Chatbots(Generative AI) and my thoughts

     Long before chatbots, we had search bars. You would type in keywords and expect to be thrown links across your way. And the expectation is; one of those links would provide an answer to your worldly concerns. With page rank, search history and GPS location, it became possible for search engines to provide quality links to quench your thirst. With all this information, search engines had to do all the backend heavy lifting to correlate all the above and guess with high accuracy about what exactly are you searching for. There is always a plausible deniability, since this is all conjecture up to this point.

    Now comes Chatbots powered by Generative AI(GenAI). A conversational assistant that is to replace an adept human on the other end of the pipe. Don't get me wrong. Chatbots have been there since search engine, but our interaction with these bots never met our expectation. (i,e) typing in a our thoughts and expecting a coherent answer, not a bunch of coagulated gibberish. The information to generate a good answer has always been there and it has been growing at a pace outrunning disk capacities to index and store them. With Large Language Models(LLMs) to predict text and Transformer architecture to provide better context, we have reached a pivotal moment to generate text spewed by Chatbots that is almost human.

    With ChatGPT, Bard and many others, it is prophesied to become the replacement for search bar. (i,e) you type in your ask and you get answers to read, instead of links to peruse. Eg: If you type in "plan my dinner", GenAI would give you a list of things to consider for your dinner like recipe, time, number of people to cook for and stuff like that... instead of just giving you links to other blog posts.

    IIUC, one of the reasons that Google did not release this type of functionality before(even though they authored the research paper on Transformers) is to not to eat their own lunch. The shear amount of processing power needed to generate this type of content is way more than just spitting out relevant links. So the profit per query goes down comparatively(This highlights the need for Antitrust and competition).

    Search terms by themselves do not mean much unless you can tie that to your search history providing a pattern, thereby helping the algorithm to provide better links that suit your need. Search engines would allow information collected from User 1 to be used for User 2 also, if the search terms and patterns are similar. Eg: If you type in "stream oscars for free" and which ever link that you clicked finally and stopped your search, would be first link to pop in someone else's answer, if they use similar search terms.

    With GenAI and Chatbots, you type in exactly what you want rather than search terms related to your thoughts. Now this gives companies like OpenAI and Google your exact thoughts compared to conjecture with search terms and history. IMO, this reveals far more information(intention) about the user, compared to earlier search bar. Chatbots used in therapy, dating apps are prone for mis-use by bad actors due to personal intimate details that we are prone to share in those conversations(hint: blackmail). More people tend to use Chatbots for above purposes, because of their prevalance and in many cases actually helpful. They are more prevalent now, since it is easy to have therapy Chatbots instances, rather than paying an actual human therapist(hint: High college tuition). If something is free to consume, then you the consumer are the product that is being sold.

    Plagiarism, hallucinations are few among many issues that plague GenAI. OpenAI and Google are working on these with attributions and grounding respectively, to mitigate these unintended consequences. Attribution only goes so far about fixing issues related to paid content. In a subscription economy, each time a content is used by a unique user, then it should result in revenue, compared to earlier one time purchase and use it however you want.

    In conclusion, LLM and Transformer architecture have opened up a million ways to help evolve our species to a bright future, but also opened a can of mutated worms that needs to be dealt with. But that is history repeating itself with the likes of Industrialization, Internet and Web 2.0. I consider Web 3.0 a small tribal evolution compared to Web 2.0, a revolution in the way we generate and share data(information).

WFH(Work From Home) and its unintended consequences

  With the COVID-19 pandemic, every job profile that can be accomplished remotely has got a de-facto approval to execute immediately on that.  Majority of the employees in tech companies fall into this category, excluding the techs that take care of data center and other essential services, to facilitate the rest to WFH. A consequence of both Shelter In Place(SIP) & Social distancing and still continue to run the business. At least in bay area, even before the county decided to issue SIP, CEO's foresaw the need to stop employees coming to office and congregating near water coolers for free coffee. Productivity amongst us has been really high, since we did not have to travel to work and avoid the hassle of traffic all together. Furthermore, the unrestricted freedom to use any wardrobe or remain oblivious to body odor, proved to be a game changer in the initial few weeks.

  Co-workers understood the impact of COVID-19 and its effects by keeping themselves abreast of all the latest news pushed to their myriad devices. The negative effects of SIP on the economy, but also how the disease itself, affects the vulnerable(old and underprivileged) unproportionately. Every worker felt like a warrior, called to battle and WFH was a way, to do our part to society with minimum effort, from the comfort of our sweat pants. As days rolled by and office hours blurred with all other hours, it does take a toll on your mind and body. Especially, if you do not take explicit measures to have a strict routine and stealing glances at your work laptop, while trying to spend time with family or getting a much required break from attending online meetings. Cos every discussion is a meeting or a constant barrage of instant slack notifications. I still miss the times(feels like eons ago) of getting ready for office and traveling back home after work. It was a chore earlier, but it also served a purpose of allowing my mind to wander away from work and get ready for my family and vice versa. It served as an undefined and translucent boundary that allowed my brain to compartmentalize the various aspects of my life.

