Using SSI in XML for RSS

Summary: As it turns out, it’s possible to include HTML files in your XML RSS feed using SSI.

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I was pointed to this New York Times op-ed. It’s about how AI-memes are destroying human value and putting the emphasis on the wrong kind of AI projects, with some ‘The Singularity is a Religion’ thrown in for good ranting measure.

It’s amusing that the author suggests we keep ‘religion’ out of our work, whilst himself arguing from the existence of souls.

After much investigation, I found that Hughes satellite Internet has been the source of the many “File does not exist” errors on our web server. And so, I will here detail the signs that this is happening, our best theories on why / how this happens, and what can be done about it. In the following, paths are changed to protect the innocent.

So in our httpd error logs, I’ll see things like the following:

[Thu Aug 05 14:14:45 2010] [error] [client 67.142.130.26] File does not exist: /m/vhost/htdocs/file.swf, referer: http://thomblake.com/

Now, no one should be looking for file.swf in that folder, which corresponds to http://thomblake.com/file.swf - it’s actually in /m/vhost/htdocs/resources/file.swf and should be accessed via
http://thomblake.com/resources/file.swf. Also, this affected a tiny percentage of users; most people were not getting errors. However, the javascript contains code like the following:

var location = path + "/file.swf";

I spent some time poking around before I got the idea of doing a whois on the offending IP addresses. It turns out they were all owned by Hughes, a satellite ISP. I had already guessed at this point that the errors might just be caused by a bad proxy or something, and this was pretty well confirmed here. As far as I can tell, Hughes has an ‘accelerator’ that prefetches content that dynamic pages might want at some point. One of the things this does is scrape the js file (without parsing or executing it) for anything that looks like a path. So it sees "/file.swf" and tries to retrieve the file at http://thomblake.com/file.swf.

At this point I had a few options. The obvious choice was to ignore the problem. One obscure ISP has a buggy piece of software that, as far as I can tell, is not even ruining the UX of my website. However, it might be worth finding a work-around, so I plodded onward. Obviously, there is not a reasonable, consistent work-around for this. Since someone else’s software being buggy is the problem, the solution is not to fix it on my end. However, it is possible to fix this for particular cases.

As it turns out, I was only using path in one place, so I was able to rewrite the script so that the ‘accelerator’ looks for the file where it actually is. In theory, this improves the performance of the site for the end-user (since the accelerator is now working properly) and it clears some of the junk out of the error logs. I fixed similar problems in other scripts and CSS files by changing some relative paths to absolute paths where it didn’t seem totally crazy to do so.

I was going to include for reference here a list of all Hughes IP addresses so it would be easier for folks to find this site if they’re trying to debug this sort of error, but those seem hard to come by. Below the fold is a short list via http://ws.arin.net/whois/. If anyone has a complete list handy, feel free to send it along.

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H+ Summit: Neuroscience

This post is a response to the neuroscience track at the H+ Summit, June 12-13 2010 at the Harvard University Science Center in Cambridge, MA.

It was in the morning of the first day of the conference.

It was amazing how much information these speakers were able to pack into 10 minutes. A lot of people came with more information than they could dish out, but they still managed to pack a lot into a short talk. Again I am struck with the impression that we should generally be able to do more with less time than we usually allow ourselves in our institutions.

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Christa and I had the pleasure of attending the H+ Summit this year, June 12-13 2010 at the Harvard University Science Center.

This post will serve as an index for my separate posts about the event. The “trip report” details my experiences of basically everything other than the Summit itself. The “summary” gives my overall impressions of the Summit with highlights. Other posts summarize or respond to particular talks, and may be added in the future.

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This post is a general response to the H+ Summit, June 12-13 2010 at the Harvard University Science Center in Cambridge, MA. I will respond to particular talks elsewhere.

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This is a report of my trip to the H+ Summit, June 12-13 2010 at the Harvard University Science Center in Cambridge, MA. The main purpose of this post is to avoid writing about uninteresting non-summit related parts of the trip in my posts about the summit itself. I felt the need to write about some of this, but didn’t want to clutter up the other posts.

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There are some new features over on the right (well, I hadn’t mentioned them yet anyway). Google Latitude shows my current position at most times, and there’s a Google Calendar gadget to tell you what I’m doing. Please let me know if they’re not working.

The results are in from Less Wrong’s poll by Yvain. Of note:

Of 128 of us who wanted to talk about our moral theories, 94 (73.4%) were consequentialists, about evenly split between garden-variety or Eliezer-variety (many complained they didn’t know what Eliezer’s interpretation was, or what the generic interpretation was, or that all they knew was that they were consequentialists). 15 (9%) said with more or fewer disclaimers that they were basically deontologists, and 5 (3.9%) wrote-in virtue ethics, and objected to their beliefs being left out (sorry!). 14 people (10.9%) didn’t believe in morality.

(bold added) We’re here! We care about stuff! Get used to it!

I wonder if those who answered that they “don’t believe in morality” mean the same thing by this statement that I would. Which is to say, they can’t possibly, because being an ethical nihilist is inconsistent for humans.

Yesterday (Tuesday, March 10, 2009) I gave a lecture at the SCSU Philosophy Department entitled, “On the Imminent Robot Uprising”. Sadly, it was not recorded (I must remember to not let that happen again) but here is a rough transcript, written in a very informal style. I tend to ad-lib a lot and use feedback from the audience to determine how in-depth I should get, and the first bit about military robots just said “say some stuff about military robots” on my notes. It helps being something of a domain expert when doing these things.

Also, I’m kindof sad that I don’t have a transcript of the following discussion (mostly me fielding questions) - I deliberately brushed over some of the philosophical questions in the talk since I knew we would have an interesting discussion about them after.

The images below are my slides; none of them were created by me, except the brief bit of editing I did to the ‘theater metaphor’ GWT image to add things about cats. As this is an academic paper, they’re being used under ‘fair use’; if you own it and disagree, I’ll take it down. Sources should be obvious.

Robots are depicted in movies as a technology that can “slip the leash” and wreak havoc upon humankind. How likely is this scenario? What sort of risk do robots represent? Is this scenario inevitable with respect to all varieties of robotics technology? (Note, Bayesian readers, that I am not a fan of Bayesian reasoning, and neither were those in the audience, so read claims about ‘probability’ with a grain of salt.)

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