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Fear, FOMO, and the scientific exodus driven by ChatGPT

Nathan Lambert Apr 6Behind the curtain: what it feels like to work in AI right now

very single person I know working in AI these days (in both the academy and industry) has been sparked by the ChatGPT moment. The first iPhone moment of AI. Working in this environment is extremely straining, for a plethora of reasons — burnout, ambition, noise, influencers, financial upside, ethical worries, and more.

The ChatGPT spark has caused career changes, projects to be abandoned, and tons of people to try and start new companies in the area. The entire industry has been collectively shaken up — it added a ton of energy into the system. We now have model and product announcements on an almost daily basis. Talking to a professor friend in NLP, it’s to the point where all sorts of established researchers are ready to jump ship and join/build companies. This is not something that happens every day — getting academics to stop wanting to do research is a hilarious accomplishment. Everything just feels so frothy.

Graduate students are competing with venture-backed companies. From a high-level technologist’s perspective, it is awesome. From an engineer-on-the-ground’s perspective, it leaves some stability and naps to be desired. Seeing all of the noise makes it very hard to keep one’s head on straight and actually do the work.

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January 27, 2011 by Will Norris
While I haven’t had much time over the last year or so to spend actually writing code for DiSo, I’ve been really interested in the new direction Tantek has been taking things with his DiSo 2.0 concepts. Many of the early efforts in DiSo were focused just on how to move social data around the web (data formats, protocols, authentication mechanisms, etc). Tantek is taking a slightly different approach to this by first emphasizing the importance of data ownership. It’s not enough to simply pull in a copy of your content from social networks into your local repository. In order to truly own your data, the original should be on your site, and then copies pushed out to whatever social networks, with links pointing back to the original where appropriate. It may sound like a purely academic distinction, but it’s the difference between sharecropping and homesteading.

So just to prove that I don’t actually spend all of my time in the belly of the beast, I’m happy to announce a new project I’ve been working on – Hum. It’s a personal URL shortener for WordPress, inspired by Whistle. It’s important to note that this is not a traditional URL shortener like bit.ly or goo.gl that is designed for creating links to any arbitrary site on the web. Instead, a personal URL shortener is intended to link to your own content… your blog posts, your status updates, your photos. When pushing content from your site out to social networks, you often need the ability to link back to the original. Thanks to Twitter this means short URLs, and following DiSo principles, this means controlling those URLs. A URL shortener may not be sexy, but it’s necessary infrastructure for DiSo 2.0.

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[RAMAGE] – About ds106

Digital Storytelling (also affectionately known as ds106) is an open, online course that happens at various times throughout the year at the University of Mary Washington… but you can join in whenever you like and leave whenever you need. This course is free to anyone who wants to take it, and the only requirements are a real computer, a hardy internet connection, preferably a domain of your own and some commodity web hosting, and all the creativity you can muster.

In August-December 2013, we ran an experimental open version of ds106 where… THERE WAS NO TEACHER! What? How is that possible? Learn more about the idea for Headless ds106 and how it planned out including an unexpected group collaboration for the story of GIFACHROME.

The Headless ds106 content has been repackaged as an ongoing, not time bound Open DS106 Course Experience.

What is Digital Storytelling?

As to what exactly this course is all about, well according to Wikipedia Digital Storytelling is defined rather succinctly as “using digital tools so that ordinary people can tell their own real-life stories.” It then goes on to elaborate as follows:

Digital Storytelling is an emerging term, one that arises from a grassroots movement that uses new digital tools to help ordinary people tell their own “true stories” in a compelling and emotionally engaging form. These stories usually take the form of a relatively short story (less than 8 minutes) and can involve interactivity.

The term can also be a broader journalistic reference to the variety of emergent new forms of digital narratives (web-based stories, interactive stories, hypertexts, fan art/fiction, and narrative computer games).

As an emerging area of creative work, the definition of digital storytelling is still the subject of much debate.

There are a number of ideas and assumptions here that we will be interrogating over the course of ds106, namely the idea of “ordinary people,” “true stories,” and the debate around the meaning of this term.

The above article is rather vague about the details surrounding this emerging genre of narrative, and it is our responsibility to interrogate the term digital storytelling within the cultural context of our moment. This means each of you will be experimenting with your own digital platform for storytelling, as well as placing yourself within a larger narrative of networked conversation on the internet at large.

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Posted on January 8, 2023

by  Mark Gardner

Replied to Yes to ActivityPub, but no to Friends by Shelley Powers (Burningbird)

I decided to disable the Friends plug-in when I realized it was inserting every new feed item as a new post in my database. This could easily become unmanageable. Considering you can use a feed reader to read weblogs AND Mastodon accounts, it just didn’t seem worth the database burden.

I’ve also been mess­ing with the Friends and ActivityPub plu­g­ins for WordPress on my blog, and I share Shelley’s con­cerns about the for­mer bloat­ing the data­base with feed items. You can con­trol this some­what by set­ting reten­tion val­ues in days or a num­ber of posts, but you have to go into each friend’s Feeds tab and do it manually–there’s no default setting.

