Author: obsidian_ns

Jeremy Keith: Permission Instead of responding to search queries by linking to the web pages we’ve made, Google is instead generating dodgy summaries rife with hallucina… lies #AI

MonaLisa Twins: Mercedes Benz #Music

Found on John Naughton’s blog: Claude’s Model Context Length in Context #AI

Douglas Hofstadter: Godel, Bach, Escher To fall for the illusion that vast computational systems “who” have never had a single experience in the real world outside of text are nevertheless perfectly reliable authorities about the world at large is a deep mistake, and, if that mistake is repeated sufficiently often and comes to be widely accepted, it will undermine the very nature of truth on which our society—and I mean all of human society—is based. #AI

Richard Merrick: Improvisation has an energy to it. Compromise does not.

It’s hard to soar like an eagle if you keep company with turkeys #quotes

Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Elizabeth — the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there’s a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trim tab. It’s a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trim tab. Society thinks it’s going right by you, that it’s left you altogether. But if you’re doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go. So I said, “Call me Trim Tab.”

The truth is that you get the low pressure to do things, rather than getting on the other side and trying to push the bow of the ship around. And you build that low pressure by getting rid of a little nonsense, getting rid of things that don’t work and aren’t true until you start to get that trim-tab motion. It works every time. That’s the grand strategy you’re going for. So I’m positive that what you do with yourself, just the little things you do yourself, these are the things that count. To be a real trim tab, you’ve got to start with yourself, and soon you’ll feel that low pressure, and suddenly things begin to work in a beautiful way. Of course, they happen only when you’re dealing with really great integrity.
Buckminster Fuller

Uncertainty Project – A toolbox of ideas #tools

Blast from the past: Training video for the Bell Labs Computing Centre #computing

Casey Handmer: Why Batteries Will Win Batteries and transmission are in direct competition. Both enable electricity arbitrage – the profitable repricing of a resource by matching different levels of supply and demand. Transmission moves power through space (technically null space, at the speed of light) and batteries move power through time. And while batteries have a fixed cost per MWh delivered (that is falling about 10% per year), transmission lines get more expensive as they get longer. #energy

Wired: The History of Autocorrect #technology