Software developer, community photographer and wanderer between worlds.
1990s: graduate student in Physics, wrote Java applets before Java 1.0, studied wavepacket mechanics, Hamiltonian chaos and classical-quantum correspondence in systems with large spins as well as the statistics of the sound of crumpling paper
2000s: Green Party activist and volunteer at an alternative dispute resolution clinic.
Software developer, sysadmin, planner and communicator for hundreds of web sites in e-publishing and e-commerce including: arXiv.org,
e-business systems for car dealerships, wineries and a pallet recycling company, decision support systems for sales territory assignment, a collaborative visual editor for knowledge graphs, a social network for a secret society, a rich metadata database for the global performing arts with hundreds of Postgres tables that we should have built in RDF
2010s: Searched for a breakthough in natural language understanding involving knowledge graphs, world knowledge, symbolic reasoning, reasoning over uncertainty, as well as autoencoder, LSTM, GRU and convolutional neural networks. Frequent speaker at conferences.
Developed a similarity metric for generic concepts (people, places, creative works, ...), a search engine for patents powered by a neural network, conversion of Freebase to an RDF graph with perfect referential integrity, an automatically curated collection of more than 1 million images of thousands of topics, and numerous prototype intelligent data processing systems.
I served on a committee researching the application of OWL, RDF and other semantic web concepts to the ISO 20022 financial messaging standard which culminated in the publication of ISO/TR 22126-2:2025 "OWL representation of the ISO 20022 metamodel and e-repository"
2020s: Full-stack software developer for the longest running public opinion data archive. Community photographer , pagan and hard-working therianthrope.
https://gen5.info/fox/
Astronaut of science fiction and fantasy. North American Weeaboo. 狐系ケモノミミ
All the properties have to be right and the price has to be right too.
Mainstream plastics, like all the ones that have their own recycling symbols, are made from monomers that cost about 50 cents a pound. There are thousands and thousands of polymers you've never heard of, some of which are very high performance, which are many times more expensive.
I think of the story that Silicon is not that good of a semiconductor as semiconductors go, but boy do people know how to make things out of it.
I had a friend who'd just gotten out of EE school as a non-traditional student who was working for a company that was making radars for tracking drones maybe five years before the 2022 Russian invasion.
That was an active system, similar in concept to the radars used in air defense system just scaled down and faster acting.
The one in this article is a passive system that sees the transmitter on the drone. The comm link is the obvious weak spot on the drone as it can be detected and jammed, it is fairly inevitable that lethal attack drones that work anonymously will be widespread as a result.
No, it's that it is, increasingly so as platforms are getting more honest about the cost or maybe more interested in monetization or proving they can monetize.
Like maybe you really can spend 1 token to save 10,000 tokens but in this climate where there is so much FOMO I can see people spending 10,000 tokens to save 1 token.
If you are starting a new social media service, for instance, the N^2 dynamics are brutal and you have to work so hard to attract, onboard, and retain each precious user. A site that has momentum is practically impossible to kill and, barring a really enlightened form of benign neglect (Craigslist?), you will eventually go into a "harvesting" mode for either money or social impact.
Landing the booster downrange might be critical to attaining full reuse. It's certainly a hassle to bring the booster back by sea compared to landing it at the launchpad, but Starship seems to be struggling with weight issues in the 2nd stage because the 1st stage has reduced delta-v thanks to the reserve it needs to reverse direction and go home.
And spend more tokens? Reminds of the startup where in every all-hands somebody complained that they couldn't find any documents and they wanted to add another place to store documents and nobody had insight that this was a problem.
Public schools are notorious for being unresponsive to everything except for the parents of "special" kids which is one reason for the explosion in diagnoses.
When I am writing good prompts that make sense, I mostly get good results. When I don't understand what I'm doing and write prompts that don't really make sense often models flounder and act strange and inconsistently.
I don't think a lot of people do it, but I will write up a paragraph about a programming task, explaining what I want done, what concerns I have, and mentioning other examples in the code where something similar was done. I usually end with something like
"Let's talk this through before you start coding. Does this make sense? Do you have any questions for me?"
and go back and forth until we are all happy. I treat it like a precocious junior programmer.
Another thing is that agents tend to get confused as the conversation continues and once you get into the place where you're getting frustrated and the model is going in circles the right thing to do is regroup and start a new conversation, maybe cutting and pasting some highlights from the last conversation.
Like you might have 10 little coding tasks and think "it will go better if it remembers the previous context" and maybe that is true if you batch 2 or 3 related tasks, but if you try all 10 tasks it may be getting "tired" or "confused" halfway through. So it's not a bad plan to just start a new conversation for every little task unless it's the kind of thing like "You did a great job with that last patch, now let's make a similar patch to this other part of the system"
I could say doing that I rarely get into a situation where the model gets dazed and confused, except when I'm starting out confused!
the same year as Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation, featuring computer generated characters, brainwashing television commercials, a light pulse gun that causes absence seizures, gun battles inside a plastic surgery clinic and an AR simulation environment, a sadistic computer, a physician who doubles as an action hero, and James Coburn giving a lecture explaining the enemy's evil plans in the opposite role that he played in the (excellent) The President's Analyst.
This time I was not so dazzled and saw it for as atrocious everyone else things it is. The minions of "Digital Matrix, Inc." manage several assassinations with the light-pulse L.O.O.K.E.R. gun but when they use real firearms they outdo Vader's stormtroopers by shooting each other. (Want to see the scene where somebody from E.Y. tells them to stick to the L.O.O.K.E.R. gun) The bad guys explain the penultimate secret to the protagonist early on but the ultimate secret is revealed in the L.O.O.K.E.R. lab which doesn't feel like a lab at all but rather a rather good room in a theme park experience where you're supposed to uncover the secret. (Contrast that to the lab Doug Trumbull outfitted in the Brainstorms movie a few years later which is packed with real surplus equipment... I've been to that lab!)
