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Somehow, without really intending to, I absorbed many years ago a line from The Brothers Karamazov that still comes to mind, verbatim, with surprising frequency: “The impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man.” It burbles up whenever a book I’m reading or a podcast I’m listening to prompts me to envision something impossible—the vast …

The assumption that AI safety is a property of AI models is pervasive in the AI community. It is seen as so obvious that it is hardly ever explicitly stated. Because of this assumption: Companies have made big investments in red teaming their models before releasing them. Researchers are frantically trying to fix the brittleness …

Breadcrumb Trail Links News Canadian Politics Canada Federal government taken to court over new rules requiring extensive cognitive tests for kosher slaughtered animals Published Mar 12, 2024  •  Last updated 1 hour ago  •  4 minute read Canada currently relies heavily on imports to meet its demand for kosher meat, with only 30 per cent sourced …

Software people are always all up in the XY problem: someone asks about how to do X when what they’re really trying to solve is Y. I find the YX problem much more frustrating: where software people decide that they want to answer question Y even though what someone asks is question X. I’ve seen …

Enlarge / A burglar with a flashlight and papers in a business office—exactly like scraping files from Discord. On Wednesday, Midjourney banned all employees from image synthesis rival Stability AI from its service indefinitely after it detected “botnet-like” activity suspected to be a Stability employee attempting to scrape prompt and image pairs in bulk. Midjourney …

The British Library says legacy IT is the overwhelming factor delaying efforts to recover from the Rhysida ransomware attack in late 2023. Rhysida broke into the British Library in October last year, making off with 600GB worth of data and, crucially, destroying many of its servers which are now in the process of being replaced. …

I think of all the absurd businesses that shouldn’t be lucrative, from selling barcodes to NFTs, you’d think “selling forms” wouldn’t be, and yet there’s no clean way to make a contact form for a website running on something simple like Github Pages. I know how to work around this, but it’s ridiculous, isn’t it? …

8 months ago, I was already frustrated by the slowness of ChatGPT. Looking for alternatives, I came across poe.com and was immediately hooked. I tried the free trial for a while and then subscribed and never looked back. Today I stopped my 8-month subscription because of the shady tactics Poe has been playing. The most …

March 2024 “Deep” modules, mismatched interfaces – and why SAP is so painful My very own “object store” Amazon S3 is the original cloud technology: it came out in 2006. “Objects” were popular at the time and S3 was labelled an “object store”, but everyone really knows that S3 is for files. S3 is a …

Fewer children now have tooth decay, and more adults keep their permanent teeth into old age. This is put down to using toothpastes that contain fluoride. In the early 1970s, almost everyone experienced decay in their permanent teeth by late childhood, and more than a third of adults had no natural teeth. In comparison, today …