Archive for Computers
Interesting paper: “Talking About Large Language Models,” by Murray Shanahan, discussing some of the ways that we talk about AI systems like ChatGPT. “As we build systems whose capabilities more and more resemble those of humans, despite the fact that those systems work in ways that are fundamentally different from the way humans work, it […]
In 2019, a friend pointed to a web interface for talking to an AI. At the time, I tried interacting with it a bit; here are four of those interactions. That system wasn’t nearly as sophisticated as ChatGPT, but it was fun. The first two responses end abruptly, because the system is set to stop […]
Deepmind has created a new “generalist agent” AI, known as Gato. “The same network with the same weights can play Atari, caption images, chat, stack blocks with a real robot arm and much more, deciding based on its context whether to output text, joint torques, button presses, or other tokens.” …Which is neat, but the […]
Today’s small victory: I closed something like 150 tabs on my iOS devices. I did it because of an annoying longstanding iPadOS Safari bug: if you have a few dozen tabs open, and you force-quit the app, then when you restart the app, it often throws away all of your tabs. I forgot and did […]
I spent quite a lot of yesterday fixing my automated backup system at work. Most important bit of this post: In recent versions of macOS, if you want a scheduled Bash shell script to write to your disk, you need to explicitly give Bash “Full Disk Access” permissions. Side note: In most contexts, using a […]
I’m seeing reactions that I think are worth signal-boosting regarding conventions held in virtual spaces like Gather (aka GatherTown) and Kumospace. The core of the issue is that although those kinds of spaces may be really useful and accessible for some people, they’re really inaccessible and hard to use for a lot of other people. […]
Summary of today’s Apple Books adventure, so I don’t forget what’s happened so far. This is primarily for my own future reference; not expecting anyone to read the whole thing. There were two problems: I have something like 700-800 ebooks. I used to be able to sync them, using iTunes, from my Mac to my […]
I’ve been continuing intermittently to work on the puzzles provided in the Turing Tumble book. I think last time I mentioned Turing Tumble, several of y’all said that yours hadn’t arrived yet; have they arrived? Have you been doing the puzzles? I’m getting near the end, but some of the later ones are really hard. […]
Last night, in a successful effort to procrastinate on some overdue work tasks, I looked up how much a nearby house recently sold for, which indirectly led me to update the list of assets in my will. (My will, such as it is, is currently just a text file in the Documents folder of my […]
When I was in 7th and 8th grade, at Wilbur Middle School, the school's computer lab had a couple of...
Late in 2015, I read an issue of Destinies (a “paperback magazine”) from 1980; it included a piece by Jerry...
In one of the boxes I pulled out of the garage a couple weeks ago, there were 100+ 3.5" floppy...