The Uselessness of Useful Knowledge
quantamagazine.org
The Uselessness of Useful Knowledge
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Re: The Uselessness of Useful Knowledge
#2tl;dr, but it reminded me of the "big" news yesterday that via ML you can guess bank ATM codes from shielded hand movements. Reading down, it turned out you could guess 30% after the 3 try limit imposed by the machines. Not terrible, but completely impractical unless you steal a LOT of bank cards.
Re: The Uselessness of Useful Knowledge
#3tl;dr, but it reminded me of the "big" news yesterday that via ML you can guess bank ATM codes from shielded hand movements. Reading down, it turned out you could guess 30% after the 3 try limit imposed by the machines. Not terrible, but completely impractical unless you steal a LOT of bank cards.
I used an AI summarizer to summarize it for you... is this useful?!
Could they be the modern equivalent of ancient alchemists? And would it be such a bad thing if they turned our lives into gold-plated jumble? Yann LeCun is co-recipient of the 2018 Turing Award for his work on neural networks. He argues that AI research is just a necessary adolescent phase characterized by trial and error, confusion, overconfidence and a lack of overall understanding. We have nothing to fear and much to gain from embracing this approach.
Alchemy is considered to have been a useful precursor to modern chemistry, more proto-science than hocus-pocus. We could enter a golden age of modern-day alchemy, in the best sense of the word, but we should never forget cautionary lessons of history.
Re: The Uselessness of Useful Knowledge
#4One skeptical way of looking at it is that the the explosion of "data science" and ML is basically comp sci running into modeling space in a way it never had before, and getting into territory that it wasn't equipped to handle.
It wasn't that long ago that there were posts on here about statisticians giving conference keynotes about how data science was basically old wine in new bottles, and were being ridiculed for being behind the times, etc.
Now we see that basically no one actually knows what's going on. My guess is when the dust settles a lot of things will be explained, but it won't be as different from established statistical and information theory as some would make it out to be. That is, some of this is new discovery and figuring out new territory, and some of it is neglecting basics that have been there all along.
My guess is the next phase of this is basically comp sci ML research rediscovering mathematical statistics and information theory.
Re: The Uselessness of Useful Knowledge
#5tl;dr, but it reminded me of the "big" news yesterday that via ML you can guess bank ATM codes from shielded hand movements. Reading down, it turned out you could guess 30% after the 3 try limit imposed by the machines. Not terrible, but completely impractical unless you steal a LOT of bank cards.
> completely impractical unless you steal a LOT of bank cards.
Like... 3 or 4? What's that, two average wallets?
(Leaving aside the question of whether scamming a few hundred dollars out of someone's debit account is practical in any sense compared with all the other ways you could legally make way more money with the same skillset, of course.)
Re: The Uselessness of Useful Knowledge
#6tl;dr, but it reminded me of the "big" news yesterday that via ML you can guess bank ATM codes from shielded hand movements. Reading down, it turned out you could guess 30% after the 3 try limit imposed by the machines. Not terrible, but completely impractical unless you steal a LOT of bank cards.
> completely impractical unless you steal a LOT of bank cards. Like... 3 or 4? What's that, two average wallets? (Leaving aside the question of whether scamming a few hundred dollars out of someone's debit account is practical in any sense compared with all the other ways you could legally make way more money with the same skillset, of course.)
Yeah I was wondering, too. 30%, i.e. 1/3, success rate per card seems incredibly good, actually? But possibly I just completely misread what "30% after the 3 try limit imposed by the machines" means?
Re: The Uselessness of Useful Knowledge
#7tl;dr, but it reminded me of the "big" news yesterday that via ML you can guess bank ATM codes from shielded hand movements. Reading down, it turned out you could guess 30% after the 3 try limit imposed by the machines. Not terrible, but completely impractical unless you steal a LOT of bank cards.
I feel like you’d start building up the expertise to steal cards & use ML to guess pin codes only to realize you could just mug someone after the ATM withdrawal.
Re: The Uselessness of Useful Knowledge
#8One skeptical way of looking at it is that the the explosion of "data science" and ML is basically comp sci running into modeling space in a way it never had before, and getting into territory that it wasn't equipped to handle. It wasn't that long ago that there were posts on here about statisticians giving conference keynotes about how data science was basically old wine in new bottles, and were being ridiculed for…
Bingo! Who remembers Symbolics and their lisp machine? Moore's law, not theoretical advancement, is the real story.
Re: The Uselessness of Useful Knowledge
#9tl;dr, but it reminded me of the "big" news yesterday that via ML you can guess bank ATM codes from shielded hand movements. Reading down, it turned out you could guess 30% after the 3 try limit imposed by the machines. Not terrible, but completely impractical unless you steal a LOT of bank cards.
I feel like you’d start building up the expertise to steal cards & use ML to guess pin codes only to realize you could just mug someone after the ATM withdrawal.
I think the potential use case here is to enhance the utility of and likelihood of success using a skimmer with a built-in camera, with ML increasing the chances of deducing PINs that would otherwise fallback to bruteforcing, which is statistically unlikely compared to 30% success rate with this ML method. Nothing to scoff at, and good to know for blue teams.
Re: The Uselessness of Useful Knowledge
#10tl;dr, but it reminded me of the "big" news yesterday that via ML you can guess bank ATM codes from shielded hand movements. Reading down, it turned out you could guess 30% after the 3 try limit imposed by the machines. Not terrible, but completely impractical unless you steal a LOT of bank cards.
> completely impractical unless you steal a LOT of bank cards. Like... 3 or 4? What's that, two average wallets? (Leaving aside the question of whether scamming a few hundred dollars out of someone's debit account is practical in any sense compared with all the other ways you could legally make way more money with the same skillset, of course.)
But you first have to observe them using the card… so 5 cards implies mugging 5 people, which is quite different from stealing wallets from random targets, easiest first.