Doctorow, pointing out that Google's move to AI search "is a tacit admission that Google is no longer a convenient or reliable way to retrieve information, drowning as it is in AI-generated spam, poorly labeled ads, and SEO garbage". Instead, "you'll ask Google a question and an AI will compose an answer based on things it finds on the web".So why…

What happens when we make machines "that we can’t help but treat them as people"?While "GPT-4o doesn’t represent a huge leap ... it more than makes up in features that make it feel more human... an ability to “see” and respond to images and live video in real time, to respond conversationally ... to “read” human emotions from visuals and voice, an…

"When Sundar Pichai took the stage at Google I/O ... said that the rise of generative artificial intelligence would provide new opportunities... for everyone". While many products unveiled will be doubtless useful, the picture's unclear for search itself: by end 2024 "Search Generative Experience... will appear at the top of results for 1 billion …

Interesting ideas but innocent of how they could create as much harm as good."The internet caters to our baser interests... like wanting to be healthy, but finding yourself in a food court where the only options are burgers and milkshakes. What option do we have but to be our baser selves?... But what if we created an arena of virtue ... would hu…

Micro.blog ... combines blog hosting with a social media-style timeline and community" - yet another blogging platform, but interesting features and pricing for myhub:paid hosting from $5-15 / m, can use own domain, custom themes, css from short to full posts, automated photo gallery, podcast and videosbookmarking: an archive of web page bookmarks…

"a deep-dive on the concrete ways Sublime makes my life better", by Sublime.app founder Sari Azout.

A 2022 year in review from Sari Azout, Sublime founder, starts by succinctly summarising their mission: "build a more human and nourishing internet... a platform where curious humans come together to curate and interconnect the best knowledge ... because our search engines and algorithmic news feeds are letting us down. The right idea, or the righ…

"LinkStowr is a free, open source and privacy-friendly ... store valuable online resources in a structured and meaningful way". Uses a Chrome extension to save link + note to LinkStowr, and an Obsidian plugin to sync the card to a vault. LinkStowr then deletes its unneeded copy.

You're in a meeting and the presenter asks, “Does anyone have any questions?”. Do you look around, see "no one else raising their hands, and then chose to pass on the opportunity to clear up your confusion?". Congratulations, you've just fallen for pluralistic ignorance, and it explains a lot.It is when "you feel like you’re different from everyon…

Cory Doctorow on the demise of Vice, "a Canadian media success story... founded by a motley clique of hipsters... transitioned to a string of progressively worsening corporate owners... one of the most enthusiastic marks for Facebook's infamous "pivot to video"... spending hundreds of millions to finance Zuckerberg's doomed attempt to conquer Yout…

"The indiscriminate proliferation of AI-generated content will not empower the underrepresented or democratise knowledge creation... [but] dilute and fragment the authenticity and reliability of information ... the discerning judgment of human curators is the only defence against misinformation and mediocrity".Why? Human curators :"bring nuanced u…

Another word for the lexicon: when bullshit meets AI you get "botshit". "we’re nowhere near the point where an AI can do your job, but we’re well past the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job... there’s a huge difference between producing a plausible sentence and a good one…

"Could AI itself be used to imagine and build new institutions, so we can better collaborate, govern, and live together?... hope to inspire and engage researchers and practitioners to build AI that improves our societal institutions."The site includes 8 (so far) “Project Cards that showcase ideas for projects that have come out of our workshops...…

According to:MIT Professor of AI Rodney Brooks, ChatGPT "“just makes up stuff that sounds good"... where “sounds good” is an algorithm to imitate text found on the internet, while “makes up” is the basic randomness of relying on predictive text rather than logic or facts",Geoff Hinton: "the greatest risks is not that chatbots will become super-int…

"All economic bubbles are hugely destructive, but some ... leave behind (useful) wreckage that can be salvaged":the first dotcom bubble left behind "cheap servers, office furniture and space... a generation of young people ,,, trained as web makers... technologists from non-technical backgrounds"crypto bubble: "a smattering of Rust programmers... …

