Toward Ecosophy

Here, two papers and two articles, all about AI, all I think better than most:

Researchers at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania are proposing an extended model of cognition as a way of measuring and studying “cognitive surrender,” the regular handoff of cognition to LLM models. It’s long but if you’ve got the patience, it’s here. I didn’t see much in the way of surprises, but it does provide an interesting framework for analysis.

One not-emphasised takeaway is that once again, the human intervention for wrong LLM responses model is shit. It’s not emphasised because that’s not the point of their paper – they’re demonstrating their model as an explanative/conceptual framework – but it’s still there.

Scientific American writes about a study showing that AI outputs tend to sway users’ beliefs, even when users are told about biases built into the model. As many – including me – have said many times before, this is absolutely part of the point of AI, particularly but not just for people like Elon Musk. But it’s good to see numbers on it.

Combine study two with study one and you see why the tech brogliarchs so eager to turn thinking into something they sell you. They don’t want to make your life easier, they want to make you pay to think like them. Or, as Karl Bode put it a few months ago, “The problem with AI isn’t going to be Skynet. It’s going to be amoral extraction class assholes applying half-cooked automation at scale onto deeply broken sectors in exploitative ways in a country too corrupt to have functioning regulators.”

Finally, give a look of the narrowly-focused (to coding) but still worthwhile essay, “I used AI. It worked. I hated it.” It strikes me that much of what he hated about it are what people who actually want to be managers like, which explains so very, very much, doesn’t it?

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The latest smoke detector to howl pointlessly into the night sends out 11.3V DC onto the signal pin when triggered but running off batteries. I suspect that’s 12V nominal, and it probably delivers 12V when operating on AC power.

Most importantly, it’s not like… 500mv. Or AC. Or complicated. It’s plain, simple DC.

When acting as a non-reporting satellite node, it triggers when receiving 4V DC on the signal pin (4.0 exactly), and that voltage is polarity sensitive. -4V doesn’t trigger the alarm.

Checking for DC on the signal line, I get functionally nothing. 20ma DC at most, and even that’s something I’m picking up out of noise floor shift rather than direct measurement.

(Yes, I checked for AC as well. Still functionally nothing.)

My thought was that if the signal line was somehow floating in whole number volts (for whatever reason) than maybe somehow the right RF noise could kick it over.

The problem with that is that I can now also confirm that non-detecting units go off exactly as long as a detecting device keeps saying it’s detecting by putting voltage on the signal line. If that voltage goes away, so do the satellite alarms – and immediately.

And that’s not what happens. We have to manually intervene and shut the alarms off ourselves.

The reason I paid meaningfully more than baseline for this particular set is that they report exactly which detector went off and why. That way, if it were the signal line somehow triggering the alarms, none of them would claim to be the originating unit; they’d all report it came from the signal backbone.

But they don’t. There’s always a unit claiming to be the active detector and it’s always smoke (and there is never actually smoke), and none of them shut up until we shut off that unit, which sometimes seems to require removing it from power.

So today’s afternoon check was basically just another way of confirming what we already knew, and I guess I’ve done that now, but…

All that does is get us right back to where we started, which is, “we have alarm after alarm after alarm of different makes, methods (ionisation, photodetector), and models which just in this house are determined to go off randomly, usually but not always at night, for absolutely no detectable fucking reason, and then pass self-test just fine afterwards.”

And no, regular cleaning – even weekly cleaning – does not help. I do all the things. None of it stops the problem.

If you’re new to this adventure, I have heard this exact same story from many other people at this point – though nobody I’ve talked to has said they’ve literally taken metres to the signal wires to verify that way.

Regardless, I know it is not just us.

What I’ve been told from others who deal with this is to RMA individual units that trigger randomly one at a time until you end up with a set that doesn’t. And I guess that’s what I’m gonna do, but

holy shit, team

holy shit

this is the opposite of fire safety

this is the opposite of how anything like this should ever work, I mean

what if all the RMAs are getting you are a set that won’t go off even when they should?

but whelp

guess i’m gonna find out

’cause this sure ain’t workin’.

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