After read­ing that post, I’m also con­sid­er­ing dis­abling Friends in favor of a feed read­er, espe­cial­ly because (as Shelley also not­ed) there are gaps when with favorites and com­ment con­ver­sa­tions bridg­ing between WordPress and Mastodon servers. Like her, I’m not keen on installing a single-​user Mastodon instance or oth­er fedi­verse serv­er that requires man­ag­ing an unfa­mil­iar pro­gram­ming language.

My ide­al is a per­son­al web­site where I write every­thing, includ­ing long-​form arti­cles, short sta­tus­es, and replies like these. Folks can then find me via a sin­gle iden­ti­fi­able address and then subscribe/​follow the entire fire­hose of con­tent or choose sub­sets accord­ing to post types, top­ics, or tags. They’d then be able to reply or react on my site or their favored plat­form, which my site would col­lect regard­less of ori­gin, with sub­se­quent replies and reac­tions get­ting pushed out to them. Oh, and it should work with both ActivityPub clients and servers, IndieWeb sites, and syndicate/​backfeed to oth­er social net­works either with or akin to the Bridgy ser­vice I men­tioned above.

Amen !

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Reblog via Christian Bühlmann Data Skooping

Writing book reviews, to me, feels as the service we all ought to provide other scholars. I don’t post actual reviews on my website (instead, I post my reading notes because I don’t know if my notes are detailed enough to be an actual review, and whether I’ll do justice to the author), but I do have extensive experience writing reviews. Producing a book (or even editing a volume) is a tremendously challenging and taxing endeavour, so I believe book reviews should be done thoroughly, kindly and honestly.


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Choose from a one-click installer tool, or a command-line-based utility.

With the Windows 11 update, Microsoft’s Windows Store experiment is finally gaining some steam. But not every app is available on the Microsoft Store Preview. If you’re setting up a new Windows PC, or want to create a workflow that will update all your apps with one click (not just Microsoft Store apps), there are some compelling third-party options to consider.

You can use a one-click installer tool, or a command-line-based utility, depending on what you prefer.

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Nous voici donc entrés clairement dans une nouvelle ère stratégique où, dans un fondu enchaîné, nous glissons depuis dix ans des règles du « nouvel ordre mondial » à celles de la compétition des blocs. Nous passons ainsi d’un ensemble de règles du jeu des relations internationales et de l’emploi de la force à un autre, comme cela arrive tous les 10 à 30 ans.

Les forces armées sont normalement organisées en fonction de ces règles du jeu, avec cette difficulté que celles-­ci changent souvent brutalement alors qu’un outil militaire est lent à se transformer. La France doit donc faire face actuellement, avec ses alliés, à une confrontation forte avec la Russie, avec encore la petite force polyvalente de police internationale mise en place après la fin de la guerre froide. Assez logiquement, alors que le nouveau contexte rappelle par de très nombreux aspects cette même guerre froide, c’est sans doute de ce côté qu’il faut regarder pour voir ce qu’il faut faire et que nous avons oublié.

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[RAMAGE] – Did Lichtenstein create art or copy it? A new film stokes the controversy.

 Comics

“It’s theft,” says one 96-year-old comic-book artist who feels the famous pop-art icon unfairly appropriated his work. “It would be nice to be recognized.”


A side-by-side comparison of Russ Heath’s original comic-panel art, from DC Comics’ “All American Men of War #89″ (1962), and Roy Lichtenstein’s 1962 painting “Blam!” that appropriated the panel. The still is from a new documentary, which rotates the direction of Heath’s panel for clearer comparison. (Hussey-Cotton Films/Hussey-Cotton Films )

Hy Eisman sits at his professional drawing board, much the way he has for seven decades. He is reminiscing about penciling a comic-book image from a page that yielded him $10 back in the ’60s. He says his rendering, though, would soon inspire the pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, who became rich and famous by appropriating such comics without credit — and with a projector — for his large, highly prized canvases.

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A Quick Look at Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Zettelkasten: Zettel 1967
In response to a post last week, Stephen Downes reminded me that Ludwig Wittgenstein had a zettelkasten practice. In particular there is a translated and published book Zettel from 1967 which contains 717 zettels from Wittgenstein’s Nachlass, or works left behind following his death in 1951. I’ve had a copy lying around for a bit, but finally spent some time with it. The book cleverly has a parallel text form with the German on one side of the page and the English on the facing page. I’ve also seen translations of the book in both Spanish and Italian for those who might prefer those.
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[RAMAGE] – Let’s forget the term AI. Let’s call them Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences (SALAMI).

Because of this misconception, we proposed we should drop the usage of the term “Artificial Intelligence” and adopt a more appropriate and scoped-limited terminology for these technologies which better describe what these technologies are:  Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences.