  Yes, this is not the most critical problem faced by society, with millions of jobs lost(maybe forever) and millions more furloughed. But this is also a problem that needs to be discussed openly and not to be ignored, due to its lower stature in a stack ranked set of problems affecting this society.

  According to my opinion, one of the reason, why WFH has been productive for many and also team members have been able to be cope easily is due to: We have already worked with each other before and shared banter in a physically shared space. The camaraderie had already been built and we as social creatures try to maintain that social balance by being prompt and courteous, even though we might only see a name or a photo associated with each question or an answer in a text box. 

  Now, a lot of the companies are looking at WFH, or remote working as a possible permanent choice, to avoid dealing with COVID-19 social distancing protocols within office space. It's a hassle to provide a completely safe environment for employees, but social distancing goes against the grain of human need to mingle and share stories. We are good at curtailing our temptations, as long as we know, that we don't have to do it till end of time. A end date, always gives us motivation to achieve the goal, since we know that the stress is only for a short, definite span of time.

  When tech companies in silicon valley started the trend of open offices, to facilitate the free flow of ideas across its ranks, it had an tremendous downstream effect on other companies across the country, wanting to be hip and replicate the techie culture, so it may help them to replicate their profits also. Now with working remote being contemplated to be of a more permanent stature, its effects would be felt across the country.

  Personally, I feel that WFH would not be an hindrance, if the work involved mainly interacting with web forms and provide remote tech support following a cookie cutter template. If you want to build a closely knit team and build truly innovative products along with them, then you need a shared physical space to congregate ideas as well as ideate goals that improves a colleagues motivation. It's that exchange of ideas over impromptu tassels during coffee break that truly helps to build a team and products along with it. A innovative idea does not come to fruition unless we have a capable team to nurture that idea. I really wonder if that would happen, if all employees are mandated to work remotely. 

  Do you think, we could have another Google or Facebook with permanent WFH? I personally feel that companies will feel a drop in their teams productivity, as WFH continues. Let me be clear, it's not about meeting the set goals, but more about solving problems by thinking outside the box. Yes, few would flourish in this environment, but for the majority that makes the company, its effects are yet to be seen.

  Maybe a blog post after a year on this topic would shed some light on WFH and its unintended consequences.

Netflix and The Witcher

    If you had not been living under a rock, you would have either heard about or watched the latest big budget series from Netflix to capitalize on the legend, Geralt of Rivia. If you still need a clue, it's called "The Witcher", an adaptation from the book and not the game. It's a lore filled with monsters and magic to tickle your dark fantasies and the traditional battle between good and evil. It was trumpeted to fill the void left by GoT from HBO, but fell way short of its expectation from my humble opinion. That is my thought and let me break it down, as I try to understand it myself.

    Readers be warned... there be spoilers ahead.

• The timelines of the story were not in sequence and they were intentional. But as your brain was trying to make sense of it, you were always pushed to get to the end of the story. The push was there to make sense of the timeline, rather than taking the time to savor the scenery. Having all the episodes readily available, did not help in reducing that friction.
• The witches and sorcerers looked manufactured and rigid. Seemed like their clothing did not allow them to move elegantly and be part of the environment. It was more like rocks tumbling, instead of water streaming, to fill the bowl.
• Visualizations and the building architecture wanted you to be part of the folklore, but the actors stood in your way as a glaring reminder, that this isn't real. To be fair, this was for few scenes only, but they stuck onto my memory far better than the good ones.
• Some of the scenes were confusing and you were led to, just push it under the rug. I still did not understand, why the djinn attacked the bard? All I know is that, djinn are supposed to give you three wishes and the Witcher seemed to be the benefactor. The bard was just a segue for the Witcher to meet Yennefer. But still, why did it attack the bard?

    Now, now, not all of it was dreary, as I portray it to be. Bad ones always seem to be highlighted.

• I did love the assassination attempt and the epic failure of Yennefer to save the baby
• The first fight scene between Renfri and Geralt was riveting... with its epic moves

    Whom were the targeted audience of this series, the gamers, the readers of the book or noobs that just wanted to watch a fantasy series? I consider myself in the last category and my observations are from that view point.

