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
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"
@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
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!
i am going to die from laughter. the entire appeal of LLMs to capitalism is its potential for obviating the cost of creative labor. it would be hilarious if the only way to prevent LLMs from eating themselves is... to pay people for their creative labor
okay you might remember this project that i posted about last year: https://posts.decontextualize.com/solar-powered-dawn-poems-progress-report/ in which I generate poetry from a markov chain on a microcontroller using a solar panel harvester chip and some big capacitors. i originally wrote the generator with CircuitPython, which gave me 2–3 lines of poetry per discharge from the harvester.
well I just finished reimplementing the generator in C++ and now I get... ~200 lines of poetry per discharge (!)
I have posted a very detailed write-up of my Game Boy Pocket SP mod, including details on design process and fabrication. I also included instructions on how to replicate the build yourself! https://posts.decontextualize.com/pocket-sp/