Suppose I should provide a brief #introduction

- Background in #physics
- Use #datascience #machinelearning and #cloudcomputing to solve challenging problems in #insurance
- Live in #Madison #Wisconsin
- Organizer of our local #python meetup group -- see @madpy
- Perennially hopeful #WhiteSox #baseball fan
- Devoted #tea drinker
- Proud papa of two

For all their talk about #MachineLearning support on their latest Apple Silicon devices, you just can’t do any of the newer generative stuff on Macs easily, or fully.

So what’s the point of Apple touting their machine learning prowess except to be misleading?

Any time I try to do anything even slightly complicated/off the beaten track, I run into issues on the Mac side 😕 Even a few years after the introduction of Apple Silicon, it just feels as if Apple is just not ready for all the new stuff …

Makes you almost want to go back to using a PC full time … almost 😛

#MachineLearning #DeepLearning #AppleSilicon #Hardware

Friday Flyday! Here’s a portrait of a hanging-thief fly, Diogmites sp., photographed in Saint Louis.

#FlyDay #Asilidae #Insects #photography

I normally post these on Twitter, but it just occurred to me I could try doing so here: MIT Technology Review has an open call for pitches, for our upcoming issue on ⚖️ethics⚖️. We're looking for *big* swings: features, investigations, profiles, and sharp essays at the intersection of #ethics and #technology. Rates: $1-2/word.

Pitch deadline is tomorrow: April 20. Short notice, I know! If you have an idea, but need a day or two to write up a pitch, send me an e-mail (see https://www.technologyreview.com/how-to-pitch-mit-technology-review/)

Take a moment to enjoy this unusually twisted and very big London Plane in #camberwell #southlondon #treesofmastdon

Apparently Melon Husk wants to start “TruthGPT” to rival OpenAI and Google. If this is going to be anything like his “free speech” efforts on Twitter, you know that “truth” is the furthest thing you’ll get from “TruthGPT” 😛

Also didn’t Melon-boy sign a letter asking for a pause on development of systems more powerful than GPT-4 for at least 6 months? So why is *he* going ahead with development of new systems? Doesn’t the pause apply to him?

Or was the pause only so that he (and others) can catch up? 😛

The way these people do u-turns is likely to give whiplash to people if anybody actually paid attention 😀

#MachineLearning #DeepLearning #GPT

If you’re a #PhD student in Australia & the Pacific researching technologies in critical ways, submit an EOI to attend the #criticaltechstudies workshop! Come help build a network and map our work.

https://www.admscentre.org.au/event/phd-winter-workshop-in-critical-technology-studies/

Travel funding is available thanks to
@sydneylawschool, @westsyduics, and additional support from @anucybernetics.

The workshop will also be a satellite event of the
@AdmsCentre 2023 Symposium.

EOI deadline extended to 21 April!

I often warn people of the dangers of using LLMs as search engines and how you need to verify any fact provided by these engines yourself.

But on the flipside, what I’ve found Bing Chat (https://www.bing.com/) useful for recently has been to find out who plays a particular role in a TV show/movie 🙂

This is a game that my wife and I play — when we recognize somebody in a show, we either say “Oh, it’s so and so from this other show” or we just say “Oh, we know this person” and then try to figure out who it is.

Our old workflow used to be that we wait for the person’s name to be mentioned, go to IMDB, find the show, find the episode, and then search the cast for the person’s name. Or, go through the actor images till we (possibly) find the right person.

But with Bing Chat, all you have to do is simply say “Who plays <name> in <show>” and it generally find the info 🙂

In fact, recently I asked for a person by their shortened character name (since I couldn’t find them in the roles listing because they had been listed with the full character name) and Bing still found them.

So colour me (slightly) impressed 😛

#MachineLearning #SearchEngines #ChatGPT #BingChat

I’m home from my Channel Islands trip. Here’s a Santa Cruz Island fox.

I guess it’s time to start giving this more of a try. Twitter feels lonely now. I’m not great at #introductions, but I read this is proper etiquette here. I’m a librarian. I like #books #boardgames #swimming #starwars #janeausten

Now I’m no #twitcher but when there are reports of a #Hoopoe just down the road I’ve got to try my luck.
What a bird..! 😲😎👍✅
These guys usually hang out in southern #Europe and occasionally appear in the south of #England causing a good deal of excitement.
But this one is in #Combee, #CountyDown, #NorthernIreland 😳

#nature #NaturePhotography #wildlife #bird #birdphotography #birds #rare #rarity #lifer #twitching #birding #exotic

#AmazingWorld
#ArtOfEasterEggs

Hennig Brand, who discovered phosphorus in 1669, found it while boiling down gallons of urine to try and make gold.

When movies get really stupid …

I’m watching this Tamil movie at the moment where this guy moves into a new house, doesn’t lock his room, has his housemate enter his room in the middle of the night, take car keys from his bedside to go to another house which has all its doors open in the middle of the night, enters the house and kills a woman and so on …

Do people really exist who have no suspicions at all of strangers and will leave their room door open if they share a house with somebody and they’ve just met the guy? I find it really hard to believe …

The movie goes on to have even more unbelievable stuff happen in quick succession and I’ll probably just watch it anyway to see where all the insanity leads but I find this one really hard to believe already 😛

#Movies #Plot #SuspensionOfDisbelief

I am James Davis Nicoll, reviewer, essayist, and part time cautionary tale. In addition to my own site and tor dot com, my work has appeared at Publishers Weekly, Romantic Times, and Interzone. Between 2001 and 2014, I was a first reader for the Science Fiction Book Club.

Links and more details in comments. This sort of issue is why my blog is called More Words, Deeper Hole.

#introduction #sciencefiction #reviews #bookstodon

My wife pointed out something a couple of days ago that I hadn’t actually noticed myself — that we’ve seen a number of Indian movies and TV shows that dealt with the pandemic, but that there were hardly any shows from the west that incorporated the pandemic into their story.

It’s almost as if the pandemic does not exist in the fictional worlds of western movies/TV 😛

In fact, the only show I can think of where I remember the pandemic being dealt with extensively was “All Rise” … and there was a movie called “7 Days” (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14494586) but it had an Indian director and Indian cast (but the movie was in English) and so I think it only counts as half a point 🙂

And that was since the pandemic began!

Compared to that, just in the last week I’ve seen at least 2 - 3 Indian movies which centered around the pandemic and wasn’t just referring to it as a passing thing.

I just find the contrast interesting …

#Pandemic #Movies #Reflections

My first attempt at #Mosstodon

Hi fedifriends - hope you can help.

We’re looking for a freelance Operations Assistant to join our small, ambitious and friendly Green Web Foundation team. We work together with one clear mission: to transition the world to a fossil-free internet by 2030.

The full details about the job, what to expect from the role and the hiring process is linked below:

https://www.thegreenwebfoundation.org/jobs/help-wanted-operations-assistant/

Retoots, boosts, retweets, hell whatever you prefer to call them very appreciated!

🌍💚

#Photography
#ThickTrunkTuesday