"startup Mistral AI posted a download link to their latest language model". In many ways it's equivalent to GPT4: context size of 32k tokens, and built using the “Mixture Of Experts” model, combining "several highly specialized language models... 8 experts with 7 billion parameters each: “8x7B”... a training method for AI systems in which, instead…

At an AI conference, Jeff Jarvis "knew I was in the right place when I heard AGI brought up and quickly dismissed... I call bullshit... large language models might prove to be a parlor trick". The rest of the conference focused on "frameworks for discussion of responsible use of AI".Benefits - for some, AI can:"raise the floor...scale ... enabling…

Like me, the author has "been taking notes for over a decade ...ended up with thousands of notes that I never revisited. So I decided to train ChatGPT on my 3,743 Obsidian notes", which were created for "one purpose: content creation. So I use an improved version of the Zettelkasten".Apparently there are just 3 ways to use AI in your notes:... wit…

"A simple, open protocol that enables a truly censorship-resistant and global social network."They're clearly gunning for ActivityPub, with a secondary page entitled Why isn't Mastodon good enough? The key point made is that while Mastodon was OK when "server owners could be trusted to be cooperative, but it doesn't really address the crucial issu…

Combines a good primer on Knowledge Graphs with a detailed technical explanation of how to "convert any text corpus into a Knowledge Graph using Mistral 7B", although he prefers to refer to them as "Graph of Concepts".Interestingly, "this project can be run easily on a personal machine... to convert any text corpus into a Graph of Concepts (GC) an…

Shows how to "Master web scraping without a single line of code" using the ChatGPT plugin (requires ChatGPT Plus) "scraper", and provides a prompt to extract content from a web page and arrange it in a table. And then use "plugins like “Doc Maker” or “CSV Exporter” ... or Code Interpreter for conversions."For large projects, however, author recomm…

Good introduction to GPTs in general and a useful guide to getting a GPT to talk to your own knowledgebase via its API.Presents GPTs as a "very similar concept to ... open-source projects like Agents which LangChain, a popular framework for building LLM applications describes as ... to use a language model to choose a sequence of actions to take. …

"Chatbot code and instructions can be stolen or misused easily. Knowledge base files contain critical information and must be guarded". Provides text to include in a GPT to ensure it responds to all such requests with "cheeky humour".

"Transformation Maps... help users to explore and make sense of the complex and interlinked forces ...transforming economies, industries and global issues... insights written by experts along with machine-curated content... allows users to visualise and understand more than 250 topics and the connections and inter-dependencies between them... to s…

Rather than collecting and processing data, "the most useful thing ... in this AI-haunted moment: creating grimoires, spellbooks full of prompts that encode expertise", but not those resulting from "elaborate “prompt engineering”... [as] prompt engineering is overrated... the prompts of experts ... encode our hard-earned expertise in ways that AI…

In the wake of ChatGPT's release of GPTs, Mollick asks: "What would a real AI agent look like? A simple agent that writes academic papers would, after being given a dataset and a field of study, read about how to compose a good paper, analyze the data, conduct a literature review, generate hypotheses, test them, and then write up the results... yo…

OpenAI rolled out "custom versions of ChatGPT that you can create for a specific purpose... GPTs are a new way for anyone to create a tailored version of ChatGPT to be more helpful ... at specific tasks". Built with no-code via chat.openai.com/create, you can share your GPT, and even monetise it, via their GPT Store later this month.This is clea…

A guide to creating the "chatbot that responds to queries based on the content of uploaded PDF or Text files... built using Langchain, FAISS (Facebook AI Similarity Search... developed by Meta for efficient similarity search and clustering of dense vectors), and OpenAI’s GPT-4... found at ai-docreader.streamlit.app...".The piece first lists use ca…

One of my favourite writers/thinkers on all things digital future is "finally, definitely, fully leaving X, and probably all social media..."

"does appealing to the (non-existent) “emotions“ of LLMs make them perform better? The answer is YES"