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.