    I am pretty sure that Netflix has the data about, how many viewers just kept forwarding scenes to the end. That should provide them a good feedback of which scenes were really riveting compared to few, that acted as fillers for the story.

If you had seen the series... let me know your thoughts on the comments section.

Cloud and security

    If you have not been living under a rock recently, you would have read about the Capital One hack, its relationship to the use of cloud technology and how its motivating people to ask the wrong questions. You can brush up on the details of the hack/breach in this post.

Application, software & service would be used interchangeably in this post.

    These kind of events are becoming a daily affair, mainly due to a simple reason; ease in which, a software/service can be deployed onto the cloud and DevOps responsible for the same, don't seem to understand all the gears and knobs (that could be modified) that are set to defaults, to get the service up and running in a infinitesimal short time. Security is not a bold line that differentiates the black, from the white. It's a nebulous grey area and needs to be understood, from each application 's requirements and its intended goal. Allowing port 80 for all IPs to a web server is an intended goal to serve traffic for the outside world, but that is not the same configuration, if it's meant to serve traffic only to the internal employees of the company. But the template to deploy that web server is the same for both the cases. 

    In pre-historic times, it would have been the responsibility of the administrator to understand these requirements to enforce and program these rules. But with Cloud Native, the role of an administrator has been merged with a developer to handle the new set of primitives, set forth by the trending agility of the infrastructure. 

    The aim of a developer is to develop and deploy a service, to help his company meets its financial goal. There are check lists to be followed, before deploying a service, but does it encompass all the backdoors, that come along with implementing new ideas? Does every developer follow it? When the aim is to develop and deploy ASAP, its human tendency to take short cuts; templates & default values support these shortcuts with unintended consequences. A big chunk of the DevOps responsibility is about operations, to maintain the uptime of deployed solution.

    All it took was a simple misconfiguration of the service to flood an, otherwise iron fortress. Auditing tools like Qualys or container deployment platforms like CCP (Cisco Container Platform), helps you with tools to identify weakness in the deployed solution. But it still takes manual intervention to review the results, apart from flagging the obvious holes. Solutions like Istio provide a mechanism to automate the traffic security that flows between the containers of a Micro services architecture, but they can only do so much(based on configuration). 

    The missing link is to have a security review of the solution, as part of the deployment process. and not just rely on the supporting tools. Once you have a baseline and that constitutes the initial heavy lifting, the subsequent iterations would have to concentrate only on the delta. Security is not a destination, it's a goal that is alive, as along as the solution is deployed.

    

AI and the invented conundrum

Recently I read this article The Metamorphosis that talks about AI (Artificial Intelligence), its positive & negative impact on our society(which is already in motion), as well as the invented social conundrums that goes along with it.

AI has been in use for the past few decades in various forms. Either it's voice recognition on a phone to guide you through a pre-fabricated menu or auto correction on your preferred word processor. It started with automating mundane, repetitive tasks to free up the human intelligence to tasks that require additional attention or were difficult to automate. Human touch was required to tasks, that were either prone to errors on automation or the return on investment (ROI) was not sufficient enough to garner attention. It seemed that the AI's requirement of costly processing power was not able to compete with cheap Human brain power.

In the beginning of this decade, few pieces of the AI puzzle started to fall in its place and that propelled  its adoption.

• Cheap CPU cycles
• Cheap Storage
• Cheap Data 

With the advent of Social media, the explosive power of search and moving all our daily activities to a digital platform; they became the source of fire hose of data, that could be channeled and collected on flexible cloud infrastructure with cheap CPU and Storage. This formed the underlying basis of big data and the analysis of this data for patterns and anomalies led to breakthrough in solving various problems. This includes and not limited to targeted advertisements, credit card fraud, predicting stock sentiments and so forth.

Humans as a species have always tried to evolve forward, either through discovery or by invention. But as apart of that process, there has been collateral damage in the wake of progress. When the Spaniards landed at Central America, they decimated the local population with their diseases, but the world was introduced to this new continent along with its abundance of natural resources and culture.

With AI, progress would be made in various fields(insurance, medicine) and AI systems would be allowed to make decisions, that would affect human lives. The decision could be as simple as; approving an application for health insurance considering the various aspects of the applicant, age, or propensity of the applicant to fall sick often. Or a decision to prescribe a life saving drug(limited resource), considering the propensity of the applicant to be a drug abuser or a negative impact to society. 

Humans already have similar decisions on things like organ transplant, but we are at peace with this decision, since we know it was an informed decision by a respectable quorum of doctors. Would we be fine with this,  if that decision was left to an AI. What if, there was a bug in the algorithm that skewed the decision making process. AI algorithms and the data fed to these algorithms are generated by humans and humans by nature are biased. Be it along lines of race, religion or sexual orientation, but implicit bias is an issue that would have to be dealt with. We deal with this, by explaining the process used to achieve the result. Would an AI be able to rationalize its decision making process in human terms?

