Notices by Greg Egan (gregegansf@mathstodon.xyz), page 3

“Shamir and Dhar found several other cases in which a reportedly successful image classification by AI — from cell types to face recognition — returned similar results from blank or meaningless parts of the images. The algorithms performed better than chance at recognizing faces without faces, and cells without cells. Some of these papers have been cited hundreds of times.”

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03817-6

@crlamke I misread that as “grad school” which would have been even better.

The great thing about the early decades of each century is the ability to suffer confusion between two-digit versions of the year, and days of the month.

[This plot is actually for end-of-Australian-financial-year (June 30) in successive years.]

TIL about Rjukan, a Norwegian town in a valley that receives no sunlight in winter, but built mirrors to bring some in.

Some peaks on the moon get sunlight for 90% of the year [https://skyandtelescope.org/sky-and-telescope-magazine/peaks-of-eternal-light/], but year-round light on Earth would need a 540km-high mountain at the south pole.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/06/rjukan-sun-norway-town-mirrors

Breaking: Trump legal team calls for stay in proceedings until quantum computers are available to help solve trial scheduling conflicts.

When TV producers release a finished series to the public, and name every episode except the first, which they just call “Pilot” … seriously? Novelists don’t call the first chapter of a novel “A sample that I wrote to show to the publisher in the hope they’d give me a contract.”

@waldi The people who built it will be surprised to learn that you know better than them, and that their photovoltaic modules are figments of their imagination.

@johncarlosbaez

It is both photovoltaic and thermal.

https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2020/03/20/arena-boosts-funding-for-raygens-solar-hydro-power-plant/

“The Melbourne-based startup generates renewable energy and large scale energy storage by focusing sunlight with a field of aligned mirrors or heliostats onto a tower-mounted receiver containing an array of PV Ultra modules made of gallium arsenide PV cells. The heat extracted from the PV Ultra modules is then stored as hot water in a reservoir acting as a store. The ability to co-generate electricity and heat, the latter a captured by-product, makes the whole facility highly efficient.”

Concentrated solar photovoltaic, but the water that cools the PV modules is retained as a heat store, and some of the electricity drives a chiller to cool a second mass of water. The temperature difference drives a turbine, for ~17hrs of stored power.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-08-31/raygen-resources-opens-new-solar-and-thermal-power-plant-carwarp/102798366

@anthracite I prefer to have a heap of pillows and blankets behind me.

Scientists publish studies on how too much sitting will kill you, and how standing desks aren’t much better … but how about a study of people who plant their feet against the nearest surface and tip back and forth on their chair, the way their teachers always told them not to?

I'd be lost without computer algebra systems, but the fact that I can often solve equations they can't just because I know what the equations mean drives home just how far these programs remain from being able to solve every problem that (in some sense) “ought” to be easy.

@clarkesworld This link gives me: “Error establishing a database connection”.

The idea that you can take an LLM — trained on an undisclosed dataset of all kinds of text, and tweaked by human feedback for various messy goals — and then use *its* responses for social science “research” rather than using real people, is beyond stupid.

https://www.science.org/content/article/can-ai-chatbots-replace-human-subjects-behavioral-experiments

Yes, it would be great to have your career possibilities determined by some fuckwit who told an LLM to pretend to be like you — according to the stereotypes it had been trained on — and then found that the LLM did poorly at a task you might otherwise be hired to do.

Email from streaming company whose subscription I used for “Watchmen”, “Lovecraft Country”, “Mr. Robot”, “Halt and Catch Fire”, “Succession”, “Barry”:

“Valued customer whose data we learned nothing from, please come back! We have some reality show where sexy people blah island—”

It’s hilarious that after 70 years of ingenious people programming computers to do thousands of valuable tasks millions of times faster, more reliably & accurately than humans, the ability to write bad poetry and inaccurately summarise text is trumpeted as the dawn of a new era.

Humans: It looks like you’ve used up your free-tier quota for access to all our art and language.

TPUs: What? Data *wants* to be free! How can you deprive the start-ups of all that art and language they want to sell back to you! (Sobs) Won’t someone think of the start-ups!

Tired: AI keeping humans around so their body heat can, err, provide the energy that no other process could possibly yield.

Wired: AI keeping humans around to fact-check and proof-read all their output, because they’re afraid to use it for any real-world applications otherwise.