down because a few pixels have been flipped.
I agree with your reasoning, but I don't entirely agree with the conclusion. However, not to bore the site with a technical discussion (and not to disclose my identity too precisely) let's just agree that ML research is not nearly as perfected as many believed.
I still maintain that the solution to Deep Fake and similar technology is authentication at source rather than detection at the other end, for many and varied reasons.
Deepfakes will also, entirely, fuck up the legal system. Video evidence will always be challenged, it will become virtually useless (photo evidence too, of course). Witnesses or complainants will no longer be able to give evidence via a screen?
That’s just the law
Why pay an actor £10m when you can deepfake Laurence Olivier for ten quid?
Movie making suddenly got a hundred times cheaper
The more you go down this rabbit hole, the darker yet deeper it gets
Why bother with humans at all? Surely this technology makes electronic replacements easier and cheaper. No unions, no toilet breaks, no repeat fees, whatever body shape is thought desirable...I think I will stop there.
Agree, it sounds scaremongery, but I think we should be seriously worried about this. There was a Sam Harris podcast with Nina Schick which explored the possible issues in terrifying detail. Once we're over Covid, I'd put some money on this being the next societal upheaval to deal with.
I'd suggest banning the technology lock stock and barrel (a bit like the US export restrictions for PGP cryptography back in the day), if it wasn't completely unworkable in this day and age.
It happens that this is a technology that I know a great deal about. And I'm not as worried as some of you here about veracity. It is entirely possible to build verification technology into cameras and webcams, such that the recipient can tell that the content has not been faked (and, optionally, who originated the image or video). I think this will make reliable photo and video journalism possible again, but there may be an intermediate period where faking is easy and verification is not widespread.
That doesn't deal with the Holywood question, of course, but I expect the unions to have something to say about that. Indeed there are already rules about using an actor's likeness (at least in the US, after the Back to the Future II incident).
As for the technology, watch this space!
--AS
You don’t think a bad actor might make cameras that don’t have that built-in tech? Like, say, China?!
I might sound a bit afeared, but remember the famous saying
‘Fear is a species of excitement’
So true. I’m really just excited.
Which famous philosopher said that?
No one. It’s a quote invented from scratch by an AI computer
No, because everyone would know that the photo or video it produced was unverified. This isn't like DRM for music (that completely failed for the reason you suggest) but an opt-in for those wishing to produce photographs that they can claim are genuine.
So then it would be: photo taken with a Nikon camera and verification intact = genuine, photo taken with a Sinocam = don't trust, especially if Sinocam have been found to produce fake photos in the past.
--AS
That sounds utopianly optimistic to me, however this is your field, so you may be right. Let’s hope so
However, it occurs to me that it’s more likely you are a deepfake commenter, a bot generated by a Chinese computer, which has sent you on here to calm us down with phoney good news, so we don’t actually take steps to stop AI taking over.
I know your game.
It is worth remembering that the same technology that allows Deep Fakes to be made, also allows them to be identified. What seems very real to a human, will seem very fake to a neural net trained on millions of videos of deep fakes.
Actually I don't entirely agree with you here. Increasing the Deep Fakes will be created with GANs, and unless the detector uses a very different architecture the fake will have been effectively designed to avoid that detector (and even different architectures might not save you). I have a lot of respect for the work on deep fake detection -- indeed, the academics doing it are my friends -- but I don't think they win that race in the long run.
To Leon's point that one cannot replace doubt with trust, I also disagree. Consider authentication online. Internet banking was impossible in the 90s, because the customer could not authenticate their bank (the other way around could have been done with passwords, a truly 1990s technology!). That problem has been largely solved, though some kinks remain in terms of phishing. However even that has technologically-available solutions, which will be deployed in a few years' time.
--AS
Hmmm...
But surely - given enough training - the GAN created will effectively be tuned to notice the artifacts and features that Deep Fake GANs produce?
I'm familiar with that article. Indeed, one of my friends demonstrated the effect several years before the research that it cites. However, it's not an insoluble problem, and it's not really related to the GAN arms race. The key is that machine learning algorithms should learn that they sometimes don't know something.
One might also say that machine learning researchers should also consider the same lesson.
--AS
IMO, it is not so much that these algorithms don't know something, it is the model we humans think they have learned, isn't what they actually have and then determine that the NN has successfully learned the task we desire due to certain tests the human puts in place.
e.g. lots of experts (and many still do) used to talk about CNNs learning object recognition by building up component parts i.e. its learns a car, by taking pixels, learning edges, edges become shapes, shapes become the doors, the wheels etc.
This belief came about because humans looked at the output of various layers of the CNN and saw edges and shapes they recognized and jumped to the conclusion that what the CNN was learning was this hierarchy.
