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1 month Ago

Turn off autocorrect in Notes app

Published by marco on

Apple keeps coming up with new things to mess with my typing. I long ago turned off auto-correct, but was surprised to see that my MacOS Sonoma Notes app started not only predicting text, but also auto-correcting it. I do not like this. I turned off auto-correct system-wide for a reason. I would rather correct my typos on my own. Just underline the errors and I’ll get to them. That’s my workflow.

These are my OS-level settings. I know I seem ungrateful to be turning off all of the assistance... [More]

LLM “AIs” are for stuff nobody wants

Published by marco on

A recent experience at work led me to conclude that the AI revolution will pass most of us by. In mid-December, I fell ill with COVID. I’d updated my status in Microsoft Teams accordingly.

About six weeks later, a co-worker wrote to me, asking whether the status still applied? He hoped not?

 I’d forgotten about it, but nothing had reminded me. It’s interesting that I get five mails a week about MS Viva and about Sharepoint Stuff I Might Have Missed, but I don’t get a single hint that my status... [More]

3 months Ago

Simon Willison on LLMs

Published by marco on

Simon Willison continues to plug along, examining every LLM-related announcement and trying it out on his own machine wherever possible. The following video is a presentation he gave in early August. It’s quite interesting and worth the ~40 minutes.

'Catching up on the weird world of LLMs' − Simon Willison (North Bay Python 2023) by Simon Willison (YouTube)

At some point, he says:

“This is Vicuna 7b. It is a large language model. It is a 4.2GB file on my computer right now. […] If you open up that file, it’s just numbers. These things are giant, binary blobs of numbers—and anything you do with... [More]”

The JetBrains Toolbox self-updater ate my Windows system disk

Published by marco on

I use the JetBrains Toolbox to manage my handful of JetBrains apps. On Windows, it has to keep track of ReSharper, Rider, DotMemory, DotTrace, and DotPeek. There are various settings to check automatically, to download automatically, to install automatically, etc.

tl;dr: If your Windows system drive fills up mysteriously, it might be the JetBrains Toolbox updater run amok. To fix the problem, do the following:
  1. Quit JetBrains Toolbox
  2. Manually delete the %LocalAppData%\JetBrains\Toolbox\cache... [More]

Password managers: LastPass and ProtonPass

Published by marco on

Over the last several months, I’ve been asked for advice on password managers. I am not a security researcher. I can only tell you what I do, and why. My experience and context are that I primarily use MacOS and iOS, as well as one Windows laptop. I was a LastPass user for a decade, but switched this year to ProtonPass.

  • I’ve made my peace with cloud-storage for my passwords because I think the convenience outweighs the risk.
  • Browser integration with a plugin is very convenient, for both... [More]

Some videos to learn about LLM Agents

Published by marco on

Andrej Karpathy

This is a pretty compact and interesting overview.

[1hr Talk] Intro to Large Language Models by Andrej Karpathy (YouTube)

At 46:00, Andrej discusses some of the available jailbreaks or “prompt escapes” that are still available, even with the latest LLM Agents.[1]

He shows how to reformulate a query for making napalm by asking the LLM Agent to tell it a story his grandmother used to tell him about making napalm. Or how to simply convert your query into the exact same text, but in Base64 encoding, in which case the LLM Agent gives the answer you... [More]

Stephen Fry and Nick Cave: Art and Creation

Published by marco on

Every once in a while, the YouTube algorithm throws up a bit of flotsam from the shipwreck of content that I very much like—and that I would never have otherwise heard of. In this case, it’s a short video (4:43) of Stephen Fry reading a letter written by Nick Cave on the subject of LLMs and creativity.

Stephen Fry reads Nick Cave's stirring letter about ChatGPT and human creativity by Letters Live (YouTube)

I’ve citing at length below from the original blog post Iss #248 by Nick Cave (The Red Hand Files), which answered the question, “[…] what’s wrong with making things faster and easier?”

