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Links August 2023

This is an interesting idea from Bruce Schneier, an “AI Dividend” paid to every person for their contributions to the input of ML systems [1]. We can’t determine who’s input was most used so sharing the money equally seems fair. It could end up as yet another justification for a Universal Basic Income.

The Long […]

GPT Systems and Relationships

Sam Hartman wrote an interesting blog post about his work as a sex and intimacy educator and how GPT systems could impact that [1].

I’ve read some positive reviews of Replika – a commercial system that is somewhat promoted as a counsellor [2], so I decided to try it out. In my brief trial it […]

My Predictions for the Ukraine War

There are a lot of people talking about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and a lot of moving goalposts in such discussions. I think that everyone who wants to advocate for it should publish what they expect to happen and what specific things they consider as victory conditions.

When Russia first invaded I thought they […]

Links July 2023

Phys.org has an interesting article about finding evidence for nanohertz gravity waves [1]. 1nano-Herz is a wavelength of 31.7 light years!

Wired has an interesting story about OpenAI saying that no further advances will be made with larger training models [2].

Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders wrote an insightful article about the need for government […]

Matrix

Introduction

In 2020 I first setup a Matrix [1] server. Matrix is a full featured instant messaging protocol which requires a less stringent definition of “instant”, messages being delayed for minutes aren’t that uncommon in my experience. Matrix is a federated service where the servers all store copies of the room data, so when you […]

Sandboxing Phone Apps

As a follow up to Wayland [1]:

A difficult problem with Linux desktop systems (which includes phones and tablets) is restricting application access so that applications can’t mess with each other’s data or configuration but also allowing them to share data as needed. This has been mostly solved for Android but that involved giving up […]

Links June 2023

Tablet Magazine has an interesting article about Jewish men who fought in the military for Nazi Germany [1]. I’m surprised that they didn’t frag their colleagues.

Dropbox has an insightful interview with a lawyer about the future of machine learning in the legal profession [2]. This seems like it could give real benefits to society […]

Running a ChatGPT Type System

Alpaca

I’ve just done some experiments running ChatGPT type programs. The first one I tried was Alpaca [1] (because I saw an alphabetical list of such systems). Here’s the 4GB data file [2]. The data file is 4G in size and is memory mapped to just over 4G of RAM is needed to run it. […]

Cheap Peripherals for Work

A problem with a lot of the purchase of peripherals is that they don’t match the needs of the users and often get thrown away long before they wear out.

At many companies when a new employee starts they are given a laptop (expensive corporate asset), a cheap headset for video calls, and optionally a […]

BOINC and Idle Users

The BOINC distributed computing client in Debian (Bookworm and previous releases) can check the idle time via the X11 protocol and run GPU jobs when the interactive user is idle, so the user gets GPU power for graphics when they need it and when it’s idle BOINC uses it. This doesn’t work for Wayland and […]