Four short links: 1 August 2017
RNA Coding, x86 Fuzzing, 1960s Coding, and AI Traps
- A Living Programmable Biocomputing Device Based on RNA (Kurzweil AI) — Similar to a digital circuit, these synthetic biological circuits can process information and make logic-guided decisions, using basic logic operations — AND, OR, and NOT. But instead of detecting voltages, the decisions are based on specific chemicals or proteins, such as toxins in the environment, metabolite levels, or inflammatory signals. The specific ribocomputing parts can be readily designed on a computer.
- Sandsifter — audits x86 processors for hidden instructions and hardware bugs by systematically generating machine code to search through a processor’s instruction set and monitoring execution for anomalies. Sandsifter has uncovered secret processor instructions from every major vendor; ubiquitous software bugs in disassemblers, assemblers, and emulators; flaws in enterprise hypervisors; and both benign and security-critical hardware bugs in x86 chips.
- Programming in the 1960s — uphill both ways in rain the colour of a television tuned to a dead station.
- How to Make a Racist AI Without Even Trying — My purpose with this tutorial is to show that you can follow an extremely typical NLP pipeline, using popular data and popular techniques, and end up with a racist classifier that should never be deployed. Exploitability is the failure mode of doing what’s easy.
