Tag Archives: machine learning
Why everyone should pay attention to Stable Diffusion
Many of the people in my circles hadn’t heard of Stable Diffusion until I told them, and I was already two days late. Heralds of new technologies have a tendency to play up every new thing, however incremental, as the … Continue reading
Posted in Analysis, Tech
Tagged AI ethics, artificial intelligence, artificial neural networks, autoencoder, DALL-E 2, deepfake, diffusion model, Emad Mostaque, Gaussian noise, Imagen, img2img, LAION, machine learning, OpenAI, Parti, Stability.ai, Stable Diffusion
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When a teenager wants to solve poaching with machine-learning…
We always need more feel-good stories, but we need those feel-good stories more that withstand closer scrutiny instead of falling apart, and framed the right way. For example, Smithsonian magazine published an article with the headline ‘This Teenager Invented a … Continue reading
Posted in Analysis, Tech
Tagged animal products, elephant-poaching, ivory smuggling, machine learning, poaching, Smithsonian magazine, techno-optimism
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Getting ahead of theory, experiment, ourselves
Science journalist Laura Spinney wrote an article in The Guardian on January 9, 2022, entitled ‘Are we witnessing the dawn of post-theory science?’. This excerpt from the article captures its points well, I thought: Or take protein structures. A protein’s function is largely … Continue reading
Posted in Science
Tagged Jonathan Woit, machine learning, post-empiricism, post-theory, Richard Dawid, string theory
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Google Docs: A New Hope
I suspect the Google Docs grammar bot is the least useful bot there is. After hundreds of suggestions, I can think of only one instance in which it was right. Is its failure rate so high because it learns from … Continue reading
Posted in Analysis
Tagged bots, Colonialism, economic inequaity, Google Docs, grammar, imperialism, machine learning, Punctuation, semantics, spellGrammar, spellGrammarFingerprint, styleguide, syntax, The New Yorker
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Injustice ex machina
There are some things I think about but struggle to articulate, especially in the heat of an argument with a friend. Cory Doctorow succinctly captures one such idea here: Empiricism-washing is the top ideological dirty trick of technocrats everywhere: they … Continue reading
Posted in Culture, Tech
Tagged anti-intellectualism, artificial intelligence, capitalism, Cory Doctorow, Evgeny Morozov, globalisation, machine learning, middle-class aspirations, nationalism, populism, technological solutionism
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Hey, is anybody watching Facebook?
The Boston Marathon bombings in April 2013 kicked off a flurry of social media activity that was equal parts well-meaning and counterproductive. Users on Facebook and Twitter shared reports, updates and photos of victims, spending little time on verifying them … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Facebook, Graph Search, machine learning, Patrick Meier, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, situational awareness, social media, Twitter
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