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. 

Happy Thanksgiving

May your turkey be safely confined in your oven ... 

Road Trip VIII - Off The Interstate I

We crossed the Macinaw Bridge on to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and turned west on Rt. 2 along Lake Michigan. Even though the views were spectacular I was looking a road north to take us up to Lake Superior. I picked a road off the map and turned north onto the road less traveled. 

There a community of Amish on the Upper Peninsula. They moved there looking for affordable farmland that wasn't being encroached on by development. It's got be hard winters, but when we were passing through it was the first week of September and it was beautiful. 

The first indication were the road signs. You see these in Pennsylvania regularly, but we saw them in Michigan, North Dakota, and Kansas.

 

 

When we stopped for gas, three young people in traditional Amish dress came out of the store and climbed into a buggy, turned out onto the road and headed north. I asked the clerk and she told me there was a large community up the road and we should watch for signs as the Amish sell at roadside farm stands to supplement their income.

 

A few miles north, there was a sign and we pulled over. I didn't want to get trapped with the trailer, so we left it on the roadside and walked up the driveway, leaving the 21st Century behind. The path went over a small bridge and climbed up to an large open area. A large two story farmhouse to the right, the barn dominating the scene to the front, and a chicken house and some storage buildings to the left. 

 

Children running around, clearly curious about the strangers in the yard, but not approaching. Rows of wash hanging on lines. A young woman, perhaps in her late twenties, came out to the covered stand that was set up on the edge of the path. Mrs. ASM asked some questions, drew the woman into conversation. We learned they had moved up from Ohio to join this community, drawn by the chance to own property. 

 

The produce and products she had for sale were all handmade, either by her family or by neighbors. We bought apples, a quart of strawberry-rhubarb jam, a large bottle of maple syrup, and two loaves of bread.

 

I tried to take it all in, capture a moment where I was seeing a different way. Not that they didn't have some technology, even a house with a roof and windows is technology, but they were choosing, deciding what they accept, setting limits and living apart.