The ethical veracity of these AI decisions needs to be dissected before we let these systems rule all aspects of our lives.

In conclusion, AI systems will open up a plethora of opportunities from driverless cars to mining meteors for minerals. It also opens up a pandora's box, along the lines of social inequality and racial injustice. As humans, we have to pay attention to details and correct the system as required in an unbiased manner to continue to evolve as an intelligent species.

A recurrent theme.

    Man made clocks reset and a celestial body on which we/life thrives, completes a rotation of its God, the Sun. A God that gives and takes life, plots and demands a spiral path with gravity, but remains completely oblivious to earth dweller's behavior and their incandescent scream for calmness and swift justice. Veering back to the main theme, we should revel in our successes and study our failures in retrospect, to identify how we have grown, stymied others and above all prepare ourselves for the next cycle.

    It's only the clock's that reset, but we carry all the accumulated baggage from the previous cycle. We as humans with a humongous memory, will never forget anything that either put us down or anything that is a cause for ridicule to others. The act is always replaced in priority, but never forgotten. It's in our innate nature to keep ourself occupied by others success/failure, than how else are we to say; we did better than last year(cycle)? It's only by comparison that we achieve this sweet joy or sour bitterness of the truth, that what we have done in the past year was either foolish, or one of the greatest effects that we will linger on, in our stories of yester years.

    It's our greed/laziness, an human quality to have it all, helped to propel us from stones to silicon. But greed is a good motivator, as long as it does NOT depend on destroying an other artifact for it's success, but rather replace it, cause it's just better.

    It's sad thought to think back and realize nothing pops up, to either learn from or revel in. We have just spent an entire year breathing, staying at the same level in the grand scale that we want measure our selves. Should we call ourselves a failure or just being content with what we have, or is it that, we have already achieved, what we had set out to achieve, as defined for us from the day we set out of our mother's womb?

    Maybe... it's booze that frees my mind to talk about all this fracas and maybe it's only pertinent to that line of thought. Fill up your cups and drink to the future, since that's the only path, that we have control off to a certain extent; everything else is more of a puzzle, that you try to understand and either use it to your advantage, or just ignore it and feel the loss of an opportunity.

    The archaic music, that filled my ear lobes complete, it's time for me to bid adieu to 2014 and welcome 2015, not with a wish that it brings in joy and success, but with a request that I, me not just standup to the challenges put forth, but mould 2015 to the way that I intend it to be, for me, my family and friends.

Happy 2015!!!

The days, before my nuptial.

            For Indians, marriage is as much a celebration for the couple, it's also an event to bring the extended family together, to mingle, muddle, fight and make promises to observe a more conducive relationship in future. Amongst all this chaos... my parents house, lights up like a christmas tree, every evening, broadcasting the event to all the neighbors. 

              The past few days have been hectic, with all the "stuff" that needs to bought, packaged and used appropriately for a wedding, following certain local/foreign customs. BTW, I really don't understand any of them or the need for all the fanfare. I assume, customs were made available previously, since there were no governing bodies like the judicial system to preside over the wedding and elders & certain order of events were the only witness to the marriage. Their council would be requested, in case of trouble with the marriage or anything related to that matter.

                I am called the "mapplai" in my local dialect, a phrase denoting the groom. So everyone goes "congrats mapplai". If it were any other sane person, I assume they would be extremely ecstatic, but I am more like "Hmm.... thanks. But I am already married to her". Well... I skipped the part of us getting our first marriage, civil marriage a few days earlier.

            Even though it's an arranged marriage, we have been in touch for sometime after the initial introduction by our parents. Our communication was sporadic at first, periodic later with alternate days, then daily and at present, a never ending banter. It seems that we have always been friends and this event culminates our friendship to the next strata. "Mine" changed to "ours", way before the official engagement took place and so, No jitters, no butterflies in the stomach, no second thoughts, but just stage fright. And I hope, even that will dissipate, once I get onto the stage, cause I am doing this for the first time and I am planning on doing it, for the only time(It's not if, but when she is reading this, for her: "Do you understand that?"). So this marriage, at least in our perspective, is for the family, to observe customs and we get to have a free ride in the ordered chaos, called the "The Indian Wedding".

             Today is the big day, when I take my wife, to be my lawfully wedded wife again. But this time, in front of all my relatives, inline with local customs.

On a funny note....

Source: Grabbed this online. I do not hold copyright of this image.

TL;DR - I am getting married on September 8th, 2013.

-Alphonse