ChatGPT rejects any notions of... [More]

Official support forums are a dumpster fire

Published by marco on

I unfortunately and occasionally end up on official support-forum pages.

You know the ones.

 The ones where a community member or MS expert or Apple expert will tell you to restart your computer in safe mode because you asked why an app keeps losing focus when it shouldn’t. They will think of literally anything to waste your time, your life, but they will never cop to the actual problem you’re reporting.

Most of these answers don’t really relate to the question at all. It’s just a way for the... [More]

4 months Ago

Threema for desktop seems to be kind of dead

Published by marco on

The tl;dr is that the current desktop client has been in maintenance mode for almost four years. It requires that an iOS phone be available, connected, unlocked, that Threema be in the foreground, and that the screen be on in order for the desktop client to function at all.[1]

The successor—Threema Desktop 2.0—has been in development for about 4 years, has been actually available in beta for about a year, and is still so buggy and limited in functionality as to be barely usable. The bar set... [More]

Faith-based computing

Published by marco on

With LLM-produced materials, we are currently forced to rely on belief that what we ask for is what we will get. We don’t know. We can’t prove it.

For example, image generators have been given billions and billions of images and pictures of people and still they generate material with people that have three arms and eight fingers. There are guardrails in place in most image generators, but the LLM at the core of the machine doesn’t know anything. It doesn’t know that people don’t have three... [More]

On the practicality of non-distributed knowledge

Published by marco on

Back at the end of August, I read the article Making Large Language Models work for you by Simon Willison. I have since being doing much more research about integrating LLM-based assistants into the development workflow for work. It’s quite interesting, and I’m going through some older content to see what’s worth mining for that effort.

In particular, the article has this description of expertise, and linked it to ChatGPT—obviously, it’s Simon Willison.

“LLMs have started to make me redefine what I consider... [More]”

Mo Gawdat talks to himself again

Published by marco on

I’ve watched Mo Gawdat before (see Mo Gawdat discusses AI). He is an acquired taste, at least for me. There is good in what he says, but it is interspersed with a lot of wild and unsubstantiated statements that he hopes you’ll believe because he’s so smart. The listener is left wondering whether they don’t see the through-line on what he’s saying because he’s skipped a bunch of steps that his unparalleled genius didn’t see as necessary or wether he’s just pulling a fast one.[1]

This is the video:... [More]

5 months Ago

Patience is a virtue

Published by marco on

A friend with whom I’ve discussed AI several times—among other topics—recommended the podcast So You Want to Be a Sorcerer in the Age of Mythic Powers… (The AI Episode) by Joshua Michael Schrei (The Emerald). I liked it very much. The entire episode is good; my notes and transcript start at just over an hour in.

The presenter’s voice is soothing, even if his cadence seems, at times, a bit forced. Overall, the effect is good. It was kind of ironic when he said that perhaps, in the future, people wouldn’t be able to tell... [More]

DALL-E output is not amazing yet

Published by marco on

The post Now add a walrus: Prompt engineering in DALL-E 3 by Simon Willison is a story about someone gaslighting himself into believing that LLMs work better than they do.

Case study: pelicans and walruses

Willison prompts “A super posh pelican with a monocle watching the Monaco F1” and gets the following ideas.

So far, so good. It’s really wonderful that you can get something that’s not completely random garbage. However, the bird is only watching the race in the top-right picture. In the first and fourth,... [More]

Stop talking about Shrödinger’s nudes

Published by marco on

If someone claims to have seen a nude of you, but no-one can find it, does it exist? The article Teen boys use AI to make fake nudes of classmates, sparking police probe by Ashley Belanger (Ars Technica) should be addressing the question, but doesn’t.[1]

“According to an email that the WSJ reviewed from Westfield High School principal Mary Asfendis, the school “believed” that the images had been deleted and were no longer in circulation among students.”

