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What I've Been Reading (6)

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What I've Been Reading (6)

Security, AI, Economics, and Algebra

nathan
Mar 28, 2023
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What I've Been Reading (6)

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What a week for AI: GPT4, Github Copilot, Adobe Firefly, Google Bard, press tours…

Pickaxes during a gold rush or waitlist software during the AI rush?

Security

https://strategyofsecurity.com/2022-cybersecurity-annual-earnings-recap-part-1/

A review of cybersecurity companies’ earning reports - themes of consolidation, but everyone still seems to be making good money. Included: Cloudflare, Check Point, CyberArk.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/news-stations-letter-bombs-ecuador-one-explodes-clear-message-to-silence-journalists/

USBs that brick your computer are one thing. USBs that explode are another. Although if I found one on the ground myself, curiosity will eat me up inside, I’d probably still plug it in... And a virtual machine doesn’t exactly protect against certain attacks.

https://github.blog/2023-03-23-we-updated-our-rsa-ssh-host-key/

Even the best of us goof: GitHub exposed their private RSA key in a public repository. Makes you wonder what the security controls were and who had access to it.

AI

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/03/will-ais-take-all-our-jobs-and-end-human-history-or-not-well-its-complicated/

Stephen Wolfram on AI, computational irreducibility and more. He covers a lot of topics here, such as: surprise when developing technology, the innumerability of problems worth solving, and the value of computational languages.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_Guz73e6fw

Sam Altman / Lex Friedman interview. Worth listening to if you think now is a pivotal time in AI. Selected topics: Moderation (Sam thinks OpenAI (+ regulators) should design wide, but definite boundaries on information AIs respond with), and what makes LLMs valuable (good interfaces, refined through tools like RLHF).

https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt-plugins

ChatGPT plugins - web searches, bookings, Wolfram, and more. ChatGPT keeps getting more and more useful. Hopping on the waitlist.

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/03/chatgpt-gets-its-wolfram-superpowers/

The ChatGPT plugin that I’m most excited about - Wolfram integration. Now we can ask it to plot a graph, perform a computation, look up geographical data, and more.

https://github.blog/2023-03-22-github-copilot-x-the-ai-powered-developer-experience/

Another waitlist or three. Github Copilot’s announcement - chat interface in VSCode, Copilot for CLI, Copilot performing PR checks and reviews, etc.

https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2023/03/21/bringing-gen-ai-to-creative-cloud-adobe-firefly

More waitlists. Firefly is better than Dalle / Stable Diffusion at some types of images, and worse at others. Adobe’s training set seems higher quality than anyone else’s, at least for art.

Economics

https://austinvernon.site/blog/nuclearbrief.html

What would it take for nuclear power to be successful? Right now, it’s too expensive. Austin provides a short summary on what may make nuclear power worth the investment. He’s written more extensively on the economics of nuclear power before.

https://thewire.in/tech/india-remains-internet-shutdown-capital-of-the-world-for-fifth-year-running-report

India shuts down internet access whenever it feels like it. Kinda scary. 106 internet shutdowns in 2021. I don’t know how much “India has a giant population” impacts the stats, but in any case, internet shutdowns aren’t great.

Algebra

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-symmetry-that-makes-solving-math-equations-easy-20230324/

Deriving the quadratic formula, then doing the same for cubics. Sometimes I’m surprised at how rusty my algebra is. :(


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