Brexit RPG

You are in a maze of twisty-turny tweets, all alike. You are likely to be eaten by a GRU.

Encounter!

You meet a Tarot reader. Roll a d6:

1. The fortune teller predicts the UK will cancel Article 50 and remain in the EU.

2. The fortune teller predicts Westminster will reject May's Deal, but instead call for the UK to join the EEA.

3. The fortune teller predicts Westminster will agree May's Deal.

4. The fortune teller predicts Westminster rejects May's Deal. Project Fear turns out to have been an understatement, as 10% of the UK's electricity is supplied by France under EU-specific rules, and the UK requires a reliable electricity supply to keep water mains running because it doesn't use water towers to pressurise the system.

While Westminster isn't paying attention, NI has a referendum under the Good Friday agreement and decides to reunify with the Republic of Ireland; Scotland unilaterally becomes independent and takes the nuclear submarines with it; and Wales, Yorkshire and Cornwall give it a go too.

5. The fortune teller predicts Westminster considers repeating the trade strategy that was highly successful in China in 1839–1842 and 1856–1860.

The UK accidentally becomes a military dictatorship after the British armed forces say "no" to this plan on the grounds that the Opium Wars were in fact wars, and as most of the EU is in NATO and the UK is also in NATO, the UK would have to declare war on itself.

6. Like 5, but instead of the second paragraph, the fortune teller predicts the UK is forced to declare war on itself under NATO article 5.

America takes over and the UK is forced to have a written constitution. Lots of people very unhappy because it's a copy of the American one and the UK population hates guns so much even the police aren't routinely armed.

=-=-=

If you have ITEM:NEWS that COUNTRY:NORWAY has rejected UK membership of the EEA, then if the Tarot reader rolls a 2 you may instead collect ONE BOWL OF POPCORN as compensation.

 

No, it’s not a prediction. It’s just a text adventure…

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More scam emails

As a follow up to a previous email scam (https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2018/08/09/anatomy-of-a-scam-and-livejournals-lost-passwords/), I’m now seeing scam attempts to fake the “from” line of an email to look like it comes from myself, from a hacked account.

It’s not different enough from the previous attempts to bother showing the content, and already been discussed by way of other examples on Hacker News.

The only interesting new point, is that this shows me that my email account’s Sender Policy Framework settings are not fully active. Apparently it’s in a fallback state because my domain hosting is still being transitioned from Retrosnub to Mythic Beasts.

It’s far from a groundbreaking invention, but there’s something very satisfying about this way of finding the smallest value in a Swift array of Integers:

var minimum = someArray.reduce(Int.max, min)

 

Brexit as an example of failure to comprehend conditional probabilities

It’s been 2 years 5 months 12 days 12 hours 25 minutes since my first post about Brexit, and I still don’t really know what will happen.

Almost everything is conditional probability: “If there’s a hard (no-deal) Brexit, then the traffic jams from Dover, Harwich/Felixstowe, etc. will be about as long as is physically possible given the number of trucks in the UK.”

Conditional probabilities suck for human-human interactions.

Any pro-Brexit person who reads that will tend, I think, to remember that prediction without the “if” clause; and if there is a deal, they will be much more likely to crow about it as “yet another Remoaner failure”. (Also often missed: “much more likely” doesn’t mean “will”, but I keep seeing people read it that way).

This sort of prediction tends to be used by propagandists as a modern-day Cassandra: the worst case scenario is so bad that everyone strives to prevent it — in this case by not countenancing a no-deal scenario — and so it becomes just another reason to distrust experts who fought against a no-deal scenario. In turn, this increases the chances of something as bad as a no-deal scenario next time. I see the same thing with the Millennium Bug, and as a kid with global warming (no, it wasn’t scientists who told you we were heading straight into an ice age, it was newspapers; any scientists actually talking about an actual ice age were talking about the end of an interglacial warm period and were even then outnumbered 6-to-1 by those concerned about things getting warmer).

I can only think of three post-Brexit-Great-Britain (yes I do mean GB, not UK, I know too little about NI) predictions that are not conditional on the final form that Brexit takes:

1. The UK population will still be arguing about it
2. These arguments will involve at least one large march (≥10,000 people)
3. At least one building will be set on fire (or an attempt will be made: they’re designed to not be on fire)

I put at least 1-in-3 odds that events 2 and 3 will be performed by both angry Leavers and angry Remainers.

Self-teaching | Selbstlernen

🇬🇧: I’ve been teaching myself German. Duolingo, clozemaster, etc.

🇩🇪: Ich habe mich Deutche selbstlernen. Duolingo, clozemaster, etc.

🇬🇧: I know my level; I can hold only simple conversations. I make mistakes often.

🇩🇪: Ich kenne meine Grade; Ich kann nur einfache Thema gesprochen. Ich oft irre bin.

🇬🇧: But my German is now good enough that I can see when Google Translate is telling me nonsense.

🇩🇪: Aber, mein Deutsch ist gut genug, das ich weiß, wann Google Translate hat blödsinn geschrieben.

🇬🇧: Not so good that Google Translate doesn’t help, just good enough to spot many mistakes.

