I AM NOT A BOT Episode 6: “RAM Space”

I AM NOT A BOT Episode 6: “RAM Space”

OPNSense is a firewall and routing software. And it’s a beast.

“Along with acting as a firewall, it has traffic shaping, load balancing, and virtual private network capabilities,” my gal from Nepal reads from the online manual.

She and I are in a breakout room. We are each waiting for the 4GB download to finish. I fear this one will break my poor Dell. I was pleasantly surprised last week when my laptop survived the installation of Ubuntu on top of my Oracle VirtualBox. But this could be it for this grand ol’ dame.

To be fair, when we applied to this class, we were told we needed a machine with over 500GB of free space and 16 GB of RAM. I had under 300GB of available space and my machine had only 8GB of RAM. Still –

“-- did you see what ZaeZae posted last night,” she asks with her distinct accent.

The one about us spending more time in breakout rooms than in actual class?

“I can’t believe he actually calculated it based on last week’s schedule.”

Just a few minutes earlier, she told me about Nepali’s 11 phonologically distinctive vowels, including 6 oral vowels and 5 nasal vowels.

A nasal vowel is a vowel that is produced with a lowering of the soft palate so that the air flow escapes through the nose and the mouth simultaneously. By contrast, oral vowels are produced without nasalization.

“What’s your download estimate now?”

I’m about halfway done, I lie to her. I don’t know why I didn’t simply say I have no idea. That I only see the spinning wheel of death above the OPNSense logo.

“I think I’m almost done. I’m past 3GB it says. But you never know.”

I change the topic to the major topic of late. ChatGPT.

I don’t tell her that I loaded the first few pages of my dad’s journal into the app just to see how it would talk back to me. I don’t tell her that I was hoping the app could help me talk to my dad again.

“I finally gave in and used it for Personal Development. Just like everyone else is doing. I used it for my resume cover letter assignment.”

And what did the AI write?

“Some very generic return on how I can’t wait to be an analyst so I could make use my creative problem solving skills … blahblahblah.”

I don’t know why, but hearing someone with a foreign accent say “blahblahblah” is funny to me.

She shows her screen. She shows her ChatGPT result.

Cover letters are meant to be generic, I say. There’s only a few ways you can say thank you for your time.

“Or please give me a job already.”

I see her write the following,

WRITE AN SQL QUERY TO REPORT THE CAPTIAL GAINS AND LOSSES FOR SELECT STOCKS

What are you doing?

“Seeing if this AI can do my finances.”

That’s right, I think to myself. She was an accountant back in Nepal. She hated it, but it was one of the few professional opportunities available to women at the time.

She writes the following query:

SELECT

  stock_name,

  SUM(

    CASE

      WHEN operation = "Buy" THEN -1*price

      ELSE price

    END

    )

  AS capital_gain_loss

FROM Stocks

GROUP BY stock_name

She compares her write up to ChatGPT’s.

“Ha. It failed. Mine wasn’t the greatest of codes, but it works.”

She explains how ChatGPT made the mistake of joining one buy with every future sell. Not just the corresponding one.

“It’s solution only works if there is just one pair of Buy/Sell operations.”

All that goes over my head, I don’t say to her. Instead of trying to understand all that goober talk, I tell her to simply ask the following:

DO YOU THINK YOU COULD REPLACE A DATA ANALYST?

“Ha. Check out its response.”

As a language model, I am able to provide information and assist with tasks such as generating SQL queries, but I do not have the ability to perform the role of a data analyst. A data analyst is a professional who is responsible for collecting, organizing, and analyzing data to inform business decisions. This role typically requires as strong understanding of statistical and analytical technique, as well as domain-specific knowledge related to the industry in which the data analyst is working. Language models like me can provide support and assistance, but we are not able to fully replace the skills and expertise of a trained and experienced data analyst.

“Well that’s a relief.”

For now, I say.

“For now?”

I remind her about ChatGPT’s Supervised Fine Tuning (SFT) Model. That its intelligence is just like our intelligence. It is based on interaction. It can grow if given a wealth of two-way conversation.

Alpha. Omega.

