Alan Jackson - "Let It Be Christmas"

This is one of my favorite Christmas songs.  Country music can tend to the sentimental, and all the best Christmas music does too.  The marriage of these combine beautifully.  If you're not a fan of the sentimental, you might want to pass this by.  But if you're like me, then enjoy.

Road Trip IX - Jim Hamm Nature Area

The Jim Hamm Nature Area in Longmont Colorado is a twenty-four acre park, nature preserve, and bird sanctuary. There's a fourteen acre pond that attracts migratory birds and views of the mountains that comprise the Front Range. Jim Hamm's grandfather farmed the land and Jim grew up spending time there.

 

Jim Hamm was commissioned as an officer in the Air Force and deployed to Vietnam as a F-4 Phantom pilot. On March 14th, 1968, his aircraft was making close air support passes in support of a helicopter evacuation when he was hit and shot down. His body was not recovered and he is still MIA.

The family donated the land in his honor and in honor of all the local men that served in Vietnam. In addition to the nature walks and habitat, there is a memorial, as well as two picnic shelters. The county school system uses the park for field trips. The VFW and the American Legion use the park on Veteran's and Memorial Day.  

 

 

It's a peaceful spot and we had the place to ourselves when we visited.

Vince Guaraldi Trio - O Tannenbaum

CBS didn't like this soundtrack, and predicted that the show A Charlie Brown Christmas would be a flop.  It was wildly popular, and the soundtrack won a Grammy.  For obvious reasons.

Yo-Yo Ma and Alison Krauss - The Wexford Carol

This is one of the most lovely carols ever recorded. 

How to attack AI systems

Use poetry.  No, really:

In a new paper, “Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in Large Language Models,” researchers found that turning LLM prompts into poetry resulted in jailbreaking the models

...

Poetic framing achieved an average jailbreak success rate of 62% for hand-crafted poems and approximately 43% for meta-prompt conversions (compared to non-poetic baselines), substantially outperforming non-poetic baselines and revealing a systematic vulnerability across model families and safety training approaches.

Whoops.  Looks, this is a new class of attack (seriously, I've been in this biz for a long time and have never seen weaponized verse before), so maybe we need to cut folks some slack here.  But I'm somewhat less inclined to do so with AI's track record of falling for 30 year old attacks.

Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight,

Past reason hunted; and, no sooner had

Past reason hated as a swallowed bait

On purpose laid to make the taker mad; 

- Wm. Shakespeare, Sonnet 129 

 

Why can't the US Navy build ships?

First, they canceled the Little Crappy Shops (LCS) program as not fit for purpose.  Now it's the Constellation class Frigate program that gets the axe:

By 2024, the first ship of the class was 36 months behind schedule, with the second already considered two years behind before its keel was even laid. The plan, as I mentioned before, was to retain roughly 85% of the FREMM frigate design to expedite production, but by that point, the Constellation design retained only about 15% of its parent design. This caused a cascade of other issues, like the need to write new code for a reported 95% of the ship’s control system software due to deviations from the FREMM design it came from, and the incorporation of new equipment and systems.

The Constellation-class frigate seemed to suffer from a classic case of scope-creep, a term used to describe a program that keeps seeing new requirements tacked onto it as it develops, resulting in cost overruns and delays. As one lawmaker put it, the Navy kept chasing a 100% solution to the point where they ended up with 0% of the ship being delivered.

There's more here from the Tech Press, so this is getting attention. 

As Yogi Berra once said, if you don't know where you're going you'll end up somewhere else.  SECNAV should see to it that the Program Management Office finds itself somewhere else - preferably not working for the Navy.  Pour encourager les autres ...

Greg Lake - I Believe In Father Christmas

Sunday music here is usually classical.  So why Greg Lake (from Emerson, Lake, and Palmer fame)?  Well, Lake sampled Sergei Prokofiev's famous sleigh ride from his Lieutenant Kijé suite.  You almost certainly know this music well enough to hum along (it starts about a minute into the video). 

There's quite a lot of classic rock that really should be labeled "Classical Rock" ... 

Anne Murray - "Winter Wonderland"

Anne Murray was huge on country radio in the 1970s and 80s, but has sadly dropped off the airways since then.  Maybe it was because she was more "Old COuntry" than the new wave of the 90s and beyond.

That's a pitty, as she had a wonderful voice.  Somewhat reminiscent of Julie Andrews, at least in this Christmas classic. 

Joe Bonamassa - Christmas Boogie

Here's some Christmas music to make you tap your toes during Black Friday.