Now we have redefined the name, will we still support the idea that SALAMI will develop some form of consciouness ?

Will SALAMI have emotions ?

Can SALAMI acquire a “personality” similar to humans’ ?

Will SALAMI ultimately overcome human limitations and develop a self superior to humans ?

Can you possibly fall in love with a SALAMI ?

Can we suddenly perceive a sense of how all these far flung (unrealistic) predictions look somewhat ridiculous ?

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[RAMAGE] – Zététique et autodéfense intellectuelle

CHAÎNE VIDÉO

Zététique et autodéfense intellectuelle

L’intégralité des cours donnés par Richard Monvoisin en 2016-2017 à l’Université Grenoble Alpes pour appréhender la démarche scientifique et sa portée critique à partir de ses frontières.

Retrouvez Richard Monvoisin sur :

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[RAMAGE] – You are not a parrot

Nobody likes an I-told-you-so. But before Microsoft’s Bing started cranking out creepy love letters; before Meta’s Galactica spewed racist rants; before ChatGPT began writing such perfectly decent college essays that some professors said, “Screw it, I’ll just stop grading”; and before tech reporters sprinted to claw back claims that AI was the future of search, maybe the future of everything else, too, Emily M. Bender co-wrote the octopus paper.

Bender is a computational linguist at the University of Washington. She published the paper in 2020 with fellow computational linguist Alexander Koller

 

Bender remains particularly fond of an alternative name for AI proposed by a former member of the Italian Parliament: “Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences.” Then people would be out here asking, “Is this SALAMI intelligent? Can this SALAMI write a novel? Does this SALAMI deserve human rights?” 

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[RAMAGE] – La Suisse : le beurre, l’argent du beurre et la comtesse en prime

27 mars 2023


Nicolas Gros-Verheyde  exportation d’armes, Neutralité, Suisse

(B2) La Suisse a développé une industrie de l’armement, et veut se rapprocher de l’Alliance atlantique mais interdit toute réexportation d’armes vers l’Ukraine. Au nom de sa neutralité. Les Européens devront en tirer des conséquences. Acheter à l’industrie suisse est aujourd’hui dangereux pour l’autonomie stratégique. Il faudra donc s’en passer.

Le cyber, un des domaines où la Suisse voudrait se rapprocher de l’OTAN (Photo : Armée suisse – prise de commandement du bataillon cyber 42 – Archives B2)

Que veut la Suisse ? Berne entend se rapprocher de l’OTAN comme de l’UE. C’est une volonté exprimée clairement dans un document publié par la Confédération en septembre dernier. La Suisse qui participe déjà à la plateforme d’interopérabilité de l’OTAN espère aussi obtenir le statut de partenaire privilégié, dit « nouvelles opportunités » alias EOP), réservé à quelques happy fews (Australie, Géorgie, Ukraine). La ministre suisse de la Défense, Viola Amherd, était mercredi au siège de l’OTAN pour tenter de convaincre ses interlocuteurs. Sans vraiment réussir.

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Ca y est, vous avez été placé sur le projet de vos rêves, qui va enfin vous permettre de laisser parler le génie qui est en vous! Mais… comment? pour des raisons de gestions d’équipe ou d’exigences du client, vous devez vous passer de votre système d’exploitation préféré pour travailler sur un système inconnu, et forcément moins pratique que celui auquel vous êtes habitués? Il est toujours possible d’effectuer des tâches similaires, mais il faut ré-apprendre à dire à la machine comment faire… Heureusement, cet ensemble d’équivalences d’instructions est là pour vous y aider!
De façon générale, les instructions par ligne de commande sont effectuées en bash (ou similaire) pour les distributions Linux, et en Dos (ou plus récemment Powershell) pour les distributions Windows. Ces systèmes d’exploitation et ces langages étant différents, il n’existe pas nécessairement d’équivalence directe entre deux commandes, et certains moyens détournés sont parfois nécessaires pour effectuer une opération particulière. C’est pourquoi cet petit manuel illustre plus différents moyens de parvenir à une même fin sur différents systèmes qu’une réelle “traduction” entre diverses commandes.

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Ian Li

March 21, 2023

Predicting the future of warfare is at best a speculative affair. Any forecast can never be proposed with absolute certainty, no matter how robust the underlying analysis. The future is always somewhat uncertain. In fact, history is replete with examples of visionaries who have tried but failed to accurately divine the nature of change. Nonetheless, it is a necessary endeavour, because such is the cost of war today that the implications of failure can be far-reaching, even existential. From the Oracle of Delphi to the modern application of data analytics, military planners over the ages have sought greater clarity regarding the future conduct of war.[1] However, there is no crystal ball for future warfare. Instead, this essay argues that historical lessons provide the best means of determining its form, but only if they are used correctly. The context behind each case study must be carefully considered by military planners who seek to learn from the past so that the observations gathered can be accurately extrapolated onto the present situation, and the resulting lessons meaningfully applied.