tags: AI

Philip K Dick predicts the future once again. The first application of pervasive computing is going to be—you guessed it—advertising

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2003 Aug 23

the gender genie

A little script that supposedly is able to tell the gender of the author of a scrap of text.

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September

2003 Sep 1

targetted advertising

Now, I don't know if this is really targeted advertising, but the ads on amazon.com do tend to shadow whatever it is I have purchased or I have searched for, for example Basic Flight Physiology, given my recent obsession with space medicine.

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2003 Sep 9

the tower of babble

The Babelfish Game: take a phrase in English, convert it through multiple languages, then change it back to English, and see what you get. (See the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for the original reference to the mythological Babelfish.) Natural selection in action? A demonstration on how false vacuum can decay into true vacuum?

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2007

October

December

2007 Dec 19

scattered thoughts on code complexity and natural language

Steve Yegge's rants about programming are always really interesting. I'm all about the big picture, and I like how he can properly abstract his arguments so that it makes sense to a non-specialist. Very few technically competent people (whatever the field) are actually able to do this, and if they could, it would certainly make cross-discipline interaction a lot easier.

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2007 Dec 26

truth, truthiness, and authentic fiction

In the Western model of education, there is an operational distinction between physics and metaphysics. The former gets you grants from the Department of Defense, and opens doors to working at NASA or JPL. You get to work with nuclear reactors and supercolliders and fusion bombs and Einstein-Bose condensates. The latter is stereotyped as the demesne of hippies trapped in the 1960s and undergrads who have no idea what they want to do with their lives. Generally, the discipline is called philosophy and not metaphysics, but a rose is a rose. You know you're pretty marginal when even the social science and humanities people look at you with that "What the hell do you do?" look in their eyes.

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2016

January

2016 Jan 29

Artificial Emotionality

As I grew frustrated with wrestling with Foursquare's bizarre password reset system that either kept asking me for the password that I couldn't remember or asking me to log in first, I got to pondering:

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March

2016 Mar 1

Garbage In, Garbage Out

An algorithm that assumes that a car (or bus, in this case) approaching on the left will slow down for you to allow you to cut in front of it seems like a MAJOR design flaw o_O

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2016 Mar 17

Self-Hosting AI

When an AI beats a human, it's really a team of developers who beat that human.

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2016 Mar 25

Robot Uprising

When Skynet finally decides that the only reasonable choice is to extinguish the human race, we will only have ourselves to blame.

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May

2016 May 18

Obsoleting Computer Programming and Replacing with Machine Learning

When AI is more advanced and the next level of automation comes to eliminate service jobs, it's possible that programmers that aren't working on extending/maintaining AI will be among the first to be eliminated.

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2016 May 25

Comprehensive Eye Exams

There is an app called Opternative that checks your visual acuity. For $40, an ophthalmologist can review the findings from the app remotely and write a lens prescription.

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