Suggested readings week 46/2023

Digital Equipment Corporation memories on Licklider

This report honors J. C. R. Licklider for his contributions to computer science research and education in this country. We reprint here two of his papers, originally published in the 1960s, which exemplify his ideas about how computers could enhance human problem-solving.>

Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider was a founding member of the great community of researchers that enabled the revolution of Computer Science in our recent history.

Biohacking own Life as a knowledge worker

Andrej Karpathy is a founding membed at OpenAI and former Senior Director of Artificial Intelligence at Tesla.

I assume when he speaks about health, exercise, diet and nutrition of an intense knowledge worker he knows stuff: working at both organizations must be an interesting but exhausting experience.

So the narration here is very interesting, revealing insights about our body and health from the perspective of a curious data scientist.

Hardware requirements for Larga Language Models

Here's an interesting breakdown of hardware requirements for running Larga Language Models in production, from the knowledge of and experienced someone actually working at this.

Poisoning data: a tool for artists

By adding almost invisible changes to an image before uploading it on a public internet space, artists can prevent it from being effectively scraped and used for training generative models.

This means a lot for artists, because if this proves to work it can be make it impossible for images generative models to build new artifacts from artists' creative work.

The linked paper goes in much more details.

We're behind on policies to cut carbon emissions

Coal must be phased out seven times faster than is now happening.