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vivegi

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This sounds like a shortcut, unless it isn't.

I have a feeling this is going to make debugging code written just a few months ago incrementally difficult. At least the explicit if statements are easier to follow the intent from months ago.

The syntax is clean though. I'll give it that.

Layout analysis is the key. Quite a bit of work has been going on recently in this area.

Some papers of relevance:

  - Xu Zhong, Jianbin Tang, Antonio Jimeno Yepes. "PubLayNet: largest dataset ever for document layout analysis," Aug 2019. Preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.07836 Code/Data: https://github.com/ibm-aur-nlp/PubLayNet

  - B. Pfitzmann, C. Auer, M. Dolfi, A. S. Nassar and P. Staar, "DocLayNet: a large human-annotated dataset for document-layout analysis," 13 August 2022. [Online]. Available: https://developer.ibm.com/exchanges/data/all/doclaynet/.

  - S. Appalaraju, B. Jasani, B. U. Kota, Y. Xie and R. Manmatha, "Docformer: End-to-end transformer for document understanding.," in The International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV 2021), 2021.
The first one is for publications. From the abstract: "...the PubLayNet dataset for document layout analysis by automatically matching the XML representations and the content of over 1 million PDF articles that are publicly available on PubMed Central. The size of the dataset is comparable to established computer vision datasets, containing over 360 thousand document images, where typical document layout elements are annotated".

The second is for documents. It contains 80K manually annotated pages from diverse data sources to represent a wide variability in layouts. For each PDF page, the layout annotations provide labelled bounding-boxes with a choice of 11 distinct classes. DocLayNet also provides a subset of double- and triple-annotated pages to determine the inter-annotator agreement.

Synthesis capability: When the system is capable of deriving established knowledge from first principles (similar to theorem proving from axioms)

Gap detection: The system is able to identify gaps in established knowledge

Path/problem decomposition: The system is able to decompose a problem (i.e., an identified gap) and break down the solution into a set of subproblems that can be independently solved.

Improvement/Optimization: Given a known solution, the system is able to discover objectively better approaches to solution.

There are probably other dimensions, but I would start with these.

That is a nice method to compute determinants of matrices. I wish they taught this method when I was in high school.

As John D Cook points out, the fact that the core 2x2 matmul operations that can be done in parallel is a big benefit for doing this in software or hardware.

The general guidance is that you segment your application domain into two categories - Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) and Online Analytical Processing (OLAP).

The OLAP data is populated from the OLTP data using queries (snapshot tables, materialized views etc., could be the implementation).

You then add/refresh data into the OLAP tables in a set frequency (for eg: daily, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly etc.,).

The OLTP system has up-to-date realtime transactions. The OLAP data has snapshots as of a particular date. The OLAP data may be denormalized while the OLTP data is highly normalized. This makes the OLAP data optimized for reads while the OLTP data is optimized for writes.

Biggar also contends that British rule in India, initially under the auspices of the East India Company (EIC) from the 1750s and direct colonial rule after 1857, was far from the rapacious affair that Whigs at the time (Burke springs to mind) or later historians, like Theodore Dalrymple assert.

That is a tall claim, if there ever was one.

EIC officials like Ernest ‘Oriental’ Jones and Warren Hastings showed a profound interest in Hindu culture and went to great lengths to accommodate Indian custom to utilitarian understandings of law and property. Biggar suggests that, Edward Said, the author of the 1978 book Orientalism which spawned post-colonial discourse theory and decolonise campaigns in education, distorted the character of European and British interest in both India and China.

Warren Hastings presided over the Great Bengal Famine of 1770 and reported back to the EIC about the wipeout of 10 million humans in Bengal.

Damodaran, Vinita (2014), "The East India Company, Famine and Ecological Conditions in Eighteenth-Century Bengal", in V. Damodaran; A. Winterbottom; A. Lester (eds.), The East India Company and the Natural World, Palgrave Macmillan UK, pp. 80–101, 89, ISBN 978-1-137-42727-4, writes:

Before the end of May 1770, one third of the population was calculated to have disappeared, in June the deaths were returned as six out of sixteen of the whole population, and it was estimated that 'one half of the cultivators and payers of revenue will perish with hunger'. During the rains (July–October) the depopulation became so evident that the government wrote to the court of directors in alarm about the number of 'industrious peasants and manufacturers destroyed by the famine'. It was not till cultivation commenced for the following year 1771 that the practical consequences began to be felt. It was then discovered that the remnant of the population would not suffice to till the land. The areas affected by the famine continued to fall and were put out of tillage. Warren Hastings' account, written in 1772, also stated the loss as one third of the inhabitants and this figure has often been cited by subsequent historians. The failure of a single crop, following a year of scarcity, had wiped out an estimated 10 million human beings according to some accounts. The monsoon was on time in the next few years but the economy of Bengal had been drastically transformed, as the records of the next thirty years attest."

So, yeah. The empire was evil.

Name Anchors has been a thing in HTML for a very long time (at least since HTML 2.0 spec [1], if not earlier).

