Edwin Wenink
Philosophy | Artificial Intelligence | etcetera
Welcome to my personal space on the web ↯.
Engrams are memory traces of whatever interests me. Trace your own path through these engrams by clicking on tags. For more info on me and this website, see the about section. The etc section contains more static content, e.g. a short c.v. There is no regular posting schedule. Subscribe to the RSS feed! Feedback? An idea for cooperation? Please feel free to contact me.
ENGRAMS
What is the purpose of this website?
I largely quit social media because it transformed from being something that helps me keep in touch with people and that stimulates social interaction, to an endless stream of promoted clickbait content. The little “real” personal content that made it to my feed, was usually dull and did not facilitate any interesting conversations. With the creation of this website I’m trying to take control of my online identity, making this domain a main hub for various dispersed identities, …
Paradoxes of the logical implication
When one starts studying logic one is likely to be surprised by the workings of the so-called material implication, p –> q (if p, then q). Unlike the implication used in natural language, which can for example indicate causation, the material implication has a more restricted meaning. The material implication is true unless p is true and q is false. This is ultimately a matter of definition to resolve ambiguities present in natural language.
Ethics of Autonomous Vehicles: beyond the trolley dilemma
This is a short commentary I wrote in 2017, on Patrick Lin’s “Why Ethics Matters for Autonomous Cars”. The book Autonomous Driving formulates a set of use cases that serve as a reference point for discussing the technical, legal and social aspects of autonomous driving (Wachenfeld et al. 2016). In addition, Lin sketches scenarios that require ethical choices to be made by autonomous vehicles (AVs). An advantage of this approach is that these scenarios can take the form of …
Warlike acts in the cyber domain
This CSO article reports on a massive ransomware attack with NonPetya that is estimated by CyberReason research to have costs businesses globally around 1.2 billion dollar. One paragraph in particular caught my eye: To complicate matters, having cyber insurance might not cover everyone’s losses. Zurich American Insurance Company refused to pay out a $100 million claim from Mondelez, saying that since the U.S. and other governments labeled the NotPetya attack as an action by the Russian military …
Digital portraits
My friend Rits did me a big favor by making some digital portraits of me. His website is currently in quarantine because he was too late with re-registering his domain name, but if you read this post after sunday 17 March you can check out his web site. While doing me a favour, Rits made sure that he enjoyed himself. See right for a first proof of concept. After seeing this sketch, I had complete faith in the end result.
Two notes on the original Google paper
A few days ago Djoerd Hiemstra gave a guest lecture on estimating the size of big data problems, within the context of a Big Data course I am currently following. As a preparation, we read the paper of Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page from 1998 (read it here) where they introduced the anatomy of their search engine called “Google”. We did so in particular because it is interesting to compare their estimations on the size and scalability of Google with the colossus it has become today.
Morton's Perverse Holism - A Twelve-step program
A year ago I attended a lecture by Timothy Morton. I had not seriously read anything of Morton except a quite extravagant paper called “From modernity to the Anthropocene: ecology and art in the age of asymmetry”, which flamboyantly combined Hegel, art and ecology in a manner I do not recall. The lecture was equally flamboyant, and can perhaps best be described as a confused rant that simultaneously felt very genuine and personal.
Security and privacy: some key concepts
Discussions about privacy- and security issues are in the news daily, related to some scandal, data leaks, new regulations (GDPR), increased surveillance in response to terrorism, etc. But what do these concepts of privacy and security actually mean, and how do they relate to each other? Everyone probably has some intuitive notion of these concepts, but on a closer look, they are more complex than one would expect. Discussions about privacy and security should begin with: what privacy, what …
Website Update: Dark Theme and Etc. section
Two short updates: 1) I designed a minimalistic “Dark Theme” for this website. It can be selected in two ways. If your browser supports it, you can manually select the page layout. For example, in Firefox you can press Alt -> View -> Page style -> Dark theme. However, this makes the selection only for the current page. A slightly less transient option is to use the switch button in the navigation bar.
New feature! Added comments to this *static* website
A friend challenged me to implement the option to leave comments on blog posts over the Christmas break, and rightfully so. I write these posts about things that currently interest me, not because I think I know it all, but to record a thought process or idea for later review by me or others. A blog is not the place for publishing well-polished papers, but instead ideally is a playground for developing and testing ideas in interaction with others.
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