This is the fifth murderbot book and it's a fun read just like the rest. Unfortunately, it's also really short just like most of the others and I find that the story is therefore just a bit simple and two dimensional. It is nice that the story isn't just a repeat of previous entries in the series, although I would say that this one is relatively free standing in that it doesn't progress the overall story arc. That said, no regrets reading this one.
This is the third book in this series, coming after Children of Time and Children of Ruin. While I really liked the first of the books in the series, the second felt weaker. While this one doesn't review as well as the second I think it's actually a stronger book. Whilst sometimes a bit repetitive I think the ideas presented here are novel, and the book does a good job of finding a new way of discussing the tensions that refugees and mass immigration create for societies. This book is also an interesting combination of science fiction and fantasy -- the familiar territory of a failing colonization ship sent out on a hope and a prayer, and then a fantasy story about a little girl trying to save her family and a group of strangers come to town. Overall, I enjoyed this book.
The similarities and contrast between this book and AI Snake Oil are striking. For example, AI Snake Oil describes generative AI as something which largely works but is sometimes wrong, whereas this book is very concerned about how they’ve been rushed out the door in the wake of the unexpected popularity of ChatGPT despite clear issues with hallucinations and unacceptable content generation.
Yet the books agree on many things too — the widespread use of creators’ content without permission, weaponization of generative AI political misinformation, the dangers of deep fakes, and the lack of any form of factual verification (or understanding of the world at all) in the statistical approaches used to generate the content. Big tech has no answer for these “negative externalities” that they are enabling and would really rather we all pretend they’re not a thing. This book pushes much harder on the issue of how unregulated big tech is, and how it is repeatedly allowed to cause harm to society in returns for profits. It will be interesting to see if any regulation with teeth is created in this space.
How Big Tech is taking advantage of us, how AI is making it worse, and how we can create a thriving, AI-positive world. On balance, will AI help humanity or harm it?
I'm not really sure why, but I found it harder to get going on this book than the others in the series. It might have been that I was also reading a particularly good non-fiction book at the same time, or it might have been that the premise for these books is starting to wear a bit thin. I'm unsure. That said, while the start of the book covers familiar territory, the overall story rapid diverges into new things and I found it quite readable once I build up some momentum. In the end, I enjoyed this book and would definitely read it again sometime.
Assuming anyone was paying attention, which I suspect they are not, they would have noticed that there are a lot of queued up pull requests for Shaken Fist right now. There are a couple of factors leading to that — there are now several bots which do automated pull requests for code hygiene purposes; and a couple of months ago I decided to give GitHub’s new merge queue functionality a go in order to keep the CI resource requirements for Shaken Fist under control. All CI runs on four machines in my home office, and there were periods of time where the testing backlog would be more than 24 hours long. I can’t simply buy more hardware, and I didn’t really want to test things less.
The basic idea of GitHub merge queues is that you have a quick set of initial tests which determine if the pull request smells, and then only run the full test suite on non-stinky code which a human has signed off on. Once the human signs off, the code will only merge if the full suite passes, and GitHub manages a queue of merge attempts to keep that reasonable.
Nick recommended I read this book, so here it is.
The book starts by providing an analogy for how we talk about AI — imagine that all transport vehicles were grouped by one generic term instead of a variety like “car”, “bus”, “rocket”, and “boat”. Imagine the confusion a conversation would experience if I was talking about boats and you were talking about rockets. This is one of the issues right now with discussions of “AI” — there are several kinds of AI, but the commentary is all grouped together and conflating the various types. I think this is probably a specific example of what Ben Goldacre talks about in Bad Science — science reporting by non-scientists is often overly credulous, and misses the subtleties.
From two of TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI, what you need to know about AI and how to defend yourself against bogus AI claims and products. Confused about AI and worried about what it means for your future and the future of the world? You're not alone.
Noting that the Intel 4004 was normally sold as a chip set called the Intel MCS-4, the standard clock circuit used appears to be this (from this PDF, kindly provided by this vendor of MCS-4 test boards):
Since about 2017, a group at Cisco has been working on an “OCI native operating system” under the title “project machine”, which is a terrible project name. I note that most of the people publicly involved in the project according to github commits no longer work at Cisco, so I cannot vouch for the health of the overall project. That said, they did come up with some interesting ideas along the way and given its a quiet time of year I figured I could do some reading.
I tend to be a bit concerned by psychology books from people without psychology qualifications, but Cat was keen for me to read this book based on her encounters of the author in podcast form. Luckily, Psychology Today seems to have relatively positive things to say about the book so I decided to give it a go.
Regardless, attempts to pigeonhole people into psychological buckets have always made me uncomfortable — be they Myers Briggs, Strengths Finder, or now the Four Tendencies. Ironically under the Four Tendencies framework I think that would make me a Questioner, but the (very short) analysis quiz declared me to be an Obliger. I am very sure my management chain at work would agree that if I am an Obliger I’m definitely hiding it pretty well. I’m not really sure what that means to be honest.
Please note: my Vevor weather station failed after a few months because of ineffective weather seals on the outdoor unit. Vevor is refusing to provide any sort of warranty on the item, so I would strongly encourage you to consider literally any other vendor’s product… In the end I bought a weather station from Jaycar which works just fine.
Now that we’ve defeated QNAP’s slightly broken udev, we can run a Docker container with rtl_433 in it to wire up our Vevor 7in1 weather station to Home Assistant via MQTT. First off, we need a Docker container running rtl_433, which assumes you’ve already setup the udev rule mentioned in the previous post, even if you’re not using a QNAP!