From their viewpoint, Google and Facebook are not in the business of giving anybody traffic for free. Of course businesses divide into categories including ones that are trying to sell something directly who can pay more and those that are trying to get attention to place their own ads from the viewpoints of the platform that is an arbitrage play that they'd like to eliminate.
It's awful but true. I dropped out of large-scale web publishing around 2013 or so because I saw the writing on the wall.
... and in the meantime people are looking at their AI bills and realizing tokens aren't worth what they cost. The frontier is getting the cost down, not getting intelligence up. In a cage match between this guy and "Ed", Ed wins.
For a long time it has been a win to do clustering, retrieval, ranking, classification, anomaly detection and other non-generative tasks with local models from the BERT family. These are so much better than all the things I tried from 2000-2020. ModernBERT for feature generation plus classical algorithms from scikit-learn works so well, plus scikit-learn has great tools for eval, model selection, probability calibration and all the other things that make the difference between "write another arXiv paper" vs "deploy a product into production"
If you read the splogs you'd think it is all about the "zero-shot" scenario where you write a prompt asking what decision you want the model to make. Yeah, it is amazing that it does so well with so little input, but side by side "many-shot" models that learn a decision surface in hyperspace beat the pants off "few-shot" models that look at nearest neighbors and "zero-shot" models that do whatever they do. It's not even close.
The reckoning for generative AI may near and it might be like something right out of "Where's your Ed at?" When people see honest prices for current models I think a lot of people might decide the juice isn't worth the squeeze. The story in the next few year is not going to be bigger models that only Elon Musk models but a relentless fight to get costs down.
Was kinda inevitable though. Before that everybody was making huge amounts of money off Facebook... except Facebook. Really spammy "publishers" like Zynga were cleaning up.
Was the end of the "if you build it they will come" era. Around that time Google's enclosure of the web was well underway and the black hat SEO masterminds I knew were switching to AdWords.
but she is a high priestess even if she omits "high". Now I did get a high when I went to Litha (summer solstice) at her place that lasted for days because the experience was ethereal and otherworldly. But she's a professional who does this full time.
I got a very similar high at the fourth of July; driving up to Little York lake I was rehearsing a five minute sermon on "the magic of blessings" with the consequence that whenever anyone said something like "enjoy the fourth of July" it exploded in my head like a firework and eating soft serve on the midway felt like what Martin Prechtel talks about when he says "the feast is the only ritual".
So when Valerie says we can recover ancient agricultural animism and restore a consciousness similar to what indigenous people experienced she's right. But we can also recover the old religion that lies under the surface in contemporary ordinary activities like being a sports fan, like at Cornell we have a bear statue that people tie scarfs to and make other offerings. People don't think this is a religious activity but it is.
So far as tech goes I am starting to put some effort into the back end of this system
for months these tokens have all had unique identifiers and I am now looking at what I can do in terms of relationship building (register cards to an individual when I hand them out) and building territories (register cards that I install on a bulletin board to a place and enroll in an AR game)
And of course there is the wearable system that supports my photography on the go like being able to show people the group portrait I just took and reshoot if somebody had their eyes closed that is a work in progress. I'm like a theme park performer who brings the whole park with me everywhere i go.
I found smashing the "not interested in this" button consistently for a few days greatly reduced "slop about AI" if not AI slop. It's irksome that so many people are having convo's with ChatGPT about "What AI all means" who don't know enough to have a worthwhile opinion and then posting blog posts based on this as if anyone cares. I hardly see it anymore. But then again, I am just on LinkedIn to post photos and connect with students because... they're the last LIONs.
I would say that "Vibe-coded" is not a selling point. I mean, AI is just slightly more popular than crypto was the peak, I think now any politician could win any election in the US if they were on a certain side of this issue
Software developer, community photographer and wanderer between worlds.
1990s: graduate student in Physics, wrote Java applets before Java 1.0, studied wavepacket mechanics, Hamiltonian chaos and classical-quantum correspondence in systems with large spins as well as the statistics of the sound of crumpling paper
2000s: Green Party activist and volunteer at an alternative dispute resolution clinic.
Software developer, sysadmin, planner and communicator for hundreds of web sites in e-publishing and e-commerce including: arXiv.org, e-business systems for car dealerships, wineries and a pallet recycling company, decision support systems for sales territory assignment, a collaborative visual editor for knowledge graphs, a social network for a secret society, a rich metadata database for the global performing arts with hundreds of Postgres tables that we should have built in RDF
2010s: Searched for a breakthough in natural language understanding involving knowledge graphs, world knowledge, symbolic reasoning, reasoning over uncertainty, as well as autoencoder, LSTM, GRU and convolutional neural networks. Frequent speaker at conferences.
Developed a similarity metric for generic concepts (people, places, creative works, ...), a search engine for patents powered by a neural network, conversion of Freebase to an RDF graph with perfect referential integrity, an automatically curated collection of more than 1 million images of thousands of topics, and numerous prototype intelligent data processing systems.
I served on a committee researching the application of OWL, RDF and other semantic web concepts to the ISO 20022 financial messaging standard which culminated in the publication of ISO/TR 22126-2:2025 "OWL representation of the ISO 20022 metamodel and e-repository"
2020s: Full-stack software developer for the longest running public opinion data archive. Community photographer , pagan and hard-working therianthrope.
https://gen5.info/fox/
Astronaut of science fiction and fantasy. North American Weeaboo. 狐系ケモノミミ
[email protected] (607) 821 1243