Technology – Postcards

Driving ‘Assists’

September 5, 2024 No Comments

I drove a car with lane assist once, turned it off sharpish. Either I’m driving, or I’m a passenger. Any other half-way situation is pure shite. There’s no middle ground for driving automation, no happy medium. It’s a binary proposition. It can sound and look like there’s a ‘easier driving’ way, as if you can […]

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Environment Technology

ClimateOS – DataVis for Greener Cities

February 8, 2023 No Comments

This sounds like a great tool: “Cities account for more than 70% of global CO2 emissions,” Shalit said. “They are clearly critical to climate action, but they are also complex and highly interconnected systems – and they really lacked the tools to plan and manage their transition.” ClimateOS, the integrated platform developed by Shalit’s Stockholm-based startup, […]

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Society Technology

ChatGPT CEO – Technology will fix the problems of Technology

January 22, 2023 No Comments

https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-chatgpt-ceo-sam-altman-responds-school-plagiarism-concerns-bans-2023-1 Given how popular ChatGPT has become, Altman believes that the world must adapt to generative AI and that technology will improve over time to prevent unintended consequences. “It’s an evolving world,” Altman said. “We’ll all adapt, and I think be better off for it. And we won’t want to go back.” I’m not convinced. […]

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Food for Thought Technology

“AI is a slot machine for the imagination”

January 14, 2023 No Comments

Thoughtful piece about AI tools and creativity on the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists: Promoters of AI tools like to talk about user creativity. But I’ve found the relationship between my prompts and results to be unsatisfyingly obscure. It’s almost impossible to know what difference using one input word versus another makes, since the algorithms that […]

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Computer Science History

Kathleen Booth, the inventor of assembly language, Dead at 100

November 24, 2022 No Comments

Obit in the Reg: Professor Kathleen Booth, one of the last of the early British computing pioneers, has died. She was 100. […] As well as building the hardware for the first machines, she wrote all the software for the ARC2 and SEC machines, in the process inventing what she called Contracted Notation. This language, […]

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Food for Thought Technology Uncategorized

GPT-3 – Great use of statistical computing, tells us nothing about language

July 13, 2022July 13, 2022 No Comments

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/noam-chomsky-and-gpt-3 One good way to move beyond merely filling in the blanks might be to ask whether the models could reliably distinguish truth from fiction. In point of fact, they can’t. Rather, systems like GPT are truth-challenged, known to routinely lose coherence over long passages of text and known to fabricate endlessly. One such variant […]

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Fun & Games Parenting & Children Space Technology

Projects: Build your own Radio Telescope

November 16, 2020 No Comments

This is a cool project to do when the kids are a bit older: The resolution of a telescope’s images depends both on the wavelength at which it operates and on the diameter of its dish. The longer the wavelength, the worse the resolution; and the larger the diameter, the better the resolution. Radio waves […]

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Cities for People Places & Travel Technology

2km from home

May 9, 2020 No Comments

https://2kmfromhome.com/ Very handy!

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Technology

Windows 10 Shutown?

April 29, 2020 No Comments

So, today I learned that Windows 10 doesn’t really shutdown when you tell it to. It’s a feature called ‘fastboot’, and apparently what it does is log users off, and then do a hibernate like stop. Which means that your next boot is fast, a neat feature. I noticed this because the uptime reported in […]

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Coding For Fun and Profit

WordPress: Fix citation colour

February 28, 2020 No Comments

With your own css addition to the template. Add this, adjust to suit, et viola:

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Who?

Murf

Driving ‘Assists’

ClimateOS – DataVis for Greener Cities

ChatGPT CEO – Technology will fix the problems of Technology

“AI is a slot machine for the imagination”

Kathleen Booth, the inventor of assembly language, Dead at 100

GPT-3 – Great use of statistical computing, tells us nothing about language

Projects: Build your own Radio Telescope

2km from home

Windows 10 Shutown?

WordPress: Fix citation colour

Category: Technology