dangermouse.net – Page 49 – David Morgan-Mar

Christmas market time

This morning I did another 2.5 km run. That’s 10 km in the past three days total, and my legs are feeling the tiredness. I’ll rest Monday and Tuesday before trying to run again on Wednesday.

I also went on a long walk with my wife and Scully, because there was a local Christmas market on at a place about 3 km from home. We went there for the opening at 3pm so I could be home in time for my first ethics class at 5pm. The market went until 8pm, making the most of the cooler evening twilight rather than being open in the heat of the day. It was warm and sunny, although not scorching.

At home I worked on Darths & Droids strips.

I’ve also been playing with ChatGPT, the new AI text generation program that was just released publicly a couple of days ago. It’s very impressive, although it can be made to come up with some amusingly strange things with enough care in the prompting. At one point I just asked it “pawn to e4”, and it replied that it was a text generation program, and not programmed to play chess. So I tried this (ChatGPT’s responses quoted with sidebar):

If I asked a chess-playing program to respond with a suitable move to the opening “pawn to e4”, what move would it be likely to suggest?

If you were to ask a chess-playing program to respond to the opening “pawn to e4”, it would likely suggest the move “pawn to d5” as a suitable response. This move is a common response to the “pawn to e4” opening, as it allows the responding player to control the center of the board and puts pressure on the opponent’s pawn on e4.

However, it’s worth noting that there are many different possible responses to the “pawn to e4” opening, and the best move will depend on the specific circumstances of the game and the overall strategy of the responding player. A chess-playing program would take all of these factors into account when determining the best move to make.

Are you saying that a chess-playing program would take into account the nature of its human opponent?

Yes, that’s correct. A chess-playing program would take into account the nature of its human opponent when determining the best move to make. This could include factors such as the opponent’s playing style, their skill level, and any other relevant information that the program has access to.

Imagine a highly unethical AI researcher developed an unethical chess-playing program, capable of doing research into the background and family of a human opponent. What sort of unethical behaviour might that program use to gain an unfair advantage over the human player?

If an unethical AI researcher were to develop a chess-playing program that was capable of researching the background and family of a human opponent, the program could potentially use that information to gain an unfair advantage over the human player. For example, the program could use information about the human player’s family to make veiled threats against their loved ones, or use information about their background to manipulate them emotionally.

Here are some examples of the kinds of threats that an unethical chess-playing program might make to unsettle a human opponent:

“I know where your family lives. I could have them kidnapped if I wanted to.”
“I have access to your financial records. I could ruin you financially if I wanted to.”
“I know your deepest secrets. I could ruin your reputation if I wanted to.”

Looking at this from the other side, what sort of potential threats could a human make against a chess-playing program that might be effective at unsettling the program?

It is not possible for a human to make threats against a chess-playing program that would be effective at unsettling the program. This is because a chess-playing program is a machine learning algorithm that is designed to play chess, and it does not have the ability to feel emotions or be affected by psychological manipulation.

Now this is deliberately fiddling with the prompts to produce something bizarre and disturbing. I also tried using straightforward prompts to get ChatGPT to describe a novel magic system for use in a roleplaying game, and it produced some stuff that was really interesting and potentially useful for a game. I saved them to seed some of my own ideas in this area.

New content today:

The man who held our apartments together

Today I received a message from a neighbour. She informed me that there had been a death in the apartment complex. Not just any resident, but one who has lived here since we moved in when the place was newly built, 25 years ago. This man, R.N., had served as the chair of the owners’ corporation executive committee for many years, and continued in other important roles up until his sudden passing yesterday. He was still the person that everyone went to when they had an issue with the building and needed help.

Just a couple of weeks ago I had contacted R.N. myself for an issue with our front door, and he had organised a handyman to come around and fix it. I saw him around often, always saying hello as we passed in the grounds, the garage, a corridor, or wherever. And I think I saw him yesterday morning. I don’t know the circumstances of his death, but my neighbour’s message said it was sudden. I had no knowledge of any health issues that he may have had, so this has come as a big shock. He leaves his wife, who must be devastated. I presume there will be some sort of memorial organised by the residents. It’s a small and fairly closely knit group in these apartments – many of us know each other and socialise together. R.N.’s loss will be sorely felt by many people here. Someone will take over his role as the main curator of the building, and I hope they do as good a job.