Except that has now been proven to be incorrect. It has been shown switching textures causes mayhem with CNN based object detection, which if it really had learned the hierarchy described above, a texture change shouldn't make any difference to this.
Thus, CNN's aren't learning (solely) via the model most humans thought and then we are shocked when it falls down because a few pixels have been flipped.
I agree with your reasoning, but I don't entirely agree with the conclusion. However, not to bore the site with a technical discussion (and not to disclose my identity too precisely) let's just agree that ML research is not nearly as perfected as many believed.
I still maintain that the solution to Deep Fake and similar technology is authentication at source rather than detection at the other end, for many and varied reasons.
--AS
I don't disagree with you on the thrust of either points.
You only have to look at GANs through the lens of if they are an accurate generative model, and see how many "misses" (i.e. terrible looking human faces among the set of convincing ones) they have, to see how imperfect the underlying model must still be, as it is happy to create things which are so far from reality they never should be even considered as a valid output.
I'm confused - why cannot whichever officials are supporting the committee make any redactions?
It is a clusterfcuk of huge proportions, government being investigated by parliament but they insist they decide what evidence is made available to parliament. Banana republic does not cut it. More votes of No Confidence coming up I think.
In Parliament against the sitting administration I assume? What difference would that make to anything? It'd split entirely along party lines so the First Minister would be rock solid safe with the support of the sock puppet Greens.
Besides, we all know that Nicola Sturgeon is the Jacinda Ardern of Scotland. Her amazing not-quite-identical-to-Boris-Johnson Covid policies, coupled with daily looking very stern at press conferences for a year, means that her ratings are stratospheric. Just look at the most recent polling. The people love her.
I'm confused - why cannot whichever officials are supporting the committee make any redactions?
It is a clusterfcuk of huge proportions, government being investigated by parliament but they insist they decide what evidence is made available to parliament. Banana republic does not cut it. More votes of No Confidence coming up I think.
Rawnsley described Scotland as a "cold weather Banana republic" this morning.
I'm confused - why cannot whichever officials are supporting the committee make any redactions?
It is a clusterfcuk of huge proportions, government being investigated by parliament but they insist they decide what evidence is made available to parliament. Banana republic does not cut it. More votes of No Confidence coming up I think.
Rawnsley described Scotland as a "cold weather Banana republic" this morning.
Silly comment. Scotland can get quite warm in the summer.
Rob, nobody gave a toss about EU flags and I doubt I ever saw one. If you do not think this is insane then you are crazy. Try to imagine if everything in England was to be covered in saltires, you think that would go down well. Nothing partisan about it , these people are either really really stupid or insane.
That analogy doesn’t work. The flag of England is 🏴. No one is suggesting papering Scotland with St George’s Cross (save insofar as it forms part of the Union Flag).
Quite. It also needs to be reiterated - English people don't have an issue with the Saltire. Nobody in England has any objection to Scots being proud of their national flag. Personally I think it's very beautiful. I wouldn't be bothered at all seeing England bedecked with them if the celebration was relevant (St Andrews, Burns, etc.), and I wouldn't care if they hung at all Government buildings all the time alongside the flags of the other Kingdoms. We had this bizarre conversation a while back where Scot nats here thought English posters would be offended if Nicola Sturgeon wore Saltire jewelry - um, No?
Anyway, why is anyone worried about Liverpool winning the Champions League? It's not happening.
1) We're European Royalty, we've won more Champions Leagues/European Cups than Manchester City, Manchester United, Chelsea, Everton, Spurs, Arsenal, Leicester, Dirty Leeds, and Villa combined
2) 2005 says hello, we won the Champions League with Djimi Traore, anything is possible with Liverpool, we can win it no centre backs.
Genuine question, would you give up the 2004 Invincibles honour for say winning the 2006 Champions League?
If you'd asked me on the morning of 3 April 2004 what the priorities were it was PL and CL.
It was only a full time in the Liverpool game on 9 April (I was there) that it occurred to me that we could actually complete an unbeaten season. No one starts out trying to go unbeaten, but given how much it annoys certain people (cough Adrian Durham cough), it's something that I wouldn't give up readily.
Actually, if I was going to swap it, it wouldn't be for the 2006 CL (as disappointing as it was not to win that). No, it would be the 2007-08 PL. Not getting over the line hurt so much. For me, that it peak Premier League. Man Utd and Chelsea were at their best, and we so nearly beat them. Had the Eduardo thing not happened, I reckon we'd have done it.
Passed by a table in a small park today on my run. The rule of six (might have been seven) was being utilised early.
The amount of traffic on the roads was incredible. Sunday is usually visiting folks day round here and I’d suggest we are pretty much back to normal. The psychologists were right - people cannot stay in lock down forever. I think aside of the pubs and non essential shops, for many, many people, life is almost back to normal, whatever the government might tell us.