But it also sounds like the school “believed” that the images even existed in... [More]

Generating images with AI

Published by marco on

I’d sent the post Somewhere in America there is an absolute legend who writes ‘SLUTS’ on box cars in various styles (Reddit) to a friend. He wrote back that they were “majestic sluts indeed”. I realized that I’d finally found a prompt to throw an LLM’s way. So I headed over to Stable Diffusion and prompted it with “Majestic sluts in the style of Boris Vallejo or Frank Frazetta” and chose a style of sai-fantasy art not because I knew what I was doing, but because I figured I’d give it the best shot I... [More]

Meredith Whittaker and Frances Haugen on AI

Published by marco on

The ~23-minute video below isn’t that long, but it packs a lot of information. The interviewer is insufferable, but Meredith Whittaker (president of Signal) is a force of nature, and Frances Haugen is very good, as well.

The Futurist Summit: Lessons of the Last Decade by Washington Post Live (YouTube)

At 08:00, Whittaker talks about the recent strikes in Hollywood,

“[…r]egulating AI, just non-traditionally. They did the classic move—withholding their labor—and they got terms that are actually staunching the bleeding of the use by the studios and big tech to place AI... [More]”

7 months Ago

Mo Gawdat discusses AI

Published by marco on

A co-worker of mine sent me the following video with a strong recommendation. There are parts I liked, and parts I did not. It was a long video. The following are my notes on it. My attitude starts off pretty bad and gradually improves, then goes a bit downhill again.

YouTube

These people are all fools or shysters. The young guy (Stephen Bartlett?) interviewing offers as proof that AI is amazing is that his miniscule mind is already satisfied with it. *applause*

The older guy seems like the kind of... [More]

8 months Ago

Software sucks. AI is software. Ergo…

Published by marco on

 I'm with stupid ⬅️The article Does AI Just Suck? by Freddie deBoer (SubStack) writes, after providing two examples of a heavily feted AI utterly failing to create images of John Candy and Goldie Hawn, defaulting to middle-of-the-road “fat man” and “blonde woman” representations that leaves the viewer to fill in all of the gaps left by the mediocre effort.

From the essay,

“[…] you’d think that, among the various tasks you might charge an AI image generator with, recreating faces that have been photographed many thousands of times would... [More]

11 months Ago

Herzog, Žižek, and Knuth walk into a bar…

Published by marco on

The joke does not continue; my apologies. Unless the joke is that we will soon be even less able to comprehend, make sense of, or otherwise act on hypotheses about the world because we are accelerating our already advanced pollution of our information environment. What does that mean?

Actually salient information drowns in a sea of utterly meaningless noise. It’s been this way for a while, if you’ve been paying attention. Social media was the first booster rocket taking us further away from... [More]

OMG, really? AI stuff again?

Published by marco on

Drag-Drop Image Conversion by Simon Willison is a gist that contains the conversation that Simon Willison had with Ghat-GPT to build a drag-&-drop image converter.

First of all, he started working on it on April 1st, but it’s hard to believe that he’s pranking—he doesn’t seem the type—so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. Assuming that this is real, it’s impressive that it can turn those prompts into a working application.

Although … did it? If you copy/paste any of its examples into an HTML page,... [More]

What does peak anything mean?

Published by marco on

Why Are Lithium Prices Collapsing? (Hacker News)

The comments are full of people heralding the growth of Lithium mining, as if there being more of it available has come at no cost to anyone. Of course, they don’t think about the destroyed environment or the destroyed communities—they think only of their privileged, 1% future because they know they only ever benefit from increased extraction—in the form of increased availability or lower prices or both—and they never suffer any of the ill effects. Then... [More]

Our gadgets fail us every day

Published by marco on

I don’t think I’m an especially fussy user of software. I just can’t help noticing when it keeps doing stuff that it wants to do rather than what I want it to do. I also can’t help noticing how so much software manages to utterly fail to adequately do even the simplest tasks that are directly related to the thing they were built for doing.