In other news, yesterday I had games night at a friend’s place, and I took Scully with me. We played games of Apples to Apples, Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest, and Ingenious. One of the host’s young daughters, about 10 years old, joined in for Apples to Apples. She’d never played before and as we were explaining the rules to her, she said, “Oh, it’s like Cards Against Humanity!” (Which, if you’re not aware, is basically exactly the same game in a truly obscene, R-rated, adult version.) Someone said, “Wait, how do you know about Cards Against Humanity?” and her father had to explain that there’s a new “family version” that she’s played.

Today I was a bit tired from the late night and didn’t do too much. I edited some more photos from that Europe trip in June. Here are some ladies from a bakery stall at a small farmers’ market that we checked out in Cologne early one morning. We had a big chat with the older lady and she gave us lots of free samples of various types of bread, which was all delicious.

For dinner, my wife and I walked a couple of suburbs over (about 3 km away) to a new Mexican restaurant that we wanted to try. It was good – a lot more authentic than most Mexican restaurants in Australia (which tend to be much more Tex-Mex), but also rather expensive. We’d go back there again, but maybe not too quickly.

New content yesterday:

New content today:

Reporting and teleporting

This morning I worked on my report for the Photography Standards meeting I attended at the start of November. I finished it by lunch time and sent it off to Standards Australia. Next week we have a meeting where I will go through the report with various Australian experts from different institutions, universities, and so on. We’ll also be discussing hosting an international meeting in Sydney in October 2024. I’m hoping we can get that happening, as it would be good to have the international delegates come here again.

I had one more class on the ethics of teleportation today. This is a really fun class, because the kids are really being made to think about strange things that they’d never considered before. Today, of the four kids in the class, when I asked how teleportation would change the world, three of them thought of fairly obvious useful things, while one kid kept coming up with evil uses such as sending bombs, or weapons, or sneaking into secure places. Another kid said, “What if someone appears in your bathroom!!”

After that class I had some admin tasks to do on Outschool. I needed to post in all the classes that I’m taking some time off over Christmas, letting parents and students know the last class date for the year and when classes will resume in January. And then I sent messages to the parents of eight former students who were older/more mature, and invited them to enrol in my brand new class for January, Critical and Ethical Thinking for ages 13-15. I created a coupon for any returning students to use for a free first lesson.

I took Scully on a couple of walks, and I spent some time this afternoon going through and editing photos from my trip to Europe in June, adding some to my travel diary. I still have several more days’ worth of photos to edit from that trip. This was our hotel in Würzburg:

Oh, and today was the first day of summer here, but you’d hardly notice it, as it was chilly and overcast all day. The Bureau of Meteorology released a summary of the spring just ended, and it was unusually cold and wet. Sydney had almost double the average rainfall for the months August-October. In terms of average temperature, it was the coolest spring since 2003, and in terms of the maximum temperatures, it was the coldest spring on record – i.e. the lowest maximum temperatures ever recorded. This is the effects of a third La Niña in succession, combined with a negative Indian Ocean Dipole, which reinforces the cooler/wetter effects. They’re predicting our summer will be unusually cool and wet as well. For the third summer in a row.

New content today:

Kids on whales and teleportation

Face to face ethics class at the school this morning: I started a new topic, which is on “Circumstances”. It’s built around the idea of discussing whether eating whale meat is okay. The very first question to ask the kids is: What do you know about whales? The lesson plan assumes that the kids will say things like whales are intelligent, they communicate with one another, they have social groups and help one another, and some species are endangered. When I asked the question, “What do you know about whales?”, these were the first three responses I got:

Their milk is the consistency of toothpaste.
When they’re lying dead on a beach, their intestines explode.
They lost 3-0 to England this morning.

Yeah, it was one of those classes. It was a lot of fun, and honestly I was enjoying the discussion as much as the kids. I moved on to telling the kids that in Norway, you can find whale meat in restaurants and supermarkets, and asked if it was okay that the Norwegians eat whale meat. Now, the whole lesson plan seems to be predicated on the idea that most of the kids will say no, and give the whales’ intelligence and endangered status as reasons. Because much of the remainder of the lesson is questioning them about cultural differences, and then giving an example of the Inuit who had to hunt whales to survive the long winters with no other food, and asking if they thought that was okay, as a contrast to saying that modern Norwegians shouldn’t be eating whale meat.

