The AI-nuclear weapons analogy, explained : Vox catalogues some similarities and differences between the two technologies.
Recently I read:
The Doc Web: A deep dive into the dynamics of publishing to the web via Google Docs.
A woman, blogging: this is a political act: Blogging can be empowering, especially for people who otherwise might not have a voice - but it’s not without risk.
Vox's take on "Is AI the new nuclear weapons?"
Last year, Vox laid out their view as to how true or useful the “artificial intelligence is the new nuclear weapons” analogy actually is. The high-level summary of their take is: Similarities: The scientific progress on the technology has been very rapid. There is potential for mass …
'Oppenheimer' tells the story of the man behind the world's first nuclear bomb, and his later regrets
🎥 Watched Oppenheimer. This is the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who led theLos Alamos Laboratory, assigned in 1942 to the task of developing the world’s first nuclear weapon. Whilst he appeared to some reservations from the start, the race was on given his fear that the German …
Tell me how you measure me and I will tell you how I will behave. If you measure me in an illogical way don’t complain about illogical behaviour. Eliyahu M. Goldratt, from The Haystack Syndrome.
The New York Times advises us to believe Trump when he tells us what he's going to do
We’re not far away from the next US presidential election, which is to be held this November 5th. Either Harris or Trump are destined to walk away the victor, with the polls being scarily ambiguous on which it will be. It’s a fairly scary time, even for those of us outside of the US. …
The Pudding visualises the process of getting an abortion as a maze
The Pudding visualises the often laborious and damaging path some who needs an abortion needs to take if situated in the US as a series of mazes. Even whilst. Roe vs Wade was in force the process was often full of “twists, turns and roadblocks”. But now, since its overturning in 2022, …
Two types of information overload: the situational vs the ambient
I have an information problem. There are 278 books on my “Want to read list”. There are 1,794 articles saved in my read-later app. There appear to be 2,241 episodes in my podcasts “to listen to” queue. The knowledge of hundreds of pending unread journal articles put me off …
Currently trying out a combo of FreshRSS and NetNewsWire to experience the joy (?) of aggregating, managing and perusing RSS feeds without relying on someone else’s cloud service. FreshRSS is “A free, self-hostable feed aggregator”. Think Feedly, Google Reader (RIP) et al. but …
Found a new creepy critter in the garden, just in time for the Halloween season. My phone believes this to be an Araneus Quadratus, also known as a “four-spot orb-weaver”.
The wrongness of 'If you've got nothing to hide then you've nothing to fear'
“If you’ve got nothing to hide then you’ve nothing to fear” is a common response to those of us who worry about the ever-increasing rise of systematic and universal surveillance and the peel-back of privacy. It’s snappy and intuitive. But wrong. I prefer one of the …
New Scientist Live show 2024 books list
Inevitably after attending any type of show that features something even vaguely sciencey the list of books that I simply must read expands. Here, as a service to anyone else similarly afflicted, is a list of books from as many of the speakers from the recent New Scientist Live show as I could …
TIL: Thanks to the innate lack of privacy that the technology has, whilst we might not know who “Satoshi Nakamoto”, inventor of Bitcoin, actually is, people do believe that he has enough of it - between 750k and 1.1 million coins - to be worth somewhere between 50 and 75 billion dollars …
Added a few more books to my absolutely unrealistic “Books about AI I want to read” list.
It is a battle evident in the psyche of many partnered people, and especially so in midlife. It shows itself, even within a happy long-term relationship, in the crystal-clear desire to be left alone. To be allowed to work undisturbed, to perhaps write or paint or just sit at the computer, to think …
Ken Follett's Fall of Giants tells fictional-but-realistic stories of family life in the early twentieth century
📚 Finished listening to Fall of Giants by Ken Follett. This is the first book of Ken Follet’s “Century Trilogy” which sets out to allow the reader to follow the stories of five families through the highs and lows of the twentieth-century. This one covers the start of the century, …
Ryan Broderick succinctly sums up why the contemporary mega-hype around AI doesn’t depend on the systems we have being all that good, let alone ‘superintelligent’. …the so-called AI boom we’re in right now is really selling two things, neither of which have to be very …
New Scientist Live talks 2024
Journeying back from the ever-fascinating New Scientist Live show, 2024 edition. A list of the talks I managed to get to in person: Weird science: An introduction to anomalistic psychology, by Christopher French. A life of crime? By Anne Coxon. Our accidental universe, by Chris Lintott. Generation …
I’m curious about precisely what level of surveillance technology is powering this (admittedly useful) public toilet info sign. Hoping Meta isn’t somehow linking me to my…biological requirements.
Busting ghosts for breakfast.
Well this is one of the more aggravating CAPTCHAs I’ve had to solve. Especially as 2/3 of the time it was the last of the twelve images of dice that was the correct one.
A disappointing selection for the next Conservative leader
Looks like the next UK Conservative leader stands a good chance of being a right-wing weirdo. Following a surprise outcome of the leadership election, the two prospects MPs are putting to party members are Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick. That’s a shame. The desire from Cleverly to see his …
Google's creators envisaged that advertising-funded search engines are a bad idea (but made one anyway)
May we never forget that back in the early days, before Google decided to not not be evil, its founders were very well aware of the perils of what later came to be the funding model behind their own search engine. The classic citation for this is Brin and Page’s 1998 paper “The Anatomy …
TIL: Until the 1948 Representation of the People Act, graduates of certain universities in the UK were permitted to vote twice in our general elections. Once for wherever they lived, as everyone else was entitled to do - but they also got another vote corresponding to a metaphorical …
'The Age of Surveillance Capitalism' explains why Big Tech does what it does, and why it's dangerous
📚 Finished reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. I’ve had this book on my top priority reading list ever since it came out in 2018. It still somehow took me five years to get to it. But I’m glad I did - I wasn’t at all disappointed with my belated reading …
From Ars Technica: Streaming services say they make more revenue per user on average if the subscriber uses an ad tier I was curious about that. I suppose it just means we’ll be exposed to ever more ads, of ever greater obnoxiousness, irrespective of what we’re prepared to pay until …
When it comes to listening to podcasts I’m a big Pocket Casts user. Whilst it has a comprehensive free version there’s also a paid “Plus” edition I’ve never gotten around to trying. And now you can get it free for a year! This link will sign you up for a year’s …