Category: Software
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An end to copyright?
I suspect that AI generated content is (eventually, not any of the current versions) going to destroy copyright as a concept. The generally-stated reason for copyright is to incentivise the creation of more works: artificial scarcity, which drives up prices, introduced around the time the printing press was invented (but the idea goes back much…
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LaMDA, Turing Test, sentience
A chatbot from Google called LaMDA made the headlines last weekend. It seems it convinced Blake Lemoine (someone at Google) that it was sentient. While, like the majority of real AI researchers[0], I do not actually think it is sentient, the transcripts make it plain why it caused this belief. When Alan Turing originally described…
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Berlin public transport map
Today I wrote a mapping utility for OpenStreetMap XML data and used it to render all railways=* and public_transport=* nodes close to Berlin.
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It’s far from a groundbreaking invention, but there’s something very satisfying about this way of finding the smallest value in a Swift array of Integers: var minimum = someArray.reduce(Int.max, min)
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Anatomy of a scam, and LiveJournal’s lost passwords
LiveJournal seems to have leaked plain-text passwords. I found this out because I’ve just received three scam emails that are trying to blackmail me for bitcoin worth [$1600, $1100, $1100]. Here is one of the emails; the others look similar, but each one is phrased slightly differently in a way that suggests a template filled…
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Speed of machine intelligence
Every so often, someone tries to boast of human intelligence with the story of Shakuntala Devi — the stories vary, but they generally claim she beat the fastest supercomputer in the world in a feat of arithmetic, finding that the 23rd root of 916,748,676,920,039,158,098, 660,927,585,380,162,483,106, 680,144,308,622,407,126,516, 427,934,657,040,867,096,593, 279,205,767,480,806,790,022, 783,016,354,924,852,380,335, 745,316,935,111,903,596,577, 547,340,075,681,688,305,620, 821,016,129,132,845,564,805, 780, 158,806,771 was…
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I’m updating my six-year-old Runestone code. Objective-C has changed, Cocos2d has effectively been replaced with SpriteKit, and my understanding of the language has improved massively. Net result? It’s embarrassing. Once this thing is running as it should, I may rewrite from scratch just to see how bad a project has to be for rewrites to…
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Automated detection of propaganda and cultural bias
The ability of word2vec to detect relationships between words (for example that “man” is to “king” as “woman” is to “queen”) can already be used to detect biases. Indeed, the biases are so easy to find, so blatant, that they are embarrassing. Can this automated detection of cultural bias be used to detect deliberate bias,…
Kitsune Software 