Someone has represented defense in depth as slices of Swiss cheese.
Why not a plate of pasta? Is your security strategy like spaghetti… far more adaptive than a hard cheese?
Ironically, this paper is about “machine learning”, which suggests to me anything capable of minimal learning would breeze right through Swiss cheese holes like an obstacle course. Bad model.
I know I say “food for thought” too often on this blog, yet here it really seems the most appropriate phrase ever.
An analysis of Mushashi (greatest swordsman in Japanese history) caught my eye:
He lived in a land obsessed by status and tradition, however, he appeared to ignore both. Usually duels observed ceremony and ritual, but Musashi only cared about the practical nature of fighting and strategy. His unkempt appearance only added to this.
That sounds remarkably like the many stories about General Grant, whose distaste for American obsessions with patronage and appearances was famously captured the day he casually accepted unconditional surrender from Robert “shiny shoes” Lee.
Grant… hunches over (the correct) small table in the shadowy background, his muddy boots offering another point of contrast to Lee’s polished footwear.
Lee infamously fought primarily for his family dynasty, putting loyalty to their slavery empire above state (Virginia) and certainly far above loyalty to Constitution or country (discarding his American citizenship and never regaining it).
His “shiny shoes” reputation (as depicted in the many images of his surrender) reflects his cushioned elitist life, devoid of hardship — a love of monarchy with violent aspiration to leave “unpleasant” realities to only servants and slaves.
Grant cared only about the practical nature of fighting and strategy, thus had an unkempt appearance. His boots were dusty as he had famously spent the day riding hard, checking on the welfare and needs of his soldiers.
Every so often I have an image of a New Yorker cartoon pop into my mind. If I had the time to draw, this is one I would have sketched after breakfast today:
A robber leaving the vault with pockets stuffed with cash says on the way out, past police pointing guns at him, “This is the future, I’m reinventing banking”.
This cartoon in fact has many applications, not just fraudulent futurism.
Far too many times I’ve had people try to tell me that relativism makes it impossible to criticize crimes in the past.
Washington intentionally violated laws of his day that abolished slavery, other men in that day set all their slaves free, and slaves in America already for over a hundred years prior had proven abolition sensible… yet far too many Americans ignore all these simple facts while peddling how Washington’s own views of his crimes are all that should matter then or now.
An absolutely beautiful new work of writing states much of what I’ve been saying in my presentations since at least 2016: driverless cars are being designed to promote a “hellscape” that nobody should want.
With autonomous vehicles it’s both: It can’t work, but the companies will create problems because they’ll pursue it anyway. If a surgeon does invasive surgery and it doesn’t work, he’s going to do a lot of harm to your body without curing you. The destruction of pre-automobile cities like St. Louis or Cincinnati to create space for cars didn’t mean that car dependency ever met its promises — but it did mean that the belief that it could was profoundly destructive.
Waymo likes to claim that autonomous vehicles are working right now. The reason it works is that there is a hellscape that these things have to go through, called Chandler, Arizona. Density is too low for anything other than driving to work well, every residential street is too wide, the non-residential roads are all multilane arterials with turning lanes, and every destination is surrounded by a vast parking lot. If that’s what you have to create for autonomous vehicles to work, it’s a Pyrrhic victory. It’s not worth it.
It works because there is a hellscape. Couldn’t have said it any better.
In other words, if someone builds technology that can only be successful on the moon, don’t be surprised when they try to trick you into leaving your colorful alive world and going to a gray lifeless surface of the moon… so they can remain profitable regardless of your loss.
Jaywalking is a racist fantasy crime that was fabricated by car companies, for another angle on this same problem.
The new book is called “Autonorama: The Illusory Promise of High-Tech Driving” and it’s obvious it was written by a historian.
Cigarettes provide a historical lesson. When the Surgeon General’s report came out in 1964, the discussion the tobacco companies wanted to have was, “How do we make cigarettes safe?” That was getting the problem wrong. The real problem was, “How we can free ourselves from cigarettes?” […] It’s freeing ourselves from a world where if you don’t have a car you’re doomed, because you can’t get to work. The accommodation of car dependency is the perpetuation of car dependency.
Boom.
As I’ve been saying through every channel I can, history tells us that driverless cars will kill more people not less. They will cause more fatalities and do far more harms, not less. This is a function of centrally-planned and controlled decisions about human-life that values it less and less (e.g. jaywalking history) while fraudulently claiming to care more than anything before.
And so far my early predictions from five years ago have been sadly accurate.
Where does this go? Driverless will bring a “hellscape” where “…motordom has successfully prevented Americans from [freedom of choice]…”.