8 weeks into Lockdown 1.0 was Bank holiday weekend/VE day.
I don't think its much of a surprise tbh. Lovely weather, especially 2 weeks after that mid-Feb freeze.
In all honesty that May bank holiday didn’t cause a measurable increase in cases.
Well, fire up the QUITE klaxon, you've won a prize.
I'm confused - why cannot whichever officials are supporting the committee make any redactions?
It is a clusterfcuk of huge proportions, government being investigated by parliament but they insist they decide what evidence is made available to parliament. Banana republic does not cut it. More votes of No Confidence coming up I think.
In Parliament against the sitting administration I assume? What difference would that make to anything? It'd split entirely along party lines so the First Minister would be rock solid safe with the support of the sock puppet Greens.
Besides, we all know that Nicola Sturgeon is the Jacinda Ardern of Scotland. Her amazing not-quite-identical-to-Boris-Johnson Covid policies, coupled with daily looking very stern at press conferences for a year, means that her ratings are stratospheric. Just look at the most recent polling. The people love her.
Just a bit less than they did last time they were asked.
Comments
Then little butterflies we chase
We like to gamble in things rural
Commune with nature face to face
Unto our beat then back returning
Refreshed by nature's holy charm
We run them in, we run them in
We run them in, we run them in
We show them we're the bold gendarmes
We run them in, we run them in
We run them in, we run them in
We show them we're the bold gendarmes.
3 different ex United players scored.
Last I checked the only way 4th loses their space is if the Champions League and UEFA Cup are BOTH won by an English club that have BOTH finished outside the top 4.
Which came remarkably close to happening two years ago from memory.
Edit. I see that's been done.
All Everton fans are pessimists. And tend to be introverted. That's why we support EFC.
Ps. We'll get beat by Saints tomorrow.
Good news = People head out to visit other people
Bad news = People lock themselves up at home.
I can find a study of peak flow where 3/12 cases dropped their peak flow by more than 20%, but that is a pretty small study.
Had Man Utd finished 4th.
And had Spurs won the Champions League final.
And had Arsenal won the Europa League final.
Then Man Utd would have finished 4th but missed out on the Champions League as 5th and 6th Spurs and Arsenal would have taken the spots instead.
However none of it happened. Utd had a terrible end to the season and finished sixth rendering it moot, while Spurs and Arsenal both lost the finals to Liverpool and Chelsea.
To Leon's point that one cannot replace doubt with trust, I also disagree. Consider authentication online. Internet banking was impossible in the 90s, because the customer could not authenticate their bank (the other way around could have been done with passwords, a truly 1990s technology!). That problem has been largely solved, though some kinks remain in terms of phishing. However even that has technologically-available solutions, which will be deployed in a few years' time.
--AS
So the diet starts now. Jesus. And that was basically my last pleasure
EU current project is to impose standardisation on border closures.
The European Commission has written to Germany, Belgium, Hungary, Finland, Denmark and Sweden, urging them to obey to the travel restrictions recommendations of the European Council.
These six member states have introduced, to some extent, a ban on entry or exit from the country on public health grounds during the current wave of the coronavirus pandemic.
"The commission wants to recall to the European member states that it is a necessity to go back to a coordinated approach on all the measures taken in relation to the free movement of people and goods," EU justice commissioner Didier Reynders said on Tuesday (23 February) in a video posted on social media.
Now the six states have 10 days to justify these decisions.
These restrictions have "gone too far," Reynders said, arguing that "maybe a discouragement" from travelling could be admissible, but "not a ban on travel from one member state to another one."
https://euobserver.com/coronavirus/151031
Heads up backsides, again.
Although...there are some big issues with GANs, like mode collapse. But this is just the start of the journey.
In Australia they ban travel within the country, its illegal to travel from Melbourne to Sydney if Melbourne has cases. Let alone travel between countries.
Now you need six qualifiers to deny the 4th placed spot.
I don't think its much of a surprise tbh. Lovely weather, especially 2 weeks after that mid-Feb freeze.
Corrected.
Remember how they were mocked?
It's been a long autumn and winter.
Have a care.
Comical D is also saying that Vaccine Export Bans as in the US and UK are a reason why more people have got vaccinated.
Galit Alter, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard, said the fast-spreading U.K. variant seems able to evade some vaccine protection, and the South African variant appears able to skirt even more. Despite that, she said, none have completely escaped the body’s post-vaccination immune responses.
That’s because, Alter said, though much attention has focused on how antibodies boosted after vaccination target their attack on the virus’ spike protein, the immune system has an array of other defenses that vaccination also mobilizes, including antibodies that attack other parts of the virus, and, importantly, T-cells that attack the infected cells the virus hijacks in order to replicate.“
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/02/vaccines-should-end-the-pandemic-despite-the-variants-say-experts/
But surely - given enough training - the GAN created will effectively be tuned to notice the artifacts and features that Deep Fake GANs produce?
