Uppsala university recently published this Festschrift that lists all newly installed professors. As cover they chose an image that made me stop short: a single male surrounded by a flock of females. Not exactly what one would expect in usually quite gender-aware Swedish academia. It gets worse once you read the description that enlightens us that there is indeed only one professor in the picture, the man. And that the others are a "group of women from the Orient". Oh, dear!

However, I think there is a way to read all this sympathetically. The caption tells us further that the chaired professorship held by the man in the image is about semitic languages, which explains the connection to "oriental women" shortly after the second world war. Also, this chair is one of the positions newly filled by a women included in the booklet. So, benevolently, the message of the cover image can be read as "Look at how things were a few decades ago, and look inside for how much more equal they are today."

I remember it blew my mind a little in high-school, that loudspeakers and microphones are the same thing, in principle. A membrane with a magnet and a coil that you either use to drive or to measure.

It should therefore maybe not come as a surprise that the headphones that you plug into your computer can be used to spy on you.

I disabled some of my social media accounts and want to use this blog some more instead. To that end it was about time to stream-line my pusblishing process here, lowering the mental threshold. After writing a new entry, I would up to now build the site locally and then sync the output to the server. The commit to the git-repository was optional.

Now, I commit and push with git, directly to the server which updates the repo, rebuilds and syncs locally to the place where the webserver expects its files. There are many ways people do this, the following is what I found the simplest for now.

Have a git repository on the server that you push into. Let this be a standard repo, not a bare one. Set the option git config --local receive.denyCurrentBranch updateInstead inside of it. This will update the current branch working files instead of refusing to receive the push. Since we never edit files here, the tree will always be clean, so it can be updated.

Then add a script at .git/hooks/post-receive which is a hook that gets executed after the repository received the push. Mine looks like this:

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#!/bin/sh
cd ..
pelican -q -s publishconf.py && rsync -a output/* ../tmy.se

This builds the static html files with Pelican and then syncs them to the place where the webserver expects them.One could point the webserver directly to output/, in principle. But the built process takes half a minute for me during which the main index file is missing and the website would be offline.

Also note the cd .. in the script above, which is there because the working directory that the scripts gets run in seems to be the .git/ subdirectory. This is contrary to the git docs which claim that hooks get started in the root directory for non-bare repos.

I was in Munich the other week.

You certainly have heard of the term mansplaining, meaning to condescendingly explain something while falsely assuming the explainee is ignorant of the subject matter; typically executed by a male on a female.

While this certainly exists and is often pointed out rightfully (and hilariously), there is a related aspect that I think should not be confused with mansplaining. Remember this old XKDC:

Combined it with the attitude that we all know very little, that it is fun to learn new things and that there is no prestige involved in knowing more or less, we can easily find ourselves "involuntarily mansplaining". This situation, even if it lacks the misjudgment of expertise and the condescension, can be perceived as mansplaining.

Should it? Maybe. After all, in this case, the explainer has misconceved not the knowledge of the explainee, but the mind set and presence of the aforementioned attitude, resulting in a failure of human interaction. On the other hand, we might not want to stifle open exchange of ideas too much by being afraid of appearing mansplaining.

I live 20km outside of town, in a small cottage in the forest which means that I usually take the car to work. But I bought a decent new bike last year to make my commute cheaper and greener, so I want to start using it more than it turned out last year.

To get used to the distance, I don't want to take both trips by bike the same day. This is easily done by bringing the bike to work by car one morning, biking home after work, biking back to work the morning after and then taking the car and bike back home.

But this involves a surprising amout of logistics, as I experienced the other day. Apart from the bike itself, I had to pack both the biking clothes and a full set of fresh work clothes, the bike, helmet, plus towel and shower gear. The actual biking then felt like less of a challenge than not forgetting a crucial element in the preparations. But this is just a matter of practice and routine, so there will be more trips like this.

A quick follow-up on the previous post, here are a few links to satisfy your thirst for more input about AI and related topics.

MIRI's blog seems to do a good job at collecting updates.

This recent conference has put up PDFs of several presentations.

Eliezer Yudkowsky is on Facebook and Twitter, so is Demis Hassabis from DeepMind.

I also got Kurzweil's famous book The Singularity Is Near and will read it soon. Other's have convinced me that his thinking probably is way too optimistic, in the sense that while his predictions may be possible, they are not the default outcome. But it is certainly a worthwhile read anyway.

The Second Machine Age by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee made it onto my reading list as well.

The Foom debate is often referred to. I however cannot understand how some claim that Hanson "won" with his arguments against a fast take-off.

Nick Bostrom's latest paper is here (PDF) and his recent talk Safety Issues in Advanced AI is basically an updated version of his "classic" talk at Google.

Also very much worth to watch is Demis Hassabis - The Future of Artificial Intelligence.

Oh, and if you don't know Yudkowsky's short Three Worlds Collide yet, go and read it - it's deep and funny!

What strikes me in of all this is how young the whole field is. Even five or ten years ago, the main concepts and jargon that seem to make quite a bit of sense once you get them explained to you, were not in place at all.

I've recently been reading Nick Bostrom's book Superintelligence and must admit it stuck with me. It may well seem a tad abstract to us who are new to thinking about such matters, but highly stimulating and thought-provoking.

The main point is driven home thoroughly: We should be talking more about artificial intelligence! Because its arrival might be just around the corner and it has the potential to mark a crossroads for our future, the choices being really really bad or really really fantastically good.

If you havn't read them yet, these two blog posts by Wait But Why are probably the best introdution: Part 1, Part 2.

I am currently half-way through Olle Häggström's Here Be Dragons which covers related but broader toptics of near-future technologies.

It will soon be time to replace my current laptop, a three year old Thinkpad X230; it probably is my fifth X-series over the years. They deservedly had a good reputation for build quality, and to run Linux.

However, I find it unlikey that my next machine will be another Thinkpad. Partly because of Lenovo's Superfish and BIOS Crapware debacles, partly because their latest machines are just not as good anymore. (For example I don't quite like the new-style keyboard of the X230 and onward, plus it broke down twice and needed the mainboard replaced).

Criteria for a new laptop would be the following:

• fan-less
• non-glossy screen, ~ 12-13"
• digital video-out
• good keyboard, Swedish
• 16GB RAM
• decent size SSD
• track-point
• runs Linux without too much hassle.

Things like CPU-power, battery-life, weight and screen resolution are less important. Nevertheless, I am not aware of a machine that fulfills the above. The Dell XPS 13 seems to come close, but it still has a fan and no track-point. A Macbook Air is out of the question.

If you have a suggestion, let me know!