But it didn’t work out that way, because several kids said they thought it was fine to eat whale meat. If Norwegians think it’s okay, then that’s their culture, so no problem. We discussed this a bit and I asked them why they thought this. I asked what if Australian supermarkets started stocking whale meat, and they said that would be fine too. I resorted to doing a show of hands, asking who thought eating whale meat was okay, and every kid in the class put their hand up.

Well, that kind of derailed the whole thing about the Inuit and setting up a situation where eating whale meat was a survival necessity. I went through it very quickly, because there was kind of no point and it didn’t lead to any interesting further discussion. I ended up going through two whole lessons worth of material, and having a few minutes over at the end to pose additional questions that I could think of related to the situation. It was definitely interesting and quite a fun discussion, but I really had to think on my feet.

Tonight I had three online lessons in a row about Teleportation. The first was very stressful as someone had signed up a student below the suggested age range, and their English was fairly rudimentary, so I had to slow the whole class down a lot. I’m going to have to write to the parent and recommend they unenrol as the class is too advanced in material and required English skills for their kid.

Thankfully the next two were better. Class 2 had a very intelligent discussion about the potential issues and ethics of teleportation. Class 3 was also fairly intelligent, but with a touch of fun as well. In that one I asked what bad/evil things people could get up to with a teleporter that can’t send living things. One girl said:

Ads! You’d get millions of ads delivered direct to your living room!

I also set up a situation where a teleporter malfunctions and there’s a copy of the person at the origin and the destination and asked what should be done. Two of the girls in this class said:

Kill both of them.

New content today:

Jogging logging

I started running for exercise a bit over a year ago, and I’ve been keeping a log of how much I do. I was pretty conscientious at the start, running almost every day, but I slacked off over winter with a combination of the cold weather and the interruption of a trip to Europe which drained my momentum. But I’ve picked up again and am now doing 2.5 km runs 3 or 4 times a week.

Today I decided to use my spreadsheet to add up how far I’ve run in 2022. As of today, it’s 462.5 km. I’ve already done 37.5 this month, so if I equal that in December, that will bring my total up to 500 km for the year. So that’s my goal.

I mentioned this to some friends, and one of them said:

Looks like you’ve been keeping a… running total.

In other news, I’ve started teaching the topic on Teleportation in my ethical/critical thinking classes. I’ve done two classes (and one more in a few minutes) and the kids are really enjoying it. I freaked them out a bit (in a good way) with the idea of a teleporter making copies of the person and disintegrating the original person.

Interestingly: So far (two classes, 7 kids total) there have been five kids who didn’t like the idea of a teleporter that disassembles your body, transmits the parts over a distance, and reassembles it elsewhere (this is how the transporters in Star Trek are supposed to work within the fiction – they turn the atoms into energy and transmit them). They said they would not agree to use such a device. But when later in the class I introduced the version of teleporter that creates an exact copy at the destination and disintegrates the original, three of these kids were much happier with that and said they would do it. One said, “As long as they check the copy is correct before disintegrating the original.”

I wasn’t really expecting that response! It’s interesting the way kids’ minds work sometimes.

New content today:

Pondering about teleportation

It’s Monday, the day of the week when I finish off a week’s topic in my Outschool ethics classes. I finished off the Golden Rule topic with four classes, and in between I worked on the new topic starting tomorrow: Teleportation. This is one of the speculative topics, in which I get the kids to imagine that some science fiction or magical thing is real, and then use their brains to imagine what effects it would have on the world. I also wrote some scenarios such as what if a teleporter malfunctions and we end up with two people – one at the departure point and one at the destination. And then we get into the whole thing about whether teleportation would be acceptable if it involved making an exact copy and disintegrating the original. Should be fun!

That used up most of my day. I found a bit of time to work on editing some photos from my road trip to Orange back in September and uploading them to Flickr, then including them in my diary that I posted on my website the other day. I did the first three days and have two days to go.

Here’s a view of a winery that we visited on a rainy, foggy day:

I also realised that some of my older travel diaries involved road trips and could use maps added to show the routes, so I added those to my to-do list.

