Anthony

I'm Anthony and I'm a computer scientist.

Public Key

npub16mygm6jgnmygqclck9q9jz68aryf0zljp9q8yxspqux00ak2m3ls2u7w9x

NIP-05 Address

abucci_at_buc.ci@mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsddjydafyfajyqv0utzszepdr73jyh30eqjsrjrgqswr8h7m9dclcpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0wd68ytnsw43qdwmam6

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relay.mostr.pub

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npub16mygm6jgnmygqclck9q9jz68aryf0zljp9q8yxspqux00ak2m3ls2u7w9x

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Last Notes

2024-07-20 13:41:46

Whenever I hear someone say something like "you can't change human nature", I remind myself that you also can't change H₂O's nature, and yet that substance can be in various forms of ice, various forms of water, steam, and plasma; it can settle into vast bodies or interleave throughout cells; it can form destructive storms or nourish life. What, exactly, is one trying to express when one refers to "human nature"?

2024-07-12 15:58:42

Even after four years of wearing masks on a regular basis, I still sometimes try to stuff a piece of food into my mouth while wearing a mask and smash the food on the outside of it.
#MaskUp #COVIDIsAirborne #COVIDIsNotOver

2024-03-22 15:25:55

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@npub1sdr…2jh4 @npub1a6w…9e8h Just as a matter of marketing this article: why on Earth would anyone believe supply-chain experts know anything about the safety of eclipse-viewing glasses? Why not ask an astronomer who actually knows something about the subject?

2024-03-19 20:59:32

@npub1dls…hn0x hi! I'm guessing you're already aware of stuff like this, but on the off chance you weren't, here's a company, Varda Space Industries, that helps other companies send their bio and pharma projects into low earth orbit, to take advantage of microgravity: https://www.varda.com . So, in addition to Starlink and the internet/cellular sector, we have biotech and pharma angling to fill low Earth orbit (this time with potential biohazards?)

2024-03-18 13:54:06

Sorry. Your Car Will Never Drive You Around.
Brutal takedown of the bullsh&*# that is "self-driving cars": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DOd4RLNeT4
It's a long video but frankly you can get the gist of most of it by scanning over the chapter titles. "Hitting Fake Children". "Hitting Real Children". "FSD Expectations" is a long list of the various lies #Elon #Musk has told about "full self driving" Teslas. Also the "Openpilot" chapter has a picture of Elon Musk's face as a dartboard.
The endless hype and full-on lies of the self-driving-car con from roughly 2016 to 2020 resembles the #AI #hype about #LLMs like #ChatGPT going on right now. If you've been in this industry long enough and have been honest with yourself about it you've seen all this before. Until something significant changes we really ought to view anything coming out of the tech sector with deep suspicion (https://bucci.onl/notes/Another-AI-Hype-Cycle).
#AI #AGI #tech #LLM #GPT

2024-03-14 17:38:25

Somewhat upset to find that the interrobang can be written in ways other than ?! ; Wikipedia lists ?!, !?, ?!?,?!!, !?? or !?! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interrobang).
I thought it was obviously ? (interro) followed by ! (bang).
#interrobang #punctuation

2024-03-14 01:04:58

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@npub1jvp…jpzt https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/lonely-surfaces-on-ai-generated-images

2024-03-14 00:52:52

For all the surrealism of these tools’ outputs, there’s a banal uniformity to the results. When people’s imaginative energy is replaced by the drop-down menu “creativity” of big tech platforms, on a mass scale, we are facing a particularly dire form of immiseration.
From https://thebulletin.org/2022/10/ai-is-plundering-the-imagination-and-replacing-it-with-a-slot-machine/
#AI #Midjourney #DALLE #StableDiffusion #GenAI

2024-03-08 14:03:39

Please stop saying "#AI is doing X". People are doing X, with the help of artifacts produced by computer science. #AI is a marketing term. The only thing it seems to be "doing" is muddying thought.

2024-02-12 14:17:21

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You can also grep through it to find something, which I do from time to time.
CC: @npub1zwf…lylf

2024-02-07 15:25:23

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This level of death in the US amounts to one plane crash that kills all passengers aboard every single day. How many people would be flying in airplanes if this were our reality? What do you suppose would be the public response if a plane fell out of the sky every day across the country?
#COVID #COVID19 #COVIDIsAirborne #COVIDIsNotOver #WearAMask #MaskUp

2024-02-06 17:35:28

Worldwide, there were more than 11,000 reported deaths from COVID between mid-December 2023 and mid-January 2024, and more than half of those deaths occurred in the U.S.
I think it’s important that we continue to talk about it. We understand you don’t want to hear about it. I don’t want to talk about it. But we need to because there’s more we can do. We cannot prevent all infections. We cannot prevent all deaths. But there’s a hell of a lot more that we can do to really keep people safe and save them from losing a loved one.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rampant-covid-poses-new-challenges-in-the-fifth-year-of-the-pandemic/
#COVID #COVID19 #COVIDIsAirborne #COVIDIsNotOver #WearAMask #MaskUp

2024-02-05 18:28:06

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Amazing photograph on so many levels.

