Odd Lots
- That’ll leave a mark, Mark: Unsealed emails indicate that Meta downloaded 81.7 terabytes of pirated books from sites like Anna’s Archive and LibGen. Why? To train their AIs. Most people would consider that a violation of copyright law all by itself apart from seeding the monster files while torrenting them.
- After hearing how bad eggs are for your cardiovascular health for literally decades, new research on the over-70 set finds that people in that age bracket who eat eggs six or seven days a week see a 29% reduction in heart disease. I have an extra-large egg every morning (I used to have two, until I realized one would carry me to lunch) and am much relieved. Carbs are the enemy. Eggs are your allies.
- Warner Brothers has dropped more than 30 of its feature-length films on YouTube without charge, including Waiting for Guffman and Oh, God! Note that this isn’t the YouTube paid service, but just plain, ordinary free YouTube. People wonder why, though I’d guess that WB is trying to establish itself as “the good guy” vis-a-vis old content, unlike The Mouse House, which cannot let anything go no matter how old or bad it is.
- As my regular readers know, I’m not much of a fan of AI—but I am a huge fan of nuclear power. What AI seems best at right now is persuading power utilities to put unused (“zombie”) nuclear plants back online, or even—egad!—building new ones. TechCrunch has a decent story. Me? More AI! More AI!
- I remember reading about this, um, eccentric—who claimed alien visitation and is now being sued by investors who were persuaded that he had invented an antigravity machine. Here’s the whole long-form story, from Bloomberg.
- Lazarus 3.8, a bugfix release, is now available. Worth it. Really. Pascal isn’t dead.
- From robocop to rolocop: Spherical Chinese robots are hitting Chinese streets to assist police in chasing crooks and breaking up riots. One plus: They’re pretty rugged. I can think of some minuses, and I’ll bet you can too.
- Here’s a world map showing what the commonest last name is in every country on Earth. Here? Smith. Same in Canada, Australia, and the UK. Who could have guessed?
- In the first cut of Google’s AI Super Bowl ad, the ad claimed that Gouda cheese represents from 50 to 60 percent of all cheese consumed here on Earth. They fixed it with a little non-artificial intelligence, heh. Ok, one could argue the point, since a lot of stuff labeled “cheese” isn’t really cheese as I understand the term—but even Velveeta doesn’t have numbers like that. Come for the football, stay for the Super Bowl AI hallucination about…cheese.
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: health · programming
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I’m pretty sure I read something years ago that suggested that the evidence against eggs was “flimsy” at best and that eggs were more likely to be good for you. I don’t eat eggs every day, but I’ve never been shy of having an egg or two since then.
I’m sure you already know this, but whilst that 29% might sound impressive – there’s a good chance it a 29% reduction on some stupidly low number, like 0.000017317. I remember seeing an article on how red meat gave an x% higher chance of getting cancer – then when I saw how low the actual original figure that the x% was being applied to was I just laughed at the absurdity. I’m not going to be particularly scared of an extra 0.1 in 10billion chance lol
Well, yes, and that’s an issue with a whole lot of similar medical research. It may matter more to people who have a genetic predisposition to some medical issue that would bring those numbers up. This is one reason I wear my skeptic’s hat when reading about medical research. I’m in pretty good health for 72, and I mostly pay attention to things like this to get a general feel for what’s good or not good, even if the numbers are almost down in the noise. I eat an egg every morning and we use them in cooking, and given that the whole Fat Is Bad hokum is hokum (and Harvard was bribed in the ’60s for publishing fake research showing sugar was good and fat bad) I never thought of eggs as problematic.
“all by itself apart from seeding the monster files while torrenting them”
Apparently that’s what tripped them up – their internal communications discussing how to not actually seed…
But yeah… billion dollar corporation does piracy to train AI, no one blinks an eye or charges a hefty fine…
Little individual person does the same thing, and far different consequences exist…
We are in the new gilded age of robber barons.
AI… Microsoft study finds relying on AI kills your cognitive skills…
Personally, I noticed the same thing when “good” internet search became a thing – prior to that I would read through programming manuals, review all the language features, API’s and available functions and take time to think about how I could use each one. Then search came along – and while it made learning new languages easier, I never felt as knowledgeable as I did with the original two (Visual Basic and Object Pascal)…
Next I saw it with the rise of the Q&A sites (Stackoverflow) and “copy+paste” culture, which then evolved into “never write anything that you can reference in node.js from the ecosystem” mindset…
Now I see the complete integration of AI chatbots with developer IDE’s and wonder how that is going to work out in the long term…
What you’re describing is something I came to call “side learning”: Things you learn while plowing through books and encyclopedias while looking for something else. I learned it from my father, who told me to read the whole page every time I looked up a word in the dictionary, back in fourth grade or so. After that I was unbeatable in spelling and vocabulary.
Research can be a lot more focused now, and the side learning phenomenon gets a little thin. I deliberately read outside my comfort zone (most recently about the Rust programming language, which I don’t intend to actually use) to keep that ability from getting too stale.
Ok, some of that reading serves another purpose: I bought an academic history of the Byzantine Empire to read before bed when I was having trouble falling asleep. The book was cheap and it worked like a charm.
Argh – missed posting the link:
https://gizmodo.com/microsoft-study-finds-relying-on-ai-kills-your-critical-thinking-skills-2000561788
There’s probably something to that, though in truth I didn’t learn much about critical thinking even when I was in school, and I graduated college in 1974. An old priest teaching a class on theology or philosophy or somesuch threatened to throw me out of the class if I didn’t stop asking polite but awkward questions about ancient theologians like our ol’ buddy Gus of Hippo. (It’s an interesting story and I’ll tell it here on Contra at some point.)
I suspect teachers don’t like to teach critical thinking, probably because they’re afraid that some kid (like me) will ask a question that exposes something that puts the subject at hand in a bad light.
Pascal is still my favorite programming language, and I’ve been using the language for over 35 years; starting with Turbo Pascal and continuing with Free Pascal/Lazarus.
I’m with you there, fersure. Although I read about Pascal in books and magazines in the very late ’70s, I didn’t have my own compiler until 1981. (Hard to believe that was 44 years ago!) I bought Pascal MT+, written by Mike Lehman, and wrote a CP/M-80 address book program called Phonedex for my S100 box. There was soon a version of MT+ for PC DOS and once I got my own PC in 1982 I moved my development work there. I wrote my first Pascal book about MT+ and Scott, Foresman bought it in 1984, but by then Turbo Pascal basically owned the Pascal universe and at the editor’s request I rewrote the book for Turbo.
I’ve learned several other languages (my first course was FORTRAN IV in high school) but apart from BASIC I never did much with any of them, especially APL and FORTH, which tied my head in knots but back in 1979 that was what there was. FreePascal is every bit the peer of C++, and I see no reason to learn any other languages but Rust, which I suspect will become important over the coming decade. I may not write much code in Rust but I damned well want to know what it can do and how it works. From what little I’ve seen so far, it has the whiff of destiny about it.
I learned a couple of in-house languages at Xerox that history (and even the Internet) has mostly forgotten: DACL and ABL. I wanted to write in Mesa but our department didn’t have the wonderful if pricey workstations it ran on.
My only complaint about FreePascal and Lazarus is that there does not seem to be a database engine that compiles into the executable, like the old BDE did. I can’t imagine that something like SQLite can’t be baked into an LCL component. Maybe it does exist; I haven’t looked for awhile. (Have been very busy with other things the last few years, especially my assembly book and my upcoming SF novel.) If you hear of something like that, do let me know!