The Verge has a really good – though very long – article on the maintenance of the cables that keep the world connected to the internet: The Cloud Under the Sea. These cables are laid under the seas and oceans, sometimes thousands of meters deep, and this is exactly as vulnerable as it …
Amazon Ditches ‘Just Walk Out’ Checkouts at Its Grocery Stores, because, as it turns out, it wasn’t actually all that technological: Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The …
Humans Need Not Apply was a YouTube video by CGP Gray published in 2014. It talks about how technological advancements, especially making computers smarter and more able to think and make decisions, will increasingly make humans unnecessary. It was made in time where AI research was still in its …
A fascinating summary of recent AI research: AI Sleeper Agents A sleeper agent is an AI that acts innocuous until it gets some trigger, then goes rogue. … So there’s been a dispute in the AI safety community - if for some reason you start with an AI sleeper agent, and you train it on normal …
A really interesting video with some details about how the Stockfish chess engine works and what makes it so good at chess: .embed-container { position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden; max-width: 100%; } .embed-container iframe, .embed-container object, …
I feel like that as much hype as AI has gotten, rightfully so, the people advocating for caution and restraint, such as the Effective Altruism movement, have not been very popular. Part of that is just being in the unenviable and intrinsically unpopular position of a naysayer, but I think a large …
This will be huge, if true: A genetically modified bacterium that outcompetes bacteria causing tooth decay (Hacker News discussion): Lantern Bioworks says they have a cure for tooth decay. Their product is a genetically modified bacterium which infects your mouth, outcompetes all the …
As much hype and attention that the machine learning / artificial intelligence field gets, and in spite of some impressive results that have come out of it in the form of e.g. ChatGPT, overall we have very little understanding in exactly how do these models work. We can train them, and we can use …
I’ve encountered a statement today in a random blog post about the IBM PowerPC 600 series that broke my brain for a minute while I was trying to figure out what it could possibly have meant, so now I’m going to subject you to it as well. Here goes: Moving a register to itself is …
I was reading California suspends Cruise’s autonomous vehicle deployment, which is about a self-driving car company’s (Cruise) failures, and how regulators banned them because they were deemed unsafe. The triggering incident: In the Order of Suspension, the California DMV said that the …
Did you know that Nike has smart sneakers, since like 2019? I certainly have not, and I am having difficulty figuring out what to do with this piece of information, so I am posting about it here. The Verge has an article on the topic, which sometimes reads like a parody of itself: Hands-on with …
I’ve come across The Techno-Optimist Manifesto and, well, I have thoughts. (I know, it was bound to happen eventually.) I agree with a lot of the points, perhaps even with most of them, but the rest strikes me as plainly naive: As techno-optimists, we believe that we must, and we will, create …
Beauty is the promise of happiness. (Stendhal) I’ve been reading Ted Chiang’s short story collection Stories of Your Life and Others and I have to say that I can really recommend it. I’m rarely in the mood for short stories, but every single story here presents a unique and …
And so it… begins? Continues? Let’s say continues to begin: Mushroom pickers urged to avoid foraging books on Amazon that appear to be written by AI (seen on Hacker News). Amateur mushroom pickers have been urged to avoid foraging books sold on Amazon that appear to have been written …
Installing NVIDIA Graphics drivers have become annoying. For one, they bundle this GeForce Experience horribleness in it, which requires an NVIDIA account (WTF is that and why would I ever want one?) but in turn has a lot of useful features locked behind it: automatic driver updates, for one. …
I’ve been reading Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. In the first chapter The new human agenda, the author gives his interpretation of history and how humanity has ended up as it is today due to scientific and technological development – roughly as follows: humans seeking comfort …
I’m a big fan of traveling by trains, and it always pains me how impractical it is in most parts of the world, even in places where they would make economic and environmental sense. Europe has been getting better at this, with excellent high-speed rail connections from Amsterdam to Paris for …
It’s not exactly controversial to say that online dating is awful, at least for those seeking heterosexual relationships. It sucks very differently for men and women though, and from what I hear it can actually be pretty good for homosexual relationships. (Especially for gay men, I think? I …
It’s turtles all the way down: The following anecdote is told of William James. […] After a lecture on cosmology and the structure of the solar system, James was accosted by a little old lady. “Your theory that the sun is the centre of the solar system, and the earth is a ball …
Oh wow, now this is something: A Microsoft font may have exposed corruption in Pakistan: The Microsoft font Calibri is now a key piece of evidence in a corruption investigation surrounding Pakistan’s prime minister. Investigators noticed that documents handed over by the prime minister’s daughter, …
Facebook (err, sorry, Meta) is launching their Twitter competitor today in the US in the form of a new stand-alone app called Threads. The Verge has a good summary on what is known: Instagram’s Threads: all the updates on the new Twitter competitor. I can also recommend the Hacker News thread; it …
A fascinating deep-dive from New York Magazine and The Verge into how AI models – including ChatGPT, Bard, and other LLMs (Large Language Models) – are trained, and the industry that provides the data, control, and feedback: Inside the AI factory […] ChatGPT seems so human …
StillDrinking has a lot of great essays. He has a way with words that makes reading his articles both entertaining and illuminating at the same time – a powerful combination. Anyway, their essay on AI and ChatGPT, and how the world we have built will continue manages to be human-hostile in …