Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Category: Computers

  • AI black box magic

    Reading an email about C3 AI being developed to locate extremists. This nugget to start put me off. Siebel: This is the first time we’ve done things in computer science that weren’t a mathematical certainty, other than random number generators. Everything else we’ve done in computer science, up until this day, has been deterministic. Every…

  • Generative AI instead of search

    About 6 months ago, I played a bit with large language models. It was interesting. The responses were like a middle school kid didn’t read the book, but tried to summarize the Cliff Notes. The past couple days, there has a been a problem in another IT area affecting my ability to do my work.…

  • Return to personal archiving

    A prior habit saved so many possibly interesting things that I mostly never returned to. Think of it like instead of hundreds of open tabs, I collected thousands of items. Most recently the tool to collect them was Pocket, but I’ve abandoned huge troves of items in other bookmarking sites or apps. Evernote, Diigo, Instapaper,…

  • App ad network malware

    My home router’s security feature blocked some things when I was web browsing in increasing frequency. It got really bad. The AP and NBC News both experienced redirects to a page spoofing my ISP asking personal questions to give me a smartphone in the same hour. Obviously fake. Obviously a scam. Maybe phishing. These were…

  • WordPress and Mastodon

    Months ago, Automattic acquired the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress that will publish on the Mastodon network as a federated instance through the ActivityPub protocol. The blog basically becomes a server of sorts in the fediverse. That sounded cool, so I installed the plugin. This post will serve as a test to see if it works.…

  • Human hallucinations

    Listened to a Marketplace Tech episode about AI backed banking chatbots. A line caught my attention.: Sometimes people characterize made-up statements as hallucinations. I think that’s giving a little too much humanity to a robot, but if you would be comfortable with a teller just fully making something up to a member of the public,…

  • Short descriptions matter

    To me, the most important part of an email is the subject line. What it tells me factors into whether I read it immediately or get back to it later. Later might take months as I don’t really have the time to read my email. Same thing with tickets. Additionally, several times a week, someone…

  • Federated social media

    Back in April, I learned about Mastodon. I made an account, but never used it. I made another and started using it. People are leaving Twitter. Many of those to Mastodon, so I will find them. You can find me there as @ezrasf@mas.to , so connect with me. The concept is interesting. There are many…

  • Hozered Start Me Up

    So, I dug out my old laptop and found that it was very low on space. The last time I used it was before Dropbox started using the Save hard drive space feature, so it had a ton of local files that ought to be online only. I did a stupid thing and tried to…