Pylimitics

"Simplicity" rearranged


Artificial Intelligence

  • Oops

    From IEEE Spectrum, an interesting analysis of how AIs make mistakes, as do humans, but because the AI mistakes differ from human mistakes, the expectations we have and the infrastructure we’ve created to recognize, reduce, and correct for human mistakes doesn’t fit AIs as well. We’re actually pretty good at dealing with mistakes — to… Continue reading

  • The upside of AI

    I am still pretty skeptical of large language models. I went pretty deep with them a couple of years ago, and most of what I found was either disappointing (in regard to LLM performance and capabilities) or annoying (in regard to all the marketing blather). In the ensuing months, I tended to discount the whole… Continue reading

  • The usual suspects

    Remenber the “crypto bubble” of a few years ago, when “blockchain technology” was going to be incorporated into practically everything, and everything was going to be different? And most importantly, lots of guys (all guys) made millions in stock valuations. Sam Bankman-Fried got caught as a scammer, but plenty got away with it. Look at… Continue reading

  • Attention

    A set of connected connections. “What, the internet requires less attention? Yes, because it demands so little of us intellectually and appeals so powerfully to our feelings.” “Postman distinguishes the Orwellian vision of the future, in which totalitarian governments seize individual rights, from that offered by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, where people medicate themselves into bliss, thereby voluntarily sacrificing their rights.”… Continue reading

  • Connections

    It’s not documents (books, articles, stories, notes, posts) that are important, even when they encapsulate fantastically important, incisive ideas. It’s the connections among and between documents that are the most important. Browsing the web is valuable because of hypertext. Ted Nelson coined that word back in 1965, when there were only a handful of real-world… Continue reading

About Me

I’m Pete Harbeson, a writer located near Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to writing my own content, I’ve learned to translate for my loquacious and opinionated pup Chocolate. I shouldn’t be surprised, but she mostly speaks in doggerel. You can find her contributions tagged with Chocolatiana.