Something weird is happening with LLMs and chess
Are they good or bad? (This post might look better at dynomight.net/chess.) A year ago, there was a lot of talk about large language models (LLMs) playing chess. Word was that if you trained a big enough model on enough text, then you could send it a partially played game, ask it to predict the […]
MindsDB (YC W20) Is Hiring an Operations Analyst
MindsDB is a fast-growing AI startup headquartered in San Francisco, California. As a leading innovator bringing AI and Data together, our passion is empowering companies to easily build AI capabilities that can Think, Understand and Orchestrate: enabling teams to move from prototyping & experimentation to production in a fast & scalable way. MindsDB was founded […]
O2 unveils Daisy, the AI granny wasting scammers’ time
It’s a bad day to be a phone scammer. O2 has created human-like AI ‘Granny’ to answer calls in real time from fraudsters, keeping them on the phone and away from customers for as long as possible Trained using cutting-edge technology and real scambaiter content, lifelike ‘Daisy’ is indistinguishable from a real person, fooling scammers […]
The letter ℘: name and origin? (2017)
My own answer, about the name of the letter $wp$. Mostly in computing, with little math. (Lengthy) In computing, the letter $wp$ has been plagued with a plethora of inappropriate names. I guess “Weierstrass p” is one of such names that some standard created, and has been copied without much scrutiny. I suspect that ISO-8879 […]
AI Makes Tech Debt More Expensive
There is an emerging belief that AI will make tech debt less relevant. Since it’s getting easier to write code, and easier to clean up code, wouldn’t it make sense that the typical company can handle a little more debt? The opposite is true – AI has significantly increased the real cost of carrying tech […]
Air traffic failure caused by two locations 3600nm apart sharing 3-letter code
Investigators probing the serious UK air traffic control system failure in August last year have detailed the flightplan waypoint confusion which triggered the incident. Over 700,000 passengers were affected by the failure of UK air navigation service NATS’ flightplan processing system. This forced controllers to revert to manual processing, leading to more than 1,500 flight […]
We can all be AI engineers – and we can do it with open source models
A couple of weeks ago, I gave a talk at Hannah Foxwell’s amazing AI for the Rest of Us conference about something that’s been brewing in my mind after years of working in DevOps, MLOps, and now GenAI: the barriers to AI engineering are crumbling fast. The tools have gotten good enough that if you […]
Why is it so hard to find a job now? Enter Ghost Jobs
Abstract:This study investigates the emerging phenomenon of “ghost hiring” or “ghost jobs”, where employers advertise job openings without intending to fill them. Using a novel dataset from Glassdoor and employing a LLM-BERT technique, I find that up to 21% of job ads may be ghost jobs, and this is particularly prevalent in specialized industries and […]
PyPI now supports digital attestations
publishing security oidc PyPI package maintainers can now publish signed digital attestations when publishing, in order to further increase trust in the supply-chain security of their projects. Additionally, a new API is available for consumers and installers to verify published attestations. Many projects have already begun publishing attestations, with more than 20,000 attestations already published. […]
The Onion Buys Alex Jones’s Infowars Out of Bankruptcy
The satirical news site planned to turn Infowars into a parody of itself, mocking “weird internet personalities” who peddle conspiracy theories and health supplements. The Onion, a satirical publication that skewers newsmakers and current events, said on Thursday that it had won a bankruptcy auction to acquire Infowars, a website founded and operated by the […]