bjackman

Everything is just something else

Have been pondering AI and after my friend's presentation about The Conscious Mind I realised that I actually do believe that todays'a AIs have experience in some sense. However, that doesn't really have any straightforward implications regarding ethics or reasoning about its likely impact. My friend once told me about how her grandpa would always tell everyone to turn around to give his dog privacy while it shat. This was presumably tongue-in-cheek but if you do consider it as a serious viewpoint it's nonsensical: dogs do not have a socialised preference against being seen shitting. When you say a language model "wants" or "believes" something you make a similar mistake but of a much higher

bjackman

In my upper-middle-class British education, having opinions was not only a sacred right but also the solemn moral duty of the well-educated. You could (and must!) engage in debate when you disagreed with somebody, but the sacred-right aspect meant that only a small and well-enumerated set of opinions could truly be criticised. Lacking convictions was a sign of intellectual weakness, but it didn't really matter which convictions you held.

bjackman

// Copyright Chris Patuzzo 2016, Brendan Jackman 2019

// This is a modification of Chris Patuzzo's original Sentient example for
// finding self-enumerating pangrams - you can see the original here:
// https://sentient-lang.org/examples/self-enumerating-pangram
// I've added some comments and extended it
//  a) to work on larger values (the original assumed that there would be no
//     more than forty of any given letter), and
//  b) to also find "near-miss" solutions - because for longer seed texts you
//     usually find there are no solutions. This hack lets you write a seed

bjackman

This table visualises the space of eBPF opcodes. It was generated by this hack

The *s represent opcodes that are exposed but not actually used, or used internally but not exposed

Note that there are gaps, but no empty columns.

There's also a prettier version here

|  0x00           |  0x01           |  0x02           |  0x03           |  0x04           |  0x05           |  0x06           |  0x07           |

bjackman

Failed to load bpf_testmod.ko into the kernel: -8
WARNING! Selftests relying on bpf_testmod.ko will be skipped.
libbpf: load bpf program failed: Permission denied
libbpf: -- BEGIN DUMP LOG ---
libbpf: 
R1 type=ctx expected=fp
; int BPF_PROG(exec, struct linux_binprm *bprm) {
0: (79) r1 = *(u64 *)(r1 +0)
func 'bpf_lsm_bprm_committed_creds' arg0 has btf_id 1589 type STRUCT 'linux_binprm'
1: (7b) *(u64 *)(r10 -24) = r1

bjackman

KERNEL_IMG=~/sources/linux/linux/arch/x86/boot/bzImage

kvm \
    -kernel $KERNEL_IMG \
    -smp $(nproc) \
    -m 2G \
    -nographic \
    -fsdev local,security_model=none,id=fsdev-root,path=/,readonly \
    -device virtio-9p-pci,id=fs-root,fsdev=fsdev-root,mount_tag=/dev/root \
    -serial mon:stdio \

bjackman

Keybase proof

I hereby claim:

• I am bjackman on github.
• I am bjackman (https://keybase.io/bjackman) on keybase.
• I have a public key whose fingerprint is 7155 7AF5 C862 3700 3DDD FD91 9F44 D1EE 6B2C BFB8

To claim this, I am signing this object:

bjackman

#/bin/bash
set -eu

# In a kernel repo, this finds all the tip:sched commits Linus has merged,
# with a header for each of the merge commits that merged them.
# Got it?

# This helper takes a merge commit, then finds the point at which the merged
# branches diverged, and gives you all the commits between that point and the
# second parent of the merge commit. What? OK..

bjackman

bjackman

Brendan's curry recipe

Chop an onion, a red pepper and half a butternut squash (can replace with sweet potato if needed).

Chop & fry an onion until it's nice and soft, then add chopped & crushed garlic (you cannot really have too much garlic here) and fry a little while longer just until you can smell the garlic has infused into the oil a bit. If you're using fresh chilli, put it in now (chopped).