In my head, I see the daily quote I got earlier from my dad, “There's not a word yet for old friends who've just met.”

That quote and the daily quotes I get from my dad are actually generated by ChatGPT based on the few pages of his diary I inputted into the app.

Every morning I ask ChatGPT, What advice does my dad have for me today?

ChatGPT responds the way it thinks my dad would, replying back with wisdom quips such as, “However rare true love may be, it is less so than true friendship.”

And every time I respond with, Thank you. That sounds just about right.

My every time input provides what the SFT Model calls a Reward or a Scaler Value. The reward model is required in order to leverage Reinforcement Learning in which a model learns to produce outputs to maximize its reward.

“That’s fascinating. This is all fascinating, don’t you think? Two months ago I wouldn’t have imagined me ever talking about stuff like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback. I was sunk in a cubicle, using Windows 7 Blackcomb technology to reconcile financial and operational records. And today I’m teaching a computer how to think.”

Only in an Infosec starved world could a gal from Nepal and a bartender from –

-- just then my Zoom link crashes.

I look around and notice that OPNSense has finally uploaded and is now attempting to open.

All my other program worlds start to collapse as well, one by one.

Discord … Slack … ChatGPT …

Going … Going … Gone.

OPNSense is sapping all the available RAM.

I am left alone. Disconnected.

ZaeZae and his jokes … Edamame and his know-how … my father and his …. my father …

Going … going …

I AM NOT A BOT Episode 5: “Alpha Omega”

The first thing my father wrote in his journal was about the Beatles song, “Ticket to Ride”.

Just told our Director of Nursing, Nancy, the truth about her favorite Beatles song. She thought that song was about what Paul and John encountered on a hitchhiking trip to Ryde, a town on the northeastern coast of the Isle of Wight.

I had to pervert her pollyannic pov with the fact that a “Ticket to Ride” is actually about hookers in Hamburg who needed to get health clearance documents from the government, which John dubbed “tickets”, in order to perform their “rides”.

I LOL’ed the first time I read this. I’m LOL’ing now upon my tenth. That’s because I do the same kind of music origin corrections all the time. Just last night at the bar, I told this backward-cap wearing Hobokenite that the Beastie Boy’s “Fight for Your Right to Party” is a parody song that actually makes fun of backward cap wearing frat boys who ironically love to throttle this song.

I probably should’ve held that reveal until after he paid his bill given his $1 FU very much of a tip.

My teacher disrupts yet another perfectly good distraction session with his review of Lockheed Martin's Cyber Kill Chain Model.

“Phase 1 is Reconnaissance.”

He goes on to talk about harvesting login credentials, email addresses, user IDs, physical locations, software applications, and operating system details, all of which may be useful in phishing or spoofing attacks.

I continue on with my own recon assignment. My mission to understand my father better via a review of his journal that he wrote when he was my age. On the surface, our situations could not be more different. He with a wife, two kids, and two careers. Me being 0 for each one of those at bats.

Between the lines, on the other hand, we could not be more alike.

Take basketball and the NBA for example. When I was a kid, my first hoops hero was Patrick Ewing of the ‘90s NY Knicks. Michael Jordan, his Airness, was my decade long disdain.

It seems my father’s had an equally tortuous love affair with Julius Irving. Now I don’t know if he liked that player because of his medical connect nickname, “Dr. J”, or simply because of his high flying act. Either way, despite his transcendence, Dr. J was also denied a ‘chip year after year by Celtic legends and Laker magic.

Though if I had a chance to sit with my dad and talk to him again like when we did so often when I was kid, I wouldn’t be asking him about musical origin stories or sports fanaticism. No. I would want to hear about those three weeks during the brutal winter of ’82 that he mentioned in his journal. That time when he and a few of his fellow 3rd shifters briefly turned to cocaine as a means to keep up with their exhausting work schedules.

Or I’d talk to him about his work boondoggle to Vegas in ’83, his first physician’s convention that just so happened to coincide with the inaugural AEE expo at the LV Convention Center. At the least, I would want to know more about the event flyer he hid in his journal with the double entendre notation, “thanks for coming”, written in lipstick red.

