Notices by allison (aparrish@friend.camp)

i'm so exhausted with studies like this https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-76900-1

the paper really should be called "People who don't give a shit one way or another react ambivalently to output of billion-dollar machine designed by hucksters to trick people into thinking its outputs are plausible exemplars of textual artifacts in a specified genre" (the study participants were crowd-sourced online and paid less than a living wage)

it falls prey to every fallacy of AI creativity research (and AI research in general), e.g., that "AI" is a monolithic technology, that "AI" is independent of human intention, that "AI"'s telos is to produce artifacts "indistinguishable" from "humans," that the ability to "replicate" certain genres of art (especially genres positioned as highly "creative," like poetry) are benchmarks along that telos, etc.

anybody out there have resources on writing reliable, modular, memory-safe assembly (to the extent that this is even possible)? (i'm especially interested in stuff related to 8-bit retro programming, but will settle for anything relevant)

what's especially infuriating is that this outcome is *totally obvious* to anyone who knows the first thing about language, i.e., that even the tiniest atom of language encodes social context, so of course any machine learning model based on language becomes a social category detector (see Rachael Tatman's "What I Won't Build" https://slideslive.com/38929585/what-i-wont-build) & any model put to use in the world becomes a social category *enforcer* (see literally any paper in the history of the study of algorithmic bias)

i got so angry after reading this paper on LLMs and African American English that i literally had to stand up and go walk around the block to cool off https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07856-5 it's a very compelling paper, with a super clever methodology, and (i'm paraphrasing/extrapolating) shows that "alignment" strategies like RLHF only work to ensure that it never seems like a white person is saying something overtly racist, rather than addressing the actual prejudice baked into the model

and what's ADDITIONALLY infuriating is some engineer or product team at openai (or whatever) is going to read this paper and think they can "fix" the problem by applying human feedback alignment blalala to this particular situation (or even this particular corpus!), instead of recognizing that there are an infinite number of ways (both overt and subtle) that language can enact prejudice, and the system they've made necessarily amplifies that prejudice

every day i wake up in utter disbelief of the fact that people continue to take these products seriously as tools, especially in the realm of education. end rant. FOR NOW

i was going to write a kind of shitpost saying "if John Snow made his cholera map today, there would be a full-on conservative reaction that violently denied his methods and conclusions" but then I looked it up and... that's what actually happened lol

has anyone made a chatbot chatbot so you can chat with your chatbot chats

i'd be the one keeping everyone late at the apple branding meeting with my refusal to support the phrase "spatial computing" instead of my suggestion, "spomputing"

as a touch typist who uses the keyboard for pretty much everything, this sounds like a "i have no mouth"-level nightmare

(from the verge review of apple vision pro https://www.theverge.com/24054862/apple-vision-pro-review-vr-ar-headset-features-price)

gonna disrupt the whole user interface industry with my new invention, "tactile buttons that make the computer do the thing when you press them"

@nasser
ab = a times b
a·b = scalar product of a and b
a-b = a minus b
a–b = from a to b
a—b = i feel like a and b should both be clauses in this sentence but using a semicolon seems too precious

@technomancy it's so good, 100% pure joy on every rewatch

i taught a course called "Programming with data for artists and designers" this semester at NYU. schedule, notes, readings and example code available online here: https://progdat.decontextualize.com/schedule.html the course introduces Python and Pandas from the ground up, as a means for undertaking basic exploratory data analysis

my department at NYU has a position open for a new assistant arts professor, starting Fall 2024: https://tisch.nyu.edu/itp/itp-people/we-re-hiring we teach tech+art+design and have an undergrad program, a two-year masters program, and a one-year low-residency masters. it's a great place to work imo—we have wonderful facilities, a great student community, and a wide-ranging and weird curriculum

i made this custom game boy flash cart by "dead bug" soldering a DIP parallel flash chip to a cartridge edge breakout board that i designed. there's no memory bank controller in here, so you can only flash roms up to 32kb (i have tetris on there now haha) but i like how it turned out!

this table of C escape characters is making the same noises as I do when I have to wake up early