Content here is by Michael Still, mikal@stillhq.com.
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 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…
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…
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…
Another really good if a bit short book. My only real criticism of the first four books in this series is they really should have been one book. Title: Exit Strategy Author: Martha Wells Genre: Fiction Publisher: Tordotcom Release Date: October 2, 2018 Pages: 143 Murderbot wasn’t programmed to care. So, its decision to help…
The third installment in the murderbot series. Another fun if a bit short read. Honestly these books should all have been a single volume. That’s the only way I don’t enjoy these books — they’re super expensive for their length. Title: Rogue Protocol Author: Martha Wells Genre: Fiction Publisher: Tordotcom Release Date: August 7, 2018…
Another short and fun sci-fi read. Our favorite anxious and depressed murderbot is off trying to solve the mystery of why in fact he murdered all those nice people. Along the way he meets a mildly annoying but actually kind of friendly AI transport ship with a lot of unexplained capabilities. Definitely worth a couple…
So I read this paper over the weekend. Naively, its a resonably interesting piece of research around using a generative AI to use descriptions of CVEs from their responsible disclosures to exploit unpatched systems autonomously. Now read that sentence again — these people prompted Chat GPT4 with CVES which didn’t have fixes yet, and had it…
Inspired by Alastair D’Silva‘s cunning plans for world domination, I’ve been googling around for automated lego sorting systems recently. This seems like a nice tractable machine learning problem with some robotics thrown in for fun. Some cool projects if you’re that way inclined: Sorting 2 Metric Tons of Lego A lego sorter using tensorflow This…
Not the book of the movie, but the collection of short stories by Isaac Asimov. I’ve read this book several times before and enjoyed it, although this time I found it to be more dated than I remembered, both in its characterisations of technology as well as it’s handling of gender. Still enjoyable, but not…