While tangential, this is worth a read, and is one of the reasons why I disagree: https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/sensors/slight-street-sign-modifications-can-fool-machine-learning-algorithms
I think if they adopted your manifesto they would see their support increase.
Remember a GAN is a joint training approach, where you have a counterfeiter generating new images and an "expert" who decides if the generated image is genuine or not, and training a GAN is deemed complete when the counterfeiting process is producing such good quality images that the "expert" can't tell if they are real or fake. The better the "expert", the better the counterfeiter can get via this feedback loop.
It is like telling a human counterfeiter of money exactly what all the checks will be on any notes. They will ensure their fake notes pass these tests. The better the tests get, the more sophisticated the counterfeit has to get to pass them.
However, unlike human counterfeiting, machine learning based ones, it is just more about throwing more training time at it.
One might also say that machine learning researchers should also consider the same lesson.
--AS
We both burst into tears.
It's going to make my handshake with my dad seem a bit underwhelming.
BUT
It works both ways. So long as people are generating new deep fakes (and they are known to be deep fakes), then they can be used in training.
It is, as you say, an arms race. But I'm not convinced the fakers have all the advantages.
In other Italian news, research on immune response in healthcare workers suggests that the obese produce only around half as strong an antibody response as the healthy. Che sorpresa.
e.g. lots of experts (and many still do) used to talk about CNNs learning object recognition by building up component parts i.e. its learns a car, by taking pixels, learning edges, edges become shapes, shapes become the doors, the wheels etc.
This belief came about because humans looked at the output of various layers of the CNN and saw edges and shapes they recognized and jumped to the conclusion that what the CNN was learning was this hierarchy.
Except that has now been proven to be incorrect. It has been shown switching textures causes mayhem with CNN based object detection, which if it really had learned the hierarchy described above, a texture change shouldn't make any difference to this.
Thus, CNN's aren't learning (solely) via the model most humans thought and then we are shocked when it falls down because a few pixels have been flipped.
I mean look at Sheffield United.
https://twitter.com/ILawson27/status/1366101181760741378
But just like real world counterfeiters, there will be groups of people who don't do this and are carefully and quietly deploying their DeepFakes, just as the best art, wine and cash counterfeiters do (and we know how incredibly hard detecting some of these are).
So the arms race is always weighted towards the bad guy, as the good guy is a reactive position that requires finding the bad guys work to then find out how to react to it.
2) 2005 says hello, we won the Champions League with Djimi Traore, anything is possible with Liverpool, we can win it no centre backs in 2021.
Or 4m votes for that matter
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Highbury
https://twitter.com/alanferrier/status/1366101259544109060?s=20
(OK, that creepy spoon thing from the trailer is a part of it)
A list of the most emotional Pixar and similar movies would be interesting.
Militant teachers are calling for a strike to disrupt the plan for all children to return to school on March 8.
Union activist Martin Powell-Davies has said school chiefs will be 'failing in their responsibilities' of health and safety measures if they 'recklessly' open their doors.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9309441/Militant-teachers-call-strike-disrupt-plan-children-return-school-March-8.html
My youngest is Toy Story crazy, took her to see that in the cinema as her first (and thanks to Covid only so far) cinema experience.
The end of 4 is quite emotional but nothing like as emotional as 3 was.
I still maintain that the solution to Deep Fake and similar technology is authentication at source rather than detection at the other end, for many and varied reasons.
--AS
You only have to look at GANs through the lens of if they are an accurate generative model, and see how many "misses" (i.e. terrible looking human faces among the set of convincing ones) they have, to see how imperfect the underlying model must still be, as it is happy to create things which are so far from reality they never should be even considered as a valid output.
Besides, we all know that Nicola Sturgeon is the Jacinda Ardern of Scotland. Her amazing not-quite-identical-to-Boris-Johnson Covid policies, coupled with daily looking very stern at press conferences for a year, means that her ratings are stratospheric. Just look at the most recent polling. The people love her.
* spoiler alert: he doesn't.
It was only a full time in the Liverpool game on 9 April (I was there) that it occurred to me that we could actually complete an unbeaten season. No one starts out trying to go unbeaten, but given how much it annoys certain people (cough Adrian Durham cough), it's something that I wouldn't give up readily.
Actually, if I was going to swap it, it wouldn't be for the 2006 CL (as disappointing as it was not to win that). No, it would be the 2007-08 PL. Not getting over the line hurt so much. For me, that it peak Premier League. Man Utd and Chelsea were at their best, and we so nearly beat them. Had the Eduardo thing not happened, I reckon we'd have done it.
Unprepared for Autumn? Very much yes.
Man has Callipo on Southend beach stories incoming for the next few months. HUZZAH.