Michael Piotrowski @true_mxp@qoto.org

Gotta admit that my first reaction to ChatGPT as a college instructor was a mixture of fascination & dread. Now I am encouraging my journalism students to use and interrogate AI services as part of their education. Here's why:

https://www.thescoop.org/archives/2023/02/11/teaching-journalism-with-chatgpt/

Some interesting information in the survey breakdown for this article. The survey found Gen Xers and older Millennials took cyber security the most seriously

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-01-16/gen-z-are-least-aware-of-cyber-risks-cosboa-cyberwardens/101856932?

#cybersecurity #milleniel

A Google Sheet showing Twitter bots moving to Mastodon. (h/t @researchbuzz) https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SOmgXL3fRHAsxiVufw73VmzYmyLGat5koC7sf045Cic/edit#gid=1724839402

>"The aim of cognitive science always was - and still is today- the mechanization of the mind, not the humanization of the machine."

*Jean-Pierre Dupuy*
***The Mechanization of the Mind:***
*On the Origins of Cognitive Science*
https://www.google.ca/books/edition/On_the_Origins_of_Cognitive_Science/gDoiEAAAQBAJ

In 2008, I created a chat bot that would simulate the speech of Sarah Palin. Called GoAskSarah.com, it used a large corpus of her speeches and interviews to generate responses to questions posed by site visitors. The responses were, of course, inane, but they simulated her speech patterns using Markov chains, and sounded like her.

ChatGPT is, of course, much better, but fundamentally the same parlor trick that plays on humans’ extreme desire for anthropomorphism.

Much of the complexity of the 8086's flags is for historical reasons. The 8086's flags were compatible with the 8080 processor (1974), which extended the 8008 (1972). The 8008 was a clone of the Datapoint 2200 (1971), a desktop computer that is now mostly forgotten.

Lipstick on an amoral Chatbot pig

In hindsight, ChatGPT may come to be seen as the greatest publicity stunt in AI history, an intoxicating glimpse at a future that may actually take years to realize—kind of like a 2012-vintage driverless car demo, but this time with a foretaste of an ethical guardrail that will take years to perfect.

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/inside-the-heart-of-chatgpts-darkness?utm_medium=email

#ai #artificialintelligence #chatGPT @garymarcus #chatbot #chatbots

It hasn't sunk in yet, but we learned last week that the whole discourse of #LLM critique since November has been aiming behind the ball. #Bing and Google Search are now going to compete to address factual accuracy. Meanwhile the brainstorming function is already integrated in Word if you use the Edge browser.

Image: #ChatGPT integration into Office365.

Old #HomeComputers, too.

#Commodore #PET

As requested by @DosFox here is my #Atari Stacy running #Macintosh System 6 with a bit of help from the Spectre GCR hardware emulator. The Spectre contains actual Apple ROMs that the end user needed to source themselves in order to keep Gadgets by Small ( the company behind the Spectre ) out of legal trouble. The Spectre runs a cable back into the Stacy in order for it to read Macintosh disks. It can also prepare the hard drive to include an HFS partition for better storage. For a bit of time this was a cheaper alternative to a Macintosh Portable.

So, http://DISCMASTER.TEXTFILES.COM may be shut down at the end of the month, just due to the cost of running and maintaining it. I'm mentioning this just because I'd like to encourage people to use it extensively while next stage planning is looked into, so the maximum value is enjoyed.

Hey, today is XML’s 25th birthday. Back in the day I wrote a lot about it: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/Technology/XML/

Probably the most important: Neither XML’s father nor inventor: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/11/22/Not-the-Inventor-of-XML

Amusing: “XML People”: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/02/10/XML-People

Quoting from “What XML Means” (2007): “XML is the first successful instance of a data packaging system that is simultaneously (human) language-independent and (computer) system-independent. It’s the existence proof that such a thing can be built and be useful.”

Have a nice weekend everyone, and in case you missed it, someone has finally solved the trolley problem 😊

The IF Archive dates to 1992, the same year as Mark Howell's release of txd, the first z-code disassembler, Activision's release of Lost Treasures of Infocom, and Graham Nelson's development of zass, the z-code assembler that was the forerunner for the original version of Inform.

It was an FTP server; this was prior to NCSA Mosaic and still very much the web's early days.

http://www.brasslantern.org/players/software/ifarchive.html

What is it to "cite your source" for a claim?

I think it is: referring to the source that informed and convinced you of the claim.

I think it is not: becoming convinced of the claim, then finding some document or website that says something similar and citing that.

The former is a genuine explanation of the source of your belief. The latter is, at best, ad hoc imitation, at worst, dishonest.

Let's keep this distinction in mind when we see the hype around all the new LLM applications.

The Roboto Serif minisite is live and it’s excellent https://fonts.withgoogle.com/roboto-serif

Huge congrats to @greggazdowicz and to everyone who worked on this!