🇩🇪: Nicht wie gut, dass Google Translate hilft nichts, nur so gut zu viele irre gesehen.

Pocket brains

• Total iPhone sales between Q4 2017 and Q4 2018: 217.52 million
• Performance of Neural Engine, component of Apple A11 SoC used in iPhone 8, 8 Plus, and X: 600 billion operations per second
• Estimated computational power required to simulate a human brain in real time: 36.8×10¹⁵
• Total compute power of all iPhones sold between Q4 2017 and Q4 2018, assuming 50% were A11’s (I’m not looking for more detailed stats right now): 6525.6×10¹⁵
• Number of simultaneous, real-time, simulations of complete human brains that can be supported by 2017-18 sales of iPhones: 177

 

• Performance of “Next-generation Neural Engine” in Apple A12 SoC used in Phone XR, XS, XS Max: 5 trillion operations per second
• Assuming next year’s sales are unchanged (and given that all current models use this chip and I therefore shouldn’t discount by 50% the way I did previously) number of simultaneous, real-time, simulations of complete human brains that can be supported by 2018-19 sales of iPhones: 1.30512×10²¹/36.8×10¹⁵ = 35,465

 

• Speedup required before one iPhone’s Neural Engine is sufficient to simulate a human brain in real time: 36.8×10¹⁵/5×10¹² = 7,360
• When this will happen, assuming Moore’s Law continues: log₂(7360)×1.5 = 19.268… years = January, 2038
• Reason to not expect this: A12 feature size is 7nm, silicon diameter is ~0.234nm, size may only reduce by a linear factor of about 30 or an areal factor of about 900 before features are atomic. (Oh no, you’ll have to buy a whole eight iPhones to equal your whole brain).

 

• Purchase cost of existing hardware to simulate one human brain: <7,360×$749 → <$5,512,640
• Power requirements of simulating one human brain in real time using existing hardware, assuming the vague estimates of ~5W TDP for an A12 SoC are correct: 7,360×~5W → ~36.8kW
• Annual electricity bill from simulating one human brain in real time: 36.8kW * 1 year * $0.1/kWh = 32,200 US dollars
• Reasons to be cautious about previous number: it ignores the cost of hardware failure, and I don’t know the MTBF of an A12 SoC so I can’t even calculate that
• Fermi estimate of MTBF of Apple SoC: between myself, my coworkers, my friends, and my family, I have experience of at least 10 devices, and none have failed before being upgraded over a year later, so assume hardware replacement <10%/year → <$551,264/year
• Assuming hardware replacement currently costs $551,264/year, and that Moore’s law continues, then expected date that the annual replacement cost of hardware required to simulate a human brain in real time becomes equal to median personal US annual income in 2016 ($31,099): log₂($551,264/$31,099) = 6.22… years = late December, 2024

Falsifiability

The 2-4-6 game is there to teach falsifiability. It’s an important skill, because otherwise you just get confirmation biases.

For the entirety of my life, never mind the Brexit negotiations, I have assumed “the EU is good” — at least, as far as ‘good’ can be attributed to any government. Nothing the EU have done during these negotiations has changed that, as all the things pointed to by Very Angry Leavers are things which I would also do in the EU’s place (that is: it decided what its objectives were, told everyone, and focused its negotiations around them). However, this doesn’t actually prove anything, as it has all the usual problems that come with any other ‘confirmation’.

In order to test the morality of the EU, I have to predict what an Evil Moustache-Twirling Union would do, and see how the EU’s behaviour differs from that. So:

1. EMTU would seek to punish and harm the Other, meaning that it would not focus on maximising its own strategic interests but rather on causing negative outcomes to the Other. They would disregard any advice from their own economists and business groups if they say the EMTU’s response is not the best (or least-bad) option available, given those strategic interests.
2. EMTU would not attempt to negotiate with the Other, or if it was forced to negotiate it would have red-lines which the Other cannot ever accept. It would not provide the Other a range of options and ask the Other to choose which it would prefer. It would highball any and all estimates of payments due from the Other, and not consider counterclaims from the Other. It would not be open and blunt about its strategic interests and demands, just in case the Other could figure out a way to meet them. It would move the goalposts and threaten to go back on any deals it had already agreed to.
3. EMTU would insist that leaving the Other requires leaving all associations connected with EMTU, anything where the EMTU had clout. This does not mean ‘trade deals’ given the explanations I’ve read tend to agree such matters are entirely down to the third parties, but rather things like Euratom, EEA membership, fishing rights, etc.; I don’t know if it would or would not include aircraft safety certificates, mutual recognition of pilot licences etc., as I don’t know how complex those are to agree on, nor if those generally require things like “both parties agree to follow judgements of the other party’s courts” — heck, I don’t even know how to characterise that, given one of the problems with the real-life version of this is that although the EU/Remain position is that EU courts are neutral international courts for sovereign countries to resolve their disputes in, the UK/Leave position seems to be that the EU is the sovereign entity and those very same courts are domestic courts.
4. EMTU would continuously denigrate the Other, comparing it to dictatorships that half its members remember fighting to overthrow; they would then follow this up with bombastic militaristic references.

So far, the EMTU as I’ve described appears to be closer to the UK than the EU.