tingilinde

sean carroll and yejin choi on llms, chatgpt and the future

Required listening if you're interested in the subject

proprioception and a tail

Robots take a couple of pages from the animal kingdom.

 

chomsky and others on chatgpt

Language is thought - machine learning is neither.

snip

...

That day may come, but its dawn is not yet breaking, contrary to what can be read in hyperbolic headlines and reckoned by injudicious investments. The Borgesian revelation of understanding has not and will not — and, we submit, cannot — occur if machine learning programs like ChatGPT continue to dominate the field of A.I. However useful these programs may be in some narrow domains (they can be helpful in computer programming, for example, or in suggesting rhymes for light verse), we know from the science of linguistics and the philosophy of knowledge that they differ profoundly from how humans reason and use language. These differences place significant limitations on what these programs can do, encoding them with ineradicable defects.

It is at once comic and tragic, as Borges might have noted, that so much money and attention should be concentrated on so little a thing — something so trivial when contrasted with the human mind, which by dint of language, in the words of Wilhelm von Humboldt, can make “infinite use of finite means,” creating ideas and theories with universal reach.

...

 

 

the story of a calculator

PCalc is the best calculator applications for OS X and iOS..  earlier versions worked on pre-OS X Macs.  I started using it in the mid 90s because it had an option that turned it into an RPN calculator (I grew up with HP calculators).  It recently turned 30.  Here's the story.  If you're looking for a calculator, I recommend this one!

critical software and lack of support

All to often the support of mission critical software falters.  It could happen in particle physics. People need to think about proper incentive structures.

snip

...

Particle physicists use some of the longest equations in all of science. To look for signs of new elementary particles in collisions at the Large Hadron Collider, for example, they draw thousands of pictures called Feynman diagrams that depict possible collision outcomes, each one encoding a complicated formula that can be millions of terms long. Summing formulas like these with pen and paper is impossible; even adding them with computers is a challenge. The algebra rules we learn in school are fast enough for homework, but for particle physics they are woefully inefficient.

...

 

 

algorithm and implementation differences

A tip of the hat to Greg  - tl,dw:  C++ and cleverness beats python and little thought..  not terribly surprising. 

small rewards work

A massive study of motivational techniques for exercise.

 

fixing the youtube player

Take a look at Vinegar if you use Safari on MacOS or iOS.  Two bucks and it's been wonderful for the few days I've used it.

snip

...

The benefits include:

• • The removal of in-video ads.
  • Prevent YouTube from tracking your play/pause/seek activities.
  • Restore picture-in-picture functionality.
  • The videos don’t stop playing if you switch to another browser tab.
  • You can choose the audio-only stream to keep the music playing when Safari is in the background.

Vinegar works on embedded YouTube videos on other websites, too. I will consider adding support for other video sites in the future.

...

 

 

 

duckduckgo is the number 2 mobile search engine

Bigger than Bing. 

I mostly gave up on Google search two years ago..  (I still use YouTube a lot though)

 

 

tiny tools

A directory of tiny computational tools and toys.

a tip of the hat to Lynn