Notices by Justin Pickard (jcalpickard@assemblag.es), page 2

@scribe Fun bit of Perplexity.AI is when it returns your prompt to you as a text box and you unthinkingly answer your own question.

What a line. 'This is why I’m super skeptical of current approaches to artificial intelligence, which seem to imagine that if you just cobbled together enough thermostats, then you get a person.' (Ted Chiang)

https://www.publicbooks.org/developing-ai-like-raising-kids/

@scribe and/or force English people to directly state their goals when they've never had to because colonialism

@scribe Reading group?

2024: The year in which, finally, nobody gives a shit (seemingly either way?) about you being British.

Unreasonably impressed by the (malfunctioning, half-decade old) e-ink seat reservation displays on this LNER train.

'The paper identifies a phenomenon called "temporal misalignment," where language models perform worse when there is a mismatch between the time period of the training data and the time period of the text being evaluated.' #generatedtext

Ordering all the books and crying.

What kind of music do computer programmers listen to (while coding)?

@scribe Not quite yet, but it might be good to have another chat in January, if you're about?

@scribe I've also been thinking about your personal mini-metrics thing, as it happens.

Unexpected winter project: co-designing a permaculture-inspired custom task management system with generative AI, without really knowing anything about permaculture (either of us).

'The occupations most exposed to AI include more professional occupations, particularly those associated with more clerical work and across finance, law and business management roles. This includes management consultants and business analysts, accountants, and psychologists.' (UK Dept for Education, 2023)

Imagine what a strata of abruptly underemployed, ontologically insecure management consultants, business analyst, accountants, and psychologists could achieve. Whole lot of social and cultural capital. 👔 💼 🔥

Kind of assumed that my partner side-stepping from the civil service to horticulture was a risky move, but here we are, with 'gardeners and landscape gardeners' at number 16 on the professions least exposed to AI applications (albeit in part because it's so poorly paid).

Casting about for a less baggage-laden, neoliberal, and self-aggrandising substitute for 'project'; synonyms, alternate etymologies, etc.

@scribe Not the newest model, I took a punt last year before they'd locked down the ecosystem. Fans run a little noisy, but happy with it.

Second unprompted comment on my Framework laptop in the few days I've been in Liverpool, which feels interesting.

Stateless infrastructure, lads.

'The level of complexity associated with these pipes refutes an earlier understanding in archaeological fields that holds that only a centralised state power with governing elites would be able to muster the organisation and resources to build a complex water management system.'

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2023/aug/chinas-oldest-water-pipes-were-communal-effort

@scribe Have been keeping an eye on them for a while, but still not sure if it's genius or madness.