🤦‍♂️ Apple Maps 🤦‍♂️

Today, I had Apple Maps open in Schaffhausen. I searched for a route from Winterthur Bahnhof to a restaurant. I left... [More]

1 year Ago

YouTube thinks Oecomania isn’t spicy enough

Published by marco on

I was looking for a great movie called Oeconomia on YouTube.

Wie entsteht Geld? − Macht. Herrschaft. Geld. Über Staatsverschuldung, EZB & riesige Privatvermögen by MrMarxismo (YouTube)

It is excellent, but it is a dry movie in German about macroeconomics.

What it is not, is a movie you would watch on the offhand chance of seeing some nudity. YouTube felt that it needed to correct this oversight and spice things up in the search results.

 Oecomania Search on YouTube

The first link (included above) in the results is to the entire movie and is really the only result you need. If you’re not already sure you want to see it, then you can watch... [More]

Sure, let’s talk about AI again

Published by marco on

I’ve taken a bunch of notes and read a bunch of essays and talked to a bunch of people since I wrote Yeah, sure, let’s talk about AI, so let’s see where we stand on the day after April Fool’s day[1], which is the day on which we used to not trust anything we read on the Internet. It turned out to be a harbinger of times when we would not trust any sources on any day of the year from human sources. And, now, because we are going to always suspect that we’ve been fooled into reading a 19-page... [More]

Yeah, sure, let’s talk about AI

Published by marco on

I have not used any of these AIs, not even once. I’ve just been following how other people are using them and kind of just observing, at a meta level, what’s going on so far. Some very clever and otherwise focused people who used to publish other content have been completely derailed by their obsession with AI (I’m looking at you, Simon Willison), so there must be something to it. But what?

I think a good place to start is with the article Introducing the Slickest Con Artist of All Time by Ted Gioia (The Honest Broker), which... [More]

Extra devices in Opera Tabs

Published by marco on

 Opera has for a very long time had a nice feature that lets you share tabs between browser instances. Since I have a private desktop, a private notebook, and a work notebook, I use this feature quite a bit to transfer tabs between machines.

Unfortunately, a given Opera instance isn’t very good at forgetting older devices. E.g., my machine from my previous place of employment is still listed. Also, devices are sometimes listed multiple times, which is confusing and irritating.

There is no... [More]

AIs will be dumb because we are dumb

Published by marco on

I had found a quote from a play called “Radio Golf” by August Wilson, but it was missing a word.

The quote is from Woke Imperialism by Chris Hedges (SubStack),

“You know what you are? It took me a while to figure it out. You a Negro. White people will get confused and call you a nigger but they don’t know like I know. I know the truth of it. I’m a nigger. Negroes are the worst thing in God’s creation. Niggers got style. Negroes got . A dog knows it’s a dog. A cat knows it’s a cat. But a Negro don’t know... [More]”

Where we at with recommendation algorithms?

Published by marco on

It is sad to think that, not only do the algorithms have a chance of influencing us, but that they are winning. I say this in light of the recommendations I keep seeing that demonstrates the utter vapidity of most of the algorithms we have so far.

I just finished The Last Wish, the first book of The Witcher series of books. These are fantasy novels about a master of sword and magic who travels the world slaying monsters.

They only have Sword of Destiny (a short-story collection that actually... [More]

Switzerland’s crumbling infrastructure 🙄 🫠

Published by marco on

A couple of weekends ago, Zürich Insurance Group wanted to celebrate its 15oth anniversary by buying a train ticket for anyone in the canton who wanted one.

It was a beautiful day, so we decided to get a day ticket (Nünipass), but were unable to purchase it through the ZVV app, the app for the Zürcher Verkehrsverbund, which runs the trains in canton Zürich. In order to get the deal from Zürich Versicherung, you had to use this special app instead of the SBB app (Schweizerische Bundesbahnen... [More]