dweinberger

dweinberger, 3 days ago to random

Robert Dennard, who invented DRAM, has passed away.

May his memory be a blessing.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/16/technology/robert-dennard-dead.html

dweinberger, 1 month ago to ai

Here is the link to the article @garymarcus
discusses that argues that the relationship between training set size and improvements in models' performance is non-linear in the wrong direction. https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.04125 #AI #machineLearning

dweinberger, 1 month ago to random

Philosophies has published my article "The Rise of Particulars: AI and the Ethics of Care." https://www.mdpi.com/2409-9287/9/1/26

In brief: ML discovers patterns of correlations, a powerful form of generalization very different from the sort that the west has valorized as the highest form of truth: universal laws, ethical frameworks, etc. ML's generalizations let particulars speak loudly, creating an odd analogy with the feminist ethics of care.

dweinberger, 2 months ago to random

Cerebras Systems announces world's fastest chip. 2,048 can be clustered into a supercomputer capable of 256 exaFLOPS = 256,000,000,000,000,000,000 = a quintillion Floating Point Ops per second.

Should hold me for now.

https://newatlas.com/computers/cerebras-wse3-cs3-worlds-fastest-ai-chip/

dweinberger, 2 months ago to ai

Research showing LLMs' (chat AI) covert racism, triggered by dialects, is even worse than their explicit racism. An example of when you can be shocked but not surprised. via Gary Marcus https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/covert-racism-in-llms #AI #Bias #chatAI #LLM

dweinberger, 2 months ago to ai

After a long-ish exchange, chatGPT 4.0 acknowledged that it speaks from a Western, Northern cultural position. Obviously. Not as obvious is how “reluctant” it is to acknowledge that fact.

And having acknowledged it, it will deny it the next time. "I acknowledge x" is just a set of tokens chosen to get us to move on, like a politician's apology.

https://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/2024/03/03/chatgpt-admits-it-assumes-a-western-northern-culture/ #ai #chat #bias

dweinberger, 2 months ago to random

Does anyone know where the unsub button is on the Patreon web site? I want to unsub from some projects I've been minorly supporting. I can't find a button anywhere, or any support or help options from Patreon. So now I not only feel stingy, I feel dumb.

dweinberger, 2 months ago to random

I received an invitation from ISONAET to speak at its Summit on Applied Science, Engineering & Technology at a cost of a mere $800. The invite email explains: "We were impressed with your work and the way you are so impressed at that thing you do and would be so excited if you would join us."

I don't mean to brag, but who wouldn't be impressed by that thing that I do!

Seriously, has anyone heard of this group and its overwhelmingly male roster of speakers? https://scitechglobalmeets.com/2024/applied-science/

dweinberger, 3 months ago to ChatGPT

#chatGPT 4 and #Bard do terribly when asked to find words that have a consecutive M & L. They got “gimlet”, probably because it was in my prompt. Then they got 10-12 words that have M and L's in them, but not adjacent. I guess that's what happens when every word looks like a token

dweinberger, 4 months ago to ai

"The 5 Ages of Modern #Data", -- from reduced and normalized resource to the holder of secrets and mysteries-- is the topic of my latest column in @KMworld, based on my keynote at the KMWorld conf. https://www.kmworld.com/Articles/Columns/Perspective-on-Knowledge/The-five-ages-of-data-161937.aspx #AI

dweinberger, 4 months ago to random

Today I learned: Hydox was the original and Oreo is the knockoff! Why isn't this bigger news? Just goes to show the power of Big Cookie. https://thehustle.co/the-curious-case-of-the-disappearing-hydrox-cookies via @mathewi @journa.host's excellent daily aggregator "When the Going Gets Weird" https://newsletter.mathewingram.com/

pluralistic, 4 months ago to random

I'm kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to last year's Red Team Blues, featuring Marty Hench, a hard-charging, two-fisted forensic accountant who spent 40 years in Silicon Valley, busting every finance scam hatched by tech bros' feverish imaginations:

http://thebezzle.org

--

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/10/the-bezzle/#marty-hench

1/

dweinberger, 4 months ago to random

You want AI Weirdness? @Janellecshane has AI Weirdness for you! The latest: ChatGPT generates labelled images of mammals, in English, Swedish with too many umlauts, and English with too many umlauts. (Her book You Look Like a Thing and I Love You is an excellent + funny ML 'splainer.)
https://www.aiweirdness.com/learn-the-mammals-with-dall-e3/?ref=ai-weirdness-newsletter

dweinberger, 4 months ago to random

[Edit: Aaaggh. I was misled by my lying eyes. Also, I'm a dolt. How embarrassing!]

Twitter is requiring me to reauthenticate, which requires solving 5 easy but annoying addition problems in which you have to pick the dartboard (out of ten) that has numbers that add up to the target number. Except not all of them have solutions, which requires starting all over again. So far, I haven't found one in which all 5 challenges are answerable. #Schadenfreude (Why am I still on twitter? For reasons.)

Screen capture of Twitter presenting 10addition problems that don't solve the the challenge.

dweinberger, 4 months ago to journalism

@jeffjarvis' heartfelt, impassioned call for #journalism to move from seeing itself primarily as an information service, to being a builder and enabler of empathetic, truth-based communities. (Disclosure: We're friends. He doesn't know I'm posting this.) https://medium.com/whither-news/journalism-belief-belonging-07a8dabe35e4

dweinberger, 5 months ago to ChatGPT

Chomsky says Chat AI (e.g., #ChatGPT) copies "existing works from existing artists" and alters "it sufficiently to escape copyright laws." That's no more true than saying that someone who records which birds are seen together is copying existing birds. #AI

dweinberger, 6 months ago to random

John Searle wrote "...I am told that some of the ancient Greeks thought the brain functions like a catapult." I spent some time this morning doing shitty Internet research and can't find anything, except a bulleted list of lies from Bard. (ChatGPT couldn't be bothered to make anything up, to its credit.) Any suggestions? (I do not read Greek, old or new.) Thanks!

dweinberger, 7 months ago to random

@stevenlevy, one of my favorite writers about tech, has posted a good old-fashioned “rant 'n' take down” of Andreessen's perfect example of what it means to be blinded by privilege.

Andreessen: https://link.wihttps://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/

Levy: https://link.wired.com/view/5be9d5af2ddf9c72dc1f8e2bjp4yb.nx/e390c36a

dweinberger, 7 months ago to random

After using MS word for almost 40 years, it remains buggy in its basics I won't bore you with a list (you know who you are, AutoNumbering!) but tonight its refusal to let me join or separate two lines broken in the middle is particularly annoying. You'd think by now Word would have mastered line and paragraph breaks, which are pretty basic document elements. I mean, it's not like they're as wildly complex as SIMPLE STUPID AUTONUMBERING A SIMPLE STUPID LIST.

dweinberger, 7 months ago to random

New research confirms that flipped coins are slightly more likely to land on the side that was up when they were flipped. The difference is less than 1%, so take this as a very long-term betting strategy.

https://phys.org/news/2023-10-flipped-coins-fair-thought.html (via @mathewi)

dweinberger, 7 months ago to random

If you wake up without knowing you went to sleep, you may be #old.