2024-01-31 14:14:36

You're not actually accounting for the "bus factor" of your #tech / #dev / #foss project if you don't count #COVID as one of the biggest, nastiest busses on the road. Besides the fact that #COVIDIsStillHere , it is a leading cause of death in the United States (and elsewhere) and a major driver of alarmingly increasing rates of disability. On top of all that, people who've had COVID are four times as likely to develop other viral infections later. The culture around you is demanding you ignore it, but since when have tech nerds and #hackers taken marching orders from the mainstream? How much do you actually care about the health of your project if you're not taking steps to safeguard the health of the people working on it?
Looking at you, #FOSDEM , with your "No mandatory COVID-19 measures at FOSDEM 2024" (source: https://fosdem.org/2024/practical/covid/ ). You don't get to throw up your hands and pretend you didn't know.

2024-01-19 20:33:25

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@npub1364…zwxw It seemed worth emphasizing. Hypothetically it could be the case that there isn't enough money/resources/what have you to start tackling this problem. But that's not the problem in the US, and I'd guess not in Canada either. I'd like to believe most people understand that, but you often hear "but how will we PAY for it?" whenever you suggest government do something different from what it's currently doing.
@npub1fvu…nhwd @npub152r…w6dd

2024-01-19 20:23:12

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That's not a money issue. That's an issue of the people in control of the money. Very different problem.
CC: @npub1fvu…nhwd @npub152r…w6dd

2024-01-19 15:45:09

Regarding that last boost, I'm starting to conceive of LLMs and image generators as a phenomenon of (American) society eating its seed corn. If you're not familiar with the phrase, "seed corn" is the corn you set aside to plant next year, as opposed to the corn you eat this year. If you eat your seed corn this year, you have no seeds to plant next year, and thus create a crisis for all future years, a crisis that could have been avoided with better management.
LLMs and image generators mass ingest human-created texts and images. Since the human creators of the ingested texts and images are not compensated and not even credited, this ingestion puts negative pressure on the sharing of such things. Creative acts functioning as seed for future creative acts becomes depressed. Creative people will have little choice but to lock down, charge for, or hide their works. Otherwise, they'll be ingested by innumerable computer programs and replicated ad infinitum without so much as a credit attached. Seed corn that had been freely given forward will become difficult to get. Eaten.
Eating your seed corn is meant to be a last ditch act you take out of desperation after exhausting all other options. It's not meant to be standard operating procedure. What a bleak society that does this, consuming itself in essence.
#ChatGPT #GPT #Midjourney #StableDiffusion #DALLE #AI

2024-01-11 02:33:35

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@npub14p4…j3gw I've followed your podcast and web site for awhile, and your posts here more recently. I'm so happy to see you're writing for a place like Atlas Obscura too. I think you have a unique gift and insight, and I'm excited for you and excited to see where you take this work.

2024-01-09 16:31:36

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@npub1fza…qg7t @npub14ca…0nj8 @npub1p77…0jxq bizarrely, they've known about my instance since Jul 2023: https://fedidb.org/network/instance/buc.ci
and they know it runs snac. Yet it's not listed on the page about snac. There might be bugs in some of these views.

2024-01-08 22:34:41

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@npub1fza…qg7t @npub14ca…0nj8 @npub1p77…0jxq tsk tsk my instance is not on that list. I wonder how accurate it is. I don't dispute your claim to being the most poulous instance though; mine is an instance of one!

2023-12-29 19:49:02

Effective altruism is when you have a glass of water, meet a person who needs a glass of water, and decide to sell the glass of water to a third person for as high a price as you can in order to raise funds to buy a profitable water-bottling company so that you can donate water to the thirsty person. Effective accelerationism is when you do all that while insisting that government should repeal all legislation impacting water, water bottling, and water sales.
#EA #eacc #e/acc #effectivealtriuism

2023-11-23 19:23:05

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@npub1qu9…ny6g Is it because they think the flavors appeal to kids? That's been the rhetoric here in the US.

2023-10-19 17:34:45

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@npub1mhr…dz3s That might be your purpose for making public statements, but it is not everyone's purpose. Surely you see there is room for disagreement at least?
I find it bizarre that after all that you still don't think that excluding generative AI is going to fly. Are you unfamiliar with robots.txt? Anyone who runs a web site can place a filed named "robots.txt" at the root and anything that crawls the web--whether it be search engines or anything else--is supposed to respect that file. One thing you can express in the file is "don't index my web site". It is straightforward to place rules in robots.txt that would exclude OpenAI (makers of ChatGPT) from using contents from your web site, provided they respect the standards.
In other words, not only is excluding generative AI going to fly, it's already flying.
Generative AI is not just "a new technology". It's a dangerous technology, and I think it's fully rational for people to respond to it with a skepticism and restraint.

