Alfred Rossi

Computer scientist and information privacy geek. Distinguished Engineer and Scientist @Immuta. Former Senior Lecturer @OhioState. My views are my own.

[Alfred Rossi @fredRossi]

@DanRosiak How is this so, so... accurate? and not just the impression

[Alfred Rossi @fredRossi]

Not only is this a 🔥 impression of Zizek, it's the first time I understand Hegel

[Daniel Rosiak @DanRosiak]

No, but listen, you know this "put the fries in the bag, Terence Tao"'--*sniff, sniff*--already the usual replies concede too much. "If Tao is serving fries, YOU will be in the lithium mines." My God! This is our defense of human dignity? Don’t worry, the correct people will get the terrible jobs!

*Pulls at shirt* You see, everything is up for radical transformation, human intelligence, consciousness, and so on and so on--except that somebody must still have a shitty afternoon so I can enjoy my lunch.

But to say "these people are envious", this is too easy. It allows us, "the educated ones," our own little fantasy: we are disliked only because we are so wonderful.

You know, the more interesting thing is this *sniff* peculiar identification with the machine. When the mathematician discovers something, apparently this was HIS achievement, his privilege, his little secret. When the machine discovers something, suddenly it's "Look what WE can do!" The achievement has become collective precisely at the moment when no human being can claim credit.

See how this "we" functions. For the achievement, I identify with the machine. For the consequences, I identify YOU with the human. "We have surpassed you." Who are we? Well, myself and the thing that has also surpassed me.

There is something almost touching here, really. To escape the humiliation of somebody absorbed in something opaque to you, you appeal to something which knows incomparably more than either of you. And this is supposed to settle the matter in YOUR favor.

You know the old example of canned laughter. Here we have a similar arrangement. The machine achieves something on my behalf. The mathematician suffers the loss of human significance on my behalf. Somebody to be brilliant for me and somebody to be obsolete for me, without me having to be either, so I can remain as I was.

But *pulls on shirt* there is this little difficulty that hides the essential thing: you still need a response from Tao! A correct proof, this Lean slop and so on, is not enough. You need him to certify his own defeat. You need him to say "By god, this is extraordinary! Yes, this is correct, but also this is interesting." Which means--and here comes Hegel--the person you are reducing to an obedient instrument must remain more than an obedient instrument. You need recognition from someone whose authority you are abolishing.

"Your so-called expertise is worthless. Now tell me, in your expert opinion, that I, qua machine representative, was right."

*Touches nose* But I would go a step further. What does this math person actually do to provoke you? In the fantasy, I mean. He need not insult you. He can be generous, mild-mannered, whatever. Something remains irritating: there is something over there which occupies him, which matters to him, and your opinion does not settle what it is worth. Perhaps he is not even looking down on you. This is the really intolerable possibility.

This, you see, is closer to the Lacanian problem of the Other's desire. Not simply "What does he have that I don't?" but "What the hell is going on with him?" Perhaps the answer is: he is thinking about something else.

The fries solve this beautifully. Now you know what you are for him. He needs the money. Your presence creates an obligation.

And this, at last, also explains why the machine can be less threatening than the mathematician. The machine's intelligence may exceed yours unimaginably, but you imagine it arrives in response to your prompt. You can complain about the tone. You have the privileges of an angry customer and so on and so on. The human has this irritating possibility of being interested in something you did not request and cannot order. And please, this includes the person already serving the fries!

*Pulls at shirt* I am almost tempted to say: the dream of unlimited intelligence conceals just this: a the wish that nobody should be doing anything you cannot immediately understand as a service.

[Alfred Rossi @fredRossi]

@alz_zyd_ This is like saying everyone who studied music essentially had a fallback career of starting a band and becoming famous, but now that's much harder due to suno.

[Alfred Rossi @fredRossi]

@thegautamkamath @TheSalonML The took one look and said “damn… that’s one hot encoding”

[Alfred Rossi @fredRossi]

@bcantrill Would also be a hit among lawyers

[Alfred Rossi @fredRossi]

@ionathanch @jckarter Surprised to see entries for n and n-1 for square n.

[Alfred Rossi @fredRossi]

@ionathanch @jckarter What site? Must see

[Alfred Rossi @fredRossi]

@jeremyjkun x seems to promise it references a set that can accept strings — which is not the case here, no?

[KF @d0tslash]

Good news! Remember that robot dog you saw with a gun!? It was made by @UnitreeRobotics. Seems all you need to dump it in the dirt is @flipper_net. The PDB has a 433mhz backdoor. No need for @gnuradio! https://t.co/xjDepcGYe2 cc/ @UnitreeRobot007 @IrvingRobotics @shunweicapital

[Alfred Rossi @fredRossi]

@currying “I am more of an elliptical man, myself”

[Alfred Rossi @fredRossi]

@GregBodwin Goodness, in keeping with the theme, it now seems natural to refer to the collection as a “bundle”. It’s hopeless!

[Alfred Rossi @fredRossi]

@GregBodwin Hmm… Disconnecting a tree yields multiple trees makes more sense when trees have no roots. We must be biased to think of trees as rooted :)

[Alfred Rossi @fredRossi]

@Pooyahat @AirCanada You know… not saying this would go anywhere, but it really doesn’t seem unreasonable to me to submit a reasonable invoice for it.

[Matthew Green @matthew_d_green]

Well, the human race had a good run.

[Alfred Rossi @fredRossi]

@SchmiegSophie @durumcrustulum Took a minute for it to register

[Alfred Rossi @fredRossi]

@jeremyjkun Composition with other techniques is helpful here. For example, by applying e.g. a (locally) differentially private technique such as randomized response to sensitive values.

[Alfred Rossi @fredRossi]

@jeremyjkun There are many foot-guns – and former industry around fixing them – generally, these are characterized by wanting the ability to deny the implications of cohort membership (e.g. data indicates all cohort members have, say, history of substance abuse).

[Alfred Rossi @fredRossi]

@jeremyjkun Healthcare. There is good alignment between k-Anonymity and HIPAA compliance, likely due to Sweeney's work influencing the creation of the HIPAA Privacy Rule. For an example of recent public use, see e.g. https://t.co/712aBOvbYN.

[Alfred Rossi @fredRossi]

@jeremyjkun Strictly speaking, k-Anonymity is a property. What is the production concern? There are many routes — eg clustering with min capacity constraints or recursive partitioning where split sides must have k records. Sketching/streaming help. One may also have data quality objectives.

[Alfred Rossi @fredRossi]

@jeremyjkun k-Anon does not offer protection against inference attacks, and (global) DP does not allow publication of row-level data

[Alfred Rossi @fredRossi]

@jeremyjkun Different models. Differential privacy ensures that, at most, c*epsilon bits of information are inferable about any input from the output by a Bayes optimal adversary. k-anon limits the prob of success of an attacker that tries to guess which record belongs to a target individual