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Hanno Zulla

@hzulla@infosec.exchange View on infosec.exchange

Nerd, dad, Lego aficionado, software developer, occasional business guy, regretful sysadmin of an escalating smart home setup.

I sometimes post about my work, but views are my own.

I'm with the crew at epublica.de

  • 3 posts
Hanno Zulla @hzulla@infosec.exchange

@ela speaking for myself, I certainly see the benefits of experts using generative AI in their field of expertise where a user is willing and able to spot mistakes in the generated output. A force multiplier, yes.

However, the current generative AI mania is fully driven by using it outside of the users' field of expertise. "A PhD in your pocket" is the literal ad copy. The organisations pushing the use of generative AI are using it to replace human expertise and craft, without understanding if the plausible-looking generative AI results are correct. This way lies madness and one day we're going to be very sorry looking back at the many failures, cruelty and general downdumbing caused by AI use in our current era.

Anyway, since you're generalising about how AI opponents sound to you, let me clap back that these "True, I share concerns about the AI industry, but my coding assistant is great for me and I'm only using it ethically unlike everybody else around me" comments like yours sound like so many white-lie responses by meat eaters to the ostensibly annoying vegan: "Sure, you have a point about the global-scale negative effects of the meat industry, but I eat less meat than average and only buy from the organic butcher."

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Hanno Zulla @hzulla@infosec.exchange

It is such an obvious cause once you think about it, and yet before you hear about this, no software developer or maintainer ever considers the possible effects of e.g. a default Debian cron job setting may have on the global electricity grid.

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Hanno Zulla @hzulla@infosec.exchange

This is FASCINATING. Researchers were able to pin down the cause of measurable global 60 second power spikes to software that does regular checks on the minute mark. They found large scale battery installations as one major cause, but obviously this is true for any other computerized system that does cron jobs and has a synchronized clock. As weird as it sounds, adding random 0-59.999s delays to cron jobs in Linux distributions and other software would actually help the power grid.

fz-juelich.de/en/news/archive/

Mystery of 60-Second Fluctuations in Power Grids Solved Why do our grids show a brief spike in electricity demand every minute? A team led by Dirk Witthaut from Forschungszentrum Jülich has now demonstrated that this is due to regular power checks carried out by large-scale battery storage systems. These findings could help to make our electricity supply more robust, as the team reports in an article published in Nature Energy.

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