2023-10-19 15:43:38

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@npub1mhr…dz3s @npub1z0k…pp3u When you walk into a public place, are you giving anyone else present in that public place permission to do a 3-d scan of your face and body and then use that scan to make a puppet that looks almost exactly like you? Are you, further, giving them permission to use that puppet for whatever purpose they choose, without your consent? What if they use it to make bigoted comments, for instance, or to tell lies? What does "going out in public" even mean, if not this broad permission to use your 3-d likeness however anyone out there sees fit?
The fact that the technology exists to perform some task does not immediately confer permission to use the technology to perform that task. The existence of a capability and the permission to use it are separate issues and we keep them separate in virtually all areas where technology and human life intersect, for very good reason. Why on Earth would it be any different when it comes to posting online?

2023-09-26 17:04:32

Having followed the public conversation on #AI since the explosion of #ChatGPT on the scene last year, the overwhelming characteristic I experience is ugliness. The conversation around AI, the reactions to it, the pronouncements about it, all feel ugly to me. It's ugly to imagine artists being put out of work by computer programs. It's ugly that artists have to defend themselves and use tools like Glaze to protect their work from these things (https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu). It's ugly to imagine people reading AI-extruded text and thinking what they're reading was written by a human author. It's ugly to see business-minded people seeking ways to replace workers with AI programs. What NEDA did was ugly (https://www.thecut.com/2023/06/neda-has-disabled-tessa-its-harmful-helpline-chatbot.html). Replacing information retrieval systems with chatbots is ugly. Deploying AI-enabled drones and robots onto city streets is ugly.
How so many of these tools are made, on a foundation of theft and exploitation, is extremely ugly.
This technology could uplift people and yet here we are with one ugly episode after another unfolding like a dystopian science fiction plot generated by a chatbot. It's deeply unsettling and unpleasant to be a part of.

2023-09-26 16:23:15

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@npub1a6w…9e8h Oh no, you're getting into "Fresh AI Hell" territory with this one. The author of this article, and the published article they cite (The originality of machines: AI takes the Torrance Test), are in business studies, not computer science or AI, nor in psychology, sociology, or any other field relevant to the assessment of human creativity. They don't really have scholarly standing to be discussing either AI or human creativity writ large, and definitely not any overlap there may be.
The statement about AI "winning awards" is to a NYT article that both-sides the argument rather than taking the assessment of actual artists, which is that image generators cannot make art and are essentially stealing artworks from artists.
"Tools like DALL-E and Midjourney are actually more creative than most humans" is an obscene thing to say, frankly. Besides the fact that you're failing to read the room after the Writers Guild and Screen Actors Guild strikes specifically called attention to the use of these tools to deskill and replace workers, this statement is 100% AI hype and does not hold up to even a moment's scrutiny. These are tools based on storing the statistics of very large databases of images and then emitting ("extruding") image-like output from prompts. They are input-output systems, essentially puppets of their human users whose actions are choreographed by the human artists who created the works that make them possible. They are incapable of being "creative" in any meaningful sense of that word: they literally lack the capacity to "be" that, or anything else cognitive for that matter. Equating what they do with what humans do, as your toot does, is absolutely shocking.
I'm very disappointed that you published this. Boo.
cc: @npub1z0k…pp3u @npub1h4c…c4eg
#AI #hype

2023-08-30 13:24:00

Just a friendly reminder: it's quite possible that any "artificial general intelligence" human beings are ever able to create has exactly the same "shortcomings" that human intelligence has. It could be that these "shortcomings" are not shortcomings at all, but inherent in what we call "intelligence". At this point we don't know, though there are good reasons to believe this might be the case, and the precautionary principle suggests we take this possibility seriously.
We are, collectively, prone to believing that artificial general intelligence will embody all the best qualities of (what we think of as) the best people who have ever lived, while simultaneously having none of what we think of as negative qualities. They'll have the creativity of the best artists, the game-playing skills of chess grandmasters or Go 9-dans; they'll have physical prowess beyond gold-medal-winning Olympians, all wrapped up in a humanoid package that, for unexplained reasons, will be kind and graceful while happily doing our hard work for us.
What we are talking about in that case is a deity, not a machine or a tool. That's not artificial intelligence, it's angelic intelligence.
I think it is very important right now to guard against magical thinking and deification when considering what artificial intelligence is or could be. Even world leaders seem to be rapidly falling into dangerous patterns of thought, attributing god-like powers to computer systems that are only slightly better mimics than the Mechanical Turk.
#AI #AGI #artificialintelligence #intelligence

2023-08-16 19:44:47

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I don't know if they've fixed this issue or I'm just special and haven't been exposed (yet), but this is how the search looks for me on Google. I'd note, however, the picture about Kuwait next to the description of Kenya.
(if you're geographically challenged, Kuwait is in the Middle East SE of Iraq, not in Africa).
https://buc.ci/abucci/s/bc890728137e2ed9ae3f85c946de8402.png