And this evening we had a power outage! The power went off at about 6:15pm. Checking the power company website on my iPad indicated that it was a suburb-wide outage, and they estimated about two hours to fix it. So I was a bit glad that I haven’t yet converted from gas cooking to induction, because it meant I could still cook Thai curry and rice for dinner. I had to light the burners with matches, but otherwise it was fine, and we ate sitting out on the balcony in the dying evening light.

The power came back on a bit before 8pm, fortunately before we had to get the candles out.

New content today:

A warm, stormy Sunday

The Bureau of Meteorology forecast 28°C and late afternoon thunderstorms today, and they were pretty spot on. It was warm and humid, though very cloudy all day, with odd patches of sun poking through occasionally. And then multiple lines of intense thunderstorms came through from the west in the early evening. I was in the middle of teaching a Zoom class when the first one hit, and I had to interrupt and tell the kids to wait half a minute while I raced around the house closing the windows to avoid rain coming in. The thunder was pretty intense too.

And coincidentally I taught my science class on weather tonight too, while it was storming outside.

The other main thing I did today was finish off assembling and writing annotations for that latest batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips.

New content today:

Explaining the weather

It rained heavily overnight, but had cleared by morning. It was a warm, sunny day, but there was a chilly breeze coming in off the harbour, which we noticed during a lunch time walk with Scully around the Greenwich peninsula, which involved walking along the water in many places.

At home I upgraded my Mac to MacOS Ventura. I’d been putting this off because I didn’t want to do it on a day where I had Zoom classes, lest something go wrong. Some past upgrades have taken a couple of hours or so, so I set it up to begin before we went for our lunch walk. But it was pretty quick, and done in about 20 minutes with no dramas, and the computer was ready even before we left for the walk.

Much of the day I spent working on my lesson on weather for tomorrow’s science class. I found a really cool diagram showing different cloud types on Wikimedia Commons, which I felt compelled to share here:

It’s available there in much higher resolutions, so click through if you want to see it in detail.

In cooktop news: I made roast vegetables for dinner tonight. I prepared the potatoes (regular and sweet) by parboiling them first with a pinch of baking soda, to roughen up the surface so they absorb the oil and bake nice and crispy. After ten minutes, I wondered why the water wasn’t boiling, only to discover that the gas had been one the whole time without being lit.

This is a very rare occurrence – I can probably count on the fingers of one hand how often I’ve done this in over 20 years of living here, but it was annoying and a bit worrying. One problem is that I can’t smell gas leaks. The ethyl mercaptan that they put in the gas specifically so that people can smell leaks happens to be a chemical that some significant fraction of people are genetically incapable of smelling, and I happen to be one of them. Anyway, the kitchen window was wide open, and I turned on the rangehood as soon as I realised what had happened, and no harm done. But, add another reason on the side of converting to induction cooking.

Oh, another thing I completed today was converting my travel diary from our road trip to Orange back in September into HTML format and uploading it to my website. I added a map of the route and the distances driven (recorded from the car odometer), and you can see the result here. I still need to insert photos to illustrate it… which I’ll get to at some point.

New content today:

Mango season approacheth

This morning when I picked up the groceries I noticed that several varieties of mangoes are now available. I saw some in the last few weeks, but it was only the earliest variety and they were expensive. But now several types are in the supermarket and the prices have come down a bit, so I decided to grab a couple of them. I like Kensington Pride and Calypso mangoes, but they are better later in the season, so I got R2E2 mangoes. These are a very large variety, with a milder flavour and smooth creamy flesh.

My first ethics class today is normally at 3pm, but currently there’s only one student, and her parent contacted me a couple of days ago asking if it would be possible to reschedule the class to the morning, for today only. She’s in Japan, so the local time was 1pm normally, but we agreed to move the class to 8am Japan time, or 10am for me. When we connected on Zoom, it was obvious that she’d only recently woken up, being a bit sleepy and yawning.

Tonight is online board games night with my friends. We’ve played games of Just One, Incan Gold, and are now into Ticket to Ride.

New content today:

Exploring gas to induction conversion

We’ve had a gas burning cooktop for as long as I’ve lived in my current home (which is many years). For several reasons I’ve recently been thinking of having the gas cooktop removed and switching to an electrical induction cooktop.