  <a name="myanchor"><h3>Things to do</h3></a>
If the CMS supports name anchors, you can just bookmark it as
  https://example.com/foo.html#myanchor
Of course, authors are not mandated to follow named anchors for their document fragments, so this is just a best practice.

[1] https://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html-spec/html-spec_7.html#SEC7.4

The book covers it in Appendix A.6 (p 424) in the v2023.06.11a PDF file.

A.6 What is the Difference Between “Concurrent” and “Parallel”?

From a classic computing perspective, “concurrent” and “parallel” are clearly synonyms. However, this has not stopped many people from drawing distinctions between the two, and it turns out that these distinctions can be understood from a couple of different perspectives.

The first perspective treats “parallel” as an abbreviation for “data parallel”, and treats “concurrent” as pretty much everything else. From this perspective, in parallel computing, each partition of the overall problem can proceed completely independently, with no communication with other partitions. In this case, little or no coordination among partitions is required. In contrast, concurrent computing might well have tight interdependencies, in the form of contended locks, transactions, or other synchronization mechanisms.

This of course begs the question of why such a distinction matters, which brings us to the second perspective, that of the underlying scheduler. Schedulers come in a wide range of complexities and capabilities, and as a rough rule of thumb, the more tightly and irregularly a set oparallel processes communicate, the higher the level of sophistication required from the scheduler. As such, parallel computing’s avoidance of interdependencies means that parallel-computing programs run well on the least-capable schedulers. In fact, a pure parallel-computing program can run successfully after being arbitrarily subdivided and interleaved onto a uniprocessor. In contrast, concurrent computing programs might well require extreme subtlety on the part of the scheduler.

Sigh.

though the driver must remain behind the wheel to take over when prompted

That is a modal interface and the system may also decides to switch modes at will. Anytime a human is expected to wakeup from a mode and takeover from an automated system on short notice, we have failure modes that are unique compared to a modeless system (including Full Human Drive )

This is probably going to be even less successful than the Apple watch in terms of adoption. $3.5k for a personal device -- perhaps it will capture a niche. Genre defining like the iPod or iPhone, this isn't going to be.

Actually, Apple should consider making iMessage open source.

Given it is such a popular attack vector, it probably benefits the ios ecosystem to take the benefit of open source scrutiny. There are other messaging apps like Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram etc., So, it is not like a copycat would suddenly emerge and threaten Apple's position. Apple hold the keys to the app store anyway and can review any potential copycat (supposedly malicious one) and prevent it from being released.

So, they discover a vulnerability in ios and publish the details of the symptoms of the exploit -- something that Apple themselves were unaware --, release a tool to detect indicators of compromise in iphone backups and yet, somehow they have poor judgment?

What should they be doing? Keep the discovery to themselves so those who claim iPhone is secure can continue living obliviously with their worldview unchanged? Wouldn't we accuse them of poor judgment if they did that?

It is quite reasonable for them to say the ecosystem being closed is making analysis and detection difficult. It is up to Apple to do what they want with that information.

From the comments section on Securelist page on Operation Triangulation https://securelist.com/operation-triangulation/109842/

<extract>

SECURELIST

Posted on June 2, 2023. 11:10 am

Hi Bil!

We identified that the latest version of iOS that was targeted by Triangulation is 15.7. However, given the sophistication of the cyberespionage campaign and the complexity of analysis of iOS platform, we can’t guarantee that other versions of iOS are not affected.

</extract>

Latest update from Kaspersky.

June 02 2023 Update: triangle_check utility

We have developed and made freely available the triangle_check utility, that can detect indicators of compromise in an Apple device backup. Detailed instructions on how to use it under different OSs (Windows, Linux and macOS), as well as how to create a device backup can be found in a post on Securelist. [1]

[1] https://securelist.com/find-the-triangulation-utility/109867...

I guess everyone at Kaspersky knew the risk of an attack was non-zero given their industry profile. Their SIEM finally caught it, albeit it is arguable if the detection was timely and as others in the thread have pointed out, their MDM should have detected the upgrade failures or version issues. We will probably hear about it in the detailed paper/presentation later.

Their rant on the closed nature of the ios ecosystem is more around Apple's hold on the research tools. That is what I took from the statement, among other things.

What is the role of the AI and what is the distinct role of the operator?

It looks like this is a principal agent problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...):

  The principal–agent problem refers to the conflict in interests and priorities that arises when one person or entity takes actions on behalf of another person or entity.
The same issues occur with self-driving cars where it is expected that the driver take over from the automation anytime (eg: driver wants to stop but AI wants to go or vice versa).

From the article

We believe that the main reason for this incident is the proprietary nature of iOS. This operating system is a “black box”, in which spyware like Triangulation can hide for years. Detecting and analyzing such threats is made all the more difficult by Apple’s monopoly of research tools – making it a perfect haven for spyware. In other words, as I’ve often said, users are given the illusion of security associated with the complete opacity of the system. What actually happens in iOS is unknown to cybersecurity experts, and the absence of news about attacks in no way indicates their being impossible – as we’ve just seen.