Category: technology

  • Varifocal Mirror

    When I was in Gradual school at UNC Chapel Hill, there were so many cool graphics projects going on its tough to even remember them all. We had huge mechanical force feedback arms, head mounted displays, all kinds of special purpose hardware including the project I worked on (PixelPlanes). But we had a really interesting…

  • Ephemera

    I was watching For All Mankind last night and was reminded about those things called slide rules. Even though I am pretty old, I never had to use one. I missed this by one year in high school. My class was the first one where we were allowed to use a calculator. The teacher still…

  • Thoughts about Crypto

    I don’t consider myself a crypto booster or a person who thinks it’s terrible and all just a big scam/ponzi etc. For sure, having unregulated money has been great for all kinds of scams and other illegal activity but I think my main POV on crypto has always been, hmm, let’s see what happens. I…

  • GPT4V testing

    GPT4 Can do some pretty cool stuff. For example: can you tell what time it is based on this image? Yes, the current time is 3:29 based on the arrival time of 8:00 and a travel duration of 4 hours and 31 minutes. It also can try to read charts. Can you convert the data…

  • Hype that is hard to ignore

    Digital technology has changed many things about our lives since personal computers became a thing when I was in high school. Convenience, Communication, easy access to information etc. It’s hard sometimes to remember how we did things like travel before there were smartphones. The pace can feel faster and faster. In the last decade though,…

  • Transforming Epistimology

    As in these posts, I continue to be fascinated by looking at what these LLM systems “know”. While they are right most of the time, it seems like they accomplish this without knowing things or at least in a different way that people know them. I have a personal project to try to move some…

  • Langchain

    I’ve been playing around a bit with the langchain library to better understand the kind of things people are doing with complex prompts to extend the utility of LLMs. One example I looked at was how to use the library to enable queries over your own documents. There’s a good example using a notion based…

  • AI

    I’ve decided to use the free time I have to learn more about AI. I had taken the Andrew Ng ML course a long time ago so I know what some of the words mean but I wanted to also have a better understanding of the things people are actually doing now. First, I wanted…

  • Changing fortunes

    Nothing new here. But the visuals are pretty striking to me: The 1990s The 2000s

  • YAMSR

    I recently switch to using a Mac for my main computer. I decided I didn’t want to move to vista and while I love ubuntu I don’t really want to use an os which still requires me to edit files in /etc to hook to a secure wifi access point. I do have a gutsy…