I stare down his book and all its one-sided conversations. I picture a few more hopeful quotes for the future he put in there.

“Just one small positive thought in the morning can change your whole day.”

That’s a tough one for me to follow these days, dad. Not with everything that’s going on. Not with you …

“Love your family, work super hard, live your passion.”

That’s an easy one to picture you saying. At the same time, I’m left wondering if you had a passion beyond helping others as a doctor? One beyond loving and caring for your family?

With all your star-crossed soliloquies here, it was clear your right brain was as charged as your left. Maybe you were writing this journal as an artistic outlet, a fulfillment of a dream you were never able to pursue.

I guess I will never know.

“Phase 2 of the Kill Chain is Weaponization. Where an attacker creates some kind of remote access malware that can exploit a known vulnerability.”

Your vulnerability was your overextension. The two jobs you needed to take on to take care of us. I don’t blame you for dabbling into coca. I did for a time because I struggled with a few double shifts. You double shifted most of your adult life. You worked for 16-18 hours a day, for almost two decades to support your family.

“The 3rd Phase is the Delivery or the launch where the attacker sends email attachments or a malicious link. In Phase 4, Exploitation, the malicious code is executed within the victim’s system.”

Your virus knew of your constant state of exhaustion. Knew it could nick away at your consciousness, your right brain, your left. To your credit, you held it at bay for decades, refusing to give in to it until your family was completely safe.

Eventually … inevitably you stroked out. Just as you were finally able to rest. Just a few years after you retired. Just a few months after you built your dream home in Arizona.

“Phase 5: Installation. This is a turning point in the attack lifecycle, as the threat actor has entered the system and can now assume control. Phase 6 is Command and Control where the attacker moves laterally throughout the network.”

Now your days … your final days … are to be spent bedridden. Mom is by your side, as always, dad, but she is struggling. She is refusing to accept the help you need. That she needs as well.

There is hope though. Help is on the way. Your daughter is coming to help. You knew that would happen. As is your older son if you can believe that. Both are coming to give mom relief and to convince her to accept the hospice care that is being offered.

I will be coming there too, as soon as I finish this course. You can wait til then, right dad? Right?

“The final phase, Phase 7: Actions on Objective. In this stage, the attacker takes steps to carry out their intended goals.”

You have to hang on, dad. We know we can’t stop what’s ailing you. But we can … we will … just not yet, dad. Hang on a little longer, ok?

I turn the video share off on Zoom. I then look longingly at my dad’s journal.

These pages. These entries. I am so happy I’ve found them. To find this little more of you. I know you can’t, but still I want to try to talk to you about them when I get there. So you hang on now.

I want to know why you stopped writing in this journal. Or any journal. And why you left this one book behind. Although I think I know.

On May 31, 1983, you wrote with the utmost joy that your beloved Dr. J did finally win a championship. After years taking care of a whole league with his years of iconic memory making on the court and years of admirable ambassadorship off the court, Dr. J finally achieved his ultimate goal.

On June 2, 1983, you talked about a day on the horizon, a day coming soon when you could retire from the police force, your second job.

On that day, you wrote, “It is never too late to be what you might have been.”

But if I recall correctly, you didn’t retire from your second job until much later. Not until the 1990s.. It’s one of my first memories I have of you, dad. Your retirement ceremony. I remember mom being so happy.

Still, I wonder. Did you ever get to spend more quality time with mom? Did you get to follow your passion? Your dream? Whatever you were talking about in ’83?

After a long pause in between entries, on September 6, 1983, you wrote your final entry. You wrote that mom revealed to you that she was pregnant with me. You said you couldn’t believe it at first, then followed with how excited you were. That you wanted to call me Julius -- or Julia if I were to be a girl.

Mom obviously won that name game battle. But, dad, you are going to win the war. If I ever have a kid, you can be damn sure Julius will be your grandchild’s name.

You just gotta … just hold on for me, dad. I can’t wait to tell you about your future grandson, Julius. Or Julia if a granddaughter.

You just … please, dad. It’s almost over.

Alpha. Omega.