New home for my videos: video.infosec.exchange

Huge thanks to Micah Scott for hosting my videos on diode.zone until recently.

My videos are moving to video.infosec.exchange/a/andybalaam – please update all your feeds. (Thanks to Jerry Bell for running that – please donate!)

You can follow this blog for an “always” reliable source of truth for my stuff.

Following me on Mastodon at @andybalaam@mastodon.social is likely to be pretty reliable too.

I will remove the live recordings from diode.zone quite soon, to free up space. I will leave the lectures up there for as long as possible, but they may go away at any time.

Why I won’t link to AI resources

I received a very kind email today from someone who had found my page Resources for year 6 teachers on coding and programming helpful, and wanted to suggest another link for me to add, about AI resources.

I’m sure it was a helpful and useful link, but I didn’t feel able to add it. Here’s the email I wrote explaining why:

Hi,

Thank you for your email, and I’m really glad you found the resources on my web site helpful.

I’m very sceptical about AI, and so cautious about recommending resources about it. Of course, I think it’s important for students to learn about the techniques involved and the potential benefits and harms it can have for our society, but before I could link to resources I would need to do lots of research to be sure I could stand behind what was being said.

If you are surprised to hear I feel quite negatively about AI, my concerns fall in three different areas:

  • taking other people’s work and passing it off as your own – systems like ChatGPT and DALL-E consume vast amounts of copyrighted material and produce output that is derived from it without any reward for the people who created it.
  • incorrect results, dangerous behaviour and bias – many companies are promoting AI assistants and even AI “friends”, making bold statements about their reliability, despite numerous example of bots being “tricked” into saying dangerous things (e.g. promoting suicide) or simply acting in biased ways (e.g. Amazon’s recruiting AI that was biased against women). Machine learning models are characterised by the fact that we don’t know how they work, so we can’t make any supportable claims about how they will behave.
  • environmental impact – training these models takes vast amounts of energy and water. These costs are currently being hidden by the huge amount of money being invested in the hope that there will be a great return in terms of value. I don’t think much value has been generated so far…

Of course, I believe we will eventually integrate AI into our society, and hopefully in a responsible way (although I have my doubts) but right now I see it as mostly a massive hype cycle, like cryptocurrency and “the cloud” before it.

I’m sorry I can’t provide links to back up my arguments, but I am suffering from the same problem: I don’t have time to check my sources properly so I can be sure I’m sending you reliable information. I do encourage you to research further!

So, apologies for not being able to help (and for writing you an essay!) but I can’t add the link you so kindly suggested.

Good luck in your project,

Andy

Rust 101 – 27: Exercises for module C (q2)

Implementing a simplified form of Mutex.

Series: Language basics, More syntax, Traits and generics, Building applications, Concurrency and parallelism, Trait objects, Async

This section (Concurrency and parallelism): 24: Parallelism, 25: Threads, 26: Exercise C1, 27: Exercise C2

Links:

The course materials for this series are developed by tweede golf. You can find more information at github.com/tweedegolf/101-rs and you can sponsor the work at github.com/sponsors/tweedegolf. They are released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 International license.

This series of videos is copyright 2024 Andy Balaam and the tweede golf contributors and is released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Rust 101 – 26: Exercises for module C (q1)

Searching across multiple documents in parallel with Rayon.

Series: Language basics, More syntax, Traits and generics, Building applications, Concurrency and parallelism, Trait objects, Async

This section (Concurrency and parallelism): 24: Parallelism, 25: Threads, 26: Exercise C1, 27: Exercise C2

Links:

The course materials for this series are developed by tweede golf. You can find more information at github.com/tweedegolf/101-rs and you can sponsor the work at github.com/sponsors/tweedegolf. They are released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 International license.

This series of videos is copyright 2024 Andy Balaam and the tweede golf contributors and is released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Choosing who to vote for in the 2024 UK General Election

Update: I just discussed this with my son and I really want to emphasise:

It does make a difference who is in power.

The previous Labour government significantly improved primary education and many other public services. Don’t lose hope!

Here are the criteria I will use to select which party to vote for in the 2024 UK General Election.

Competence

I will be voting against the Conservative party because it has comprehensively proven itself to be incompetent at managing both the economy and public services.

Ideological blindness

I will be voting against the Conservative party because its policies have been driven by blind ideology (e.g. the Truss economic disaster) and/or the perceived prejudices of their core voters (e.g. the “ship them off to Rwanda” immigration policy).

Public services

I will be voting for a party that I believe is committed to improving our public services, especially the NHS, education and prisons. This will involve channelling funds when available, but also good-faith work to change working practices and improve working conditions and outcomes for patients, pupils and prisoners.

For bonus points I’d like to see water companies and rail services gradually moved into public control. Transport For London offers an excellent model for public/private partnership in rail. Water is a total mess so I’m looking for a party that is willing to take ownership for fixing the problems with water and sewage management.

Climate

I will be voting for a party that I believe is willing to invest optimistically in the energy transition to realise the climate and economic benefits of making significant progress soon. I want regulation and financial incentives that punish polluting and carbon-emitting behaviour and invest in innovation.

Immigration

I will be voting for a party who I trust to speak truthfully about immigration: we benefit economically from immigration, and we rely on immigration in many areas, not least universities. We should manage economic migration, working to integrate people and working with local councils to provide housing and public services where people are arriving. Pretending we don’t need immigrants makes us unable to tackle the real strains large numbers of arrivals can put on a particular area.

We should establish safe routes for refugees to travel to the UK, and we should urgently act to process the backlog of asylum claims. We must remove the backlog if we want to discourage spurious asylum claims. It may even be necessary to declare an amnesty if that is the only way to clear the backlog.

Foreign policy

I will be voting for a party that has a grown-up attitude to foreign policy: responding to the threat from hostile actors like Russia, and speaking out over matters of human rights. I remember when there was debate about whether South African apartheid was “any of our business”. History has shown that it was our business, and we should have applied maximum non-military pressure to bring apartheid to an end. I believe the situation in Israel/Palestine will be viewed similarly when we have hindsight, and we should act now with public statements, trade sanctions and legal action.

We should use our influence to advocate for those who are oppressed across the world, and (of course) we should lead by example with the highest standards of justice and fairness in our own country.

We should stop arms sales to Saudi Arabia and Israel and significantly tighten regulation around arms sales to countries engaged in military action that fails to minimise harm to civilians.

Housing

I will be voting for a party who are willing to make the changes needed to provide more houses. This will involve changing rules to make it easier to build homes, and to incentivise building homes, not sitting on land. It will also likely involve the government or councils building and renting quality homes at low rents.

Bonus: universal basic income

I’d love to see someone propose a serious plan for universal basic income. Our benefits system already acknowledges the right of all people to food, housing, water and other services.

Our health system gives freedom to everyone to plan for their future life without dreading a massive bill if something goes wrong. Let’s give a similar freedom to everyone that if their job or business idea falls through, they can still survive. Imagine the explosion of innovation and artistic expression that could spring from this freedom!