Content tagged with “ai”

“ An ‘agentic’ process is one whereby someone else goes and does something with your approval and authority. In the world of AI, it means empowering an AI engine to do something for you. These agents are goal-seeking, adaptible, asynchronous, and have decision making powers. ”

“This was recommended to me by a friend, and a Hacker News thread. It was recommended as a short work of fiction, and it is – it’s a novella, at best. ‘Murderbot’ (a name she gave herself) is a SecUnit – a cyborg security unit, hired to protected a surveying crew on a wilderness planet. Near as I…”

“This is the second book of The Murderbot Diaries. Again, it’s a novella – only 149 pages. This picks up right after the first book. In this installment, she (1) helps a group of scientists get some research back, and (2) investigates a very bad episode from her past. In this sense, it’s like a…”

“A good primer to the field. Hits the right depth between technical and theoretical layers, including quite a bit on ethics. My takeaway is that we’re really, really far away from anything approaching what we think artificial intelligence was going to be. The key is that there’s a difference between…”

“ More of an anthology, perhaps? This book fulfills it’s title, but it careens around weirdly in scope. It goes from very high-level to very low-level. I’m torn on it. It was helpful to prove the point that AI is really category, not a single technology. I’d give it a 3.5 if I could. ”

“Bill Gates recommended this book. It’s not terrible, but not at all actionable, either. It’s a breathless prediction of what the future of AI, computing power, and gene editing will enable. The author paints a picture of amazing breakthoughs and things-we-cannot-image, etc. I don’t know what to do…”

“This book tries to answer the question: will AI ever be able to emulate human creativity? It never really answers the question, but it’s still very, very interesting. Each chapter covers a different type of creativity: writing, music, art, etc. It’s full of examples and anecdotes about the advances…”

“An okay book which reveals how high-end digital marketing works. It was written by some guys that went to work for Salesforce when it acquired their company. This is not how you or me do marketing – this is how huge brands like Johnson and Johnson and General Motors do marketing. You know all that…”

“I did not get (almost) any of the stories in this book, and I feel badly about that. The book was recommended highly by Kevin Kelly in Recommendo . They are hard sci-fi, with technically plausible scenarios, played out many levels deep in very consistent worlds, explored by a very fertile…”

“I did not love this book. There’s a potential for a good book there, but it’s wrapped up in a very annoying writing style. The book is a look at the history of how we have automated text generation. The author goes back into ancient times, and moves forward to Eliza and Claude Shannon, then…”

“The first three chapters which lay out the scenario of mass worker displacement by robots are quite interesting. After that, the book descends into bad science fiction and presents many fundamentally objectionable and downright creepy ideas as obviously wonderful and desirable. The book was written…”

“Here’s the thing about AI: we’re putting a lot of effort into making sure it doesn’t do silly things. Most of our effort around AI seems to be put toward controlling it. A ‘hallucination’ is when an LLM generates text that sounds correct, but isn’t. LLMs are eager to generate text, and they will…”

“This is about ‘information networks’ – the sources of information that humans use to understand their world. The author’s premise is that information is about connecting people, not necessarily communicating truth. We come together as communities through shared information. this information might…”

“Look at this picture. It’s funny – I get it, and so do you. Now, mentally catalog all the different things a computer/AI would have to understand to ‘get’ this picture – to understand this picture the same way your mind does. It’s …sobering. Humans have a background and context of knowledge that’s…”

“I’ve found one very practical use for AI on my personal website. I have a LOT of content out there, and I haven’t written summaries for it all. When showing this content in lists, I usually just extract about 300 characters to use as a summary, but that’s not perfect. So I bounced a bunch of…”

“Back in the mid-80s, ‘Star Trek IV’ was in theaters. It was a great movie about how the Enterprise had to go back in time to the mid-80s (the present-day for movie goers). The humor of the movie was mostly because the crew of the Enterprise had to survive in the 80s. It was a classic fish out of…”

“ Another page-turner. More horror than science, unlike Airframe . Truly scary in places, with a nihilistic bent. Got me wondering if this is something that could actually happen. ”

“Here’s the bizarre thing about RAG: it basically flips what you thought you understood about AI on its head, and beckons you to understand it more accurately. LLMs are static things. They are trained at a point in time, and cannot be ‘updated’ in the sense that you’re probably thinking. An LLM…”

“I can’t decide if this book was depressing or not. It came out 19 years ago, and even though the author is a little behind in his predictions, a lot of what he wrote about is slowing coming true. ‘The Singularity’ is that moment when technology kind of …takes over. Kurzweil didn’t come up with the…”