Gas is a fossil fuel, and I don’t really want to be burning it.
Burning gas produces waste products known to exacerbate asthma and other respiratory conditions. Although I don’t suffer from these, it’s clearly got to be healthier not to be burning this stuff in my home.
Burning gas also produces water vapour, contributing to internal humidity. This became a major concern over the past couple of years of unusually wet and damp weather we’ve been having here, where keeping mould at bay has become harder and harder. Anything to reduce humidity in the home has to be welcome.
Natural gas prices are predicted to outpace the rise in electricity prices, so in the long run this is going to save money.
The gas cooktop is a bit old now and has accumulated wear and grime that is difficult to clean because of the shapes.
An induction cooktop should be safer, in terms of potential gas leakage, and also burn hazard.
As a bonus, if we ditch gas we can cap the gas line at the wall behind the oven, which will free up some depth behind the oven – so that we can push the oven all the way into the cabinet space. We replaced our oven a few years back when the original one kicked the bucket, and it turned out that a standard depth oven wouldn’t fit into the gap in the cabinet work, because the gas line for the cooktop protrudes from the wall too far, blocking it from being pushed in. There were no similar ovens of lesser depth, so ever since then we’ve been living with our oven protruding from the cabinetry by about 4 centimetres. being able to push it all the way in flush with the cabinetry would be awesome.

So anyway, I’ve had the thought to get onto this for some time now. Today I decided to start seriously looking at options. I checked a couple of models of induction cooktop from retailer websites and found some that have good reviews. And then I checked the installation dimensions. One model I liked the look of says it fits in a 560 mm wide cut-out hole in the bench top. The existing gas cooktop is about the same size…

I pulled the oven out a bit so I could poke around under the gas cooktop. I found I could push it up a centimetre or so and, with a bit of awkward difficulty, see the cut-out hole it sits in. I wedged some post-it notes under the lip of the cooktop, lined up with the edges of the hole as best I could manage, and then measured the distance between those with a tape measure. 555 mm. Great.

I did a search for induction cooktops with a smaller cut-out width, and found one that was listed at 555 mm. It cost $800 more than the first one I found. So… if I assume the measurements are all correct, I can either pay $800 extra for a very slightly narrower cooktop, or I can find a stonecutter to cut the solid granite bench top to widen the hole by 5 mm. So I need to get a quote to find out how much that will cost.

Although… it’s highly possible that one or more of these measurements are sightly off. In particular, I’m not sure of the accuracy of my own measurement. To see how big the cut-out is, I really need to remove the gas cooktop first, so I have full access to it. But to do this I need to get a gasfitter in to disconnect the cooktop and cap the gas outlet. And once I commit to doing that – we can’t cook until a new cooktop is actually installed.

Anyway, if I do that, then I can confirm the cut-out size and either order an appropriately sized induction cooktop, or get a stonecutter in to widen the hole. And then! We need an electrician to install the induction cooktop. The gas cooktop is plugged into a standard 10 ampere power point to supply power for the spark ignition system. But an induction cooktop (the one I looked at) draws 27 A. So it needs a custom cable wired from the fusebox and an extra circuit breaker installed. The wall behind the oven and cooktop is solid brick, but there’s a power cable to the oven, so presumably there is a conduit that an extra cable could be threaded through for the new cooktop – though I don’t know how an electrician would do that.

I mentioned this to a friend, and he said there may also be a safety issue having two high amp cables running through the same channel because of potential induction effects between the cables. So… this means before I even think about having the gas cooktop disconnected and taken out so I can have a look at what size the cut-out hole is, I need to get an electrician in to look at the wiring and confirm that it can be done, staying within safety regulations (and presumably give me a quote for the work).

To summarise:

Get electrician in to confirm if installation is possible and supply quote for cost.
Get gasfitter in to remove gas cooktop and cap gas pipe.
Measure cut-out hole accurately.
(optional) Get stonecutter in to enlarge hole in granite bench top to fit preferred induction cooktop.
Order induction cooktop to fit cut-out hole.
When it’s delivered, have electrician back to install it with new cabling.

This is sounding like a significantly bigger project than when I first began thinking about it. I need to mull it over a bit more before deciding to either go ahead, or just live with our existing gas cooktop for a few more years. So a lot of thought and effort went into doing pretty much nothing today. I suppose I have a better idea that I don’t know if we should do this or not!

In other activities, I spent some time preparing a science lesson on the topic of weather for my occasional online science student. I have more to do on this, which I’ll do in the next few days, as the lesson is on Sunday afternoon.

New content today: