Rolandt

Also banking as mystery, SVB as securities fraud, and Credit Suisse found some weaknesses.

GPT-4 Developer Livestream

25 minutes of live demos from OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman at the GPT-4 launch. These demos are all fascinating, including code writing and multimodal vision inputs. The one that really struck me is when Greg pasted in a copy of the tax code and asked GPT-4 to answer some sophisticated tax questions, involving step-by-step calculations that cited parts of the tax code it was working with.

I was inspired by this clever little Valentine’s Day card from the delightfully creative Charlyn (left), made with a wee Trinket M0 (a fave of mine), Neopixels (blikenlights!), laser cut parts, a 3D printed case, and rechargeable battery.

Alas, I don’t have a laser cutter, so doing a similar cool design was sorta out of my reach.

But then I took a side step in my head and got a brainwave to do something similar on my 3D printer. And I could mount it all into an Ikea frame I had left over from my lithophane project.

Then I started thinking of my heartbeat, and that I always wanted to do something around it. Y’see, my wife has the same number of letters in her first name to match the PQRST of an EKG trace – hence there’s a connection between my EKG and her – my heart, indeed, beats for her.

What’s more, she actually has a Kardia I’ve used before to capture my own EKG.

The build
I found a design from an amazing illustrator* for a heart that had some anatomic verisimilitude – with a PhD, DVM, and MD in the family, anatomic verisimilitude is how we roll.

Then I captured my EKG and calculated all the timings of the peaks (PQRST, remember?).

I edited the graphics of the heart and the EKG of a single heartbeat thru Inkscape to get them into an SVG I could import into TinkerCAD.

Then I built a simple model with a hole the shape of the heart, the trace, and “My heart beats for you” just 0.5mm up off the bottom of the model. The intention is the first 0.5mm is translucent and the rest of the model is a black mask.

Test models helped me refine the final print, and I ended up using white PLA for the bottom and black PLA for the top.

Prototyping
I like to do tests as I build something. Helps me try parts out without having to do the whole thing. For example, I did a tiny print of the heart to see how it looked with light from behind. To improve the process and see how different colors looked like, I practiced the two-tone filament switch with test prints, even though I’d done them before, such as in my Tree of Life.

With the code, I have a CircuitPlayground Express I normally use to prototype Neopixel code. While things printed, I was experimenting and refactoring the code, such that when I was ready, I was able to just copy and paste it, and then tweak it, for the QtPy I ended up using (actually, a QtPy Haxpress I had made a long time ago).

Let there be light
This is a project meant for lights – Neopixels.

The idea was the PQRST parts of my EKG would light up in sync with the parts in the heart (so P would light the atria, R would light the ventricles) and the words (see, same number of words as PQRST). What’s more, when the ventricles light, the heavy dub of the heart’s lub-dub, “beats” will light too (OK, so didn’t plan that one, was a coincidence).

When I do these pixel constructions, I print a guide image and use double stick tape to help me place and connect the Neopixels. Right, a view of the Neopixel strand, glued to the back of the print, ready to go into the frame.

The iffy GIF at the top of this post shows the final build, with the print and pixels mounted in the frame and going thru a single beat of the heart, MY heart.

My mom of course, showered praise on me – what a great mom. But the really hard one to please was my wife, for whom this was designed, and she was delighted. And I was able to surprise her as she has ZERO interest in my printing and soldering and coding. Haha.

Blemishes
What was really fun with this project wasn’t that it was the first mixed-media microcontroller-based project that I’d made in a while. The real fun was the errors and blemishes that revealed new opportunities to learn.

Stepper motors: For example, I normally am near the printer when the pause for filament swap happens. But one time I noticed the print head sag a bit and I had to try to recover (which didn’t work). But then a subsequent time, it did it again and the print head ground into the print and print bed.

Thinking my printer busted, I did some research and learned that the stepper motors have a time out for how long they hold their position. The two times my print head sagged were times I was NOT near the print when it paused and had tried to do the filament change long after the stepper time out.

Now I know, and have changed the timeout in my pause script in Octoprint, as well.

Filament tangle: I also had the filament get tangled and stuck in the spool. Kinda has been happening on a few of my spools, but I’m usually around to release the tangle. I knew the tangling was related to the winding of the spool. But I didn’t realize that there were ways to avoid the tangling.

Gcode: And challenges in making the filament swap go smoothly had me learning about Octoprint scripts and tweaking gcode. GCODE! That was a rush when I felt like I had leveled up in 3D printing, haha.

Animations: I also wanted to animate the pixels to fade, rather than turn on and off at one brightness. So I spent some time trying to animate the Neopixles to fade. But there was a lot of flickering. I think CircuitPython was too slow for the speed of animation I wanted. But was truly fun figuring it out and trying to do the animation.

In closing
This was a fun project. I applied learnings from previous projects, learned new skills, and got deeper into some domains.

And the process of making, figuring things out, watching something being created, and learning – that’s a rush.

 

*Hm, I have no problem buying designs, which I do often with 3D models, but didn’t know what to do here. Felt wrong just downloading the image and using it, even with all the ‘fair-use’ thinking. So I bought a sticker to put on my laptop. The first sticker I’ll put on it. Gonna be a good story-starter.

The post Project: “My heart beats for you” first appeared on Molecularist.

This could be the best vinyl record I’ve ever heard. Not that it’s for the average punter. It costs $150. In addition, it’s actually two records, which spin at 45 RPM and contain only two or three songs a side. So… If this were the sixties, you’d stack them and play them… If this were […]

We call on the field to recognize that applications that aim to believably mimic humans bring risk of extreme harms. Work on synthetic human behavior is a bright line in ethical Al development, where downstream effects need to be understood and modeled in order to block foreseeable harm to society and different social groups.

— Emily M. Bender

On March 9, Tourism, Arts, Culture and Sport Minister Lana Popham made a prediction about the Vancouver Folk Music Festival. In the B.C. legislature, she said that she would know within a couple of weeks whether the event would continue.

In fact, the answer came in less than one week. Today, the registered charity that puts on the festival announced that it will be held from July 14 to 16. Once again, the 45-year-old event will be at Jericho Beach Park.

“In the past month new funders have come forward with substantial offers to help the festival happen this year,” the society stated. “In addition, we have had an outpouring of volunteer support to assist in many aspects of getting the festival organized and launched. Other festivals have stepped up to assist with booking performers—artists and other festivals benefit when our Vancouver festival is healthy.”

One of those new funders is the provincial government. Last month, it announced a $30-million fund to provide a financial assistance for fairs, festivals, and other events. The largest individual grants would be $250,000.

New Vancouver Folk Music Festival Society president Erin Mullan said in a written statement that this funding was a “game changer”.

The festival website statement noted that the board is larger, with newly elected directors joining returning members.

Last January, the previous board announced that this year’s festival had been cancelled. In addition, the board declared at the time that members would vote on a board motion to dissolve the society.

Members objected to cancelling folk festival

After a well-attended online town-hall meeting in early February, the board rescinded the motion to dissolve the society. This came after many members objected to cancelling the festival and winding down an organization that can issue tax receipts to donors.

The board also followed up on the town-hall meeting by releasing detailed financial information. It forecast a $460,000 deficit in this fiscal year, which ends on August 31, largely due to event-related costs.

Pancouver has previously reported that the society posted a $24,891 deficit in the fiscal year ending last August 31.

In the two previous years when no festival was held due to the pandemic, the society recorded a surplus of $361,186.

The festival is held every year in the provincial constituency of Vancouver–Point Grey. It’s represented in the legislature by Premier David Eby.

The post Vancouver Folk Music Festival will return to Jericho Beach Park this summer appeared first on Pancouver.

Jorge Conde, Jay Rughani, Andreessen Horowitz, Mar 15, 2023

This is not an endorsement of the venture capitalist (VC) approach to things, nor is biotech directly related to edtech - yet - but it's always a good idea to keep an eye on the future, even if viewed from outside the usual frame of reference. And this article is an important glimpse into the future. As it reports, "From the molecular to the mundane, the biotech industry's wide-ranging appetite for science-native SaaS tools is accelerating and will modernize how medicines are discovered, developed, and distributed." So why does this matter? Education is fundamentally about the human being, which is the focus of biotech.

I'm not proposing that biotech will produce 'instant knowledge' drugs a la the Matrix. The outcomes will be much more subtle and interesting. For example: we know that certain drugs can change your personality, for better or worse, though calibration is very crude and imprecise. But imagine being able to change personality cheaply, predictably, and without side effects. You could put on your business face along with your power suit, shift to relaxed and accepting along with your meditation robes, and become analytical and persistent when you put on your lab coat. This is one small glimpse of what may be possible in, say, 20 to 40 years. If I were in high school today, this is one of the fields of the future I'd be looking at.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Welcome to episode 17 of the Steampipe+Mastodon series, in which we introduce a new subplot: timeline history. So far, the examples I’ve shown and discussed work with current timelines. We’ve seen SQL queries that fetch results from realtime calls to the Mastodon API, and Steampipe dashboards that display those results. But Steampipe isn’t just an API siphon, it’s also a Postgres database. As such it supports the transient tables created by Steampipe’s foreign data wrapper and plugins, but also enables you to create your own native tables as well. And you can use those native tables to accumulate data from the transient foreign tables.

Because saving and searching Mastodon data is a controversial topic in the fediverse — none of us wants to recapitulate Big Social — I’ve focused thus far on queries that explore recent Mastodon flow, of which there are plenty more to write. But nobody should mind me remembering my own home timeline, so a few weeks ago I made a tool to read it hourly and add new toots to a Postgres table.

Before you can add any toots to a table, of course, you’ve got to create that table. Here’s how I made this one.

create table mastodon_home_timeline as 
  select * from mastodon_toot_home limit 200

Once created, the table can be updated with new toots like so.

with data as (
  select
    account,
    -- more
    -- columns
    username
  from
    mastodon_toot_home
  limit 200
)
insert into mastodon_home_timeline (
  account,
    -- more
    -- columns
  username
)
select
  *
from 
  data
where 
  id not in ( select t.id from mastodon_home_timeline t )

To run that query from a crontab, on a machine where Steampipe is installed, save it as mastodon_home_timeline.sql, then schedule it.

15 * * * * cd /home/jon/mastodon; steampipe query mastodon_home_timeline.sql

That’s it! Now the number reported by select count(*) from mastodon_home_timeline is growing hourly.

I’ve only been collecting toots for a couple of weeks, and haven’t yet begun to explore that data yet; we’ll see what happens when we get there. Meanwhile, though, I want to show how such exploration can be a team exercise.

A friend of mine, whom I’ll call Elvis, shares my interest in teasing out connections among people, servers, and hashtags. He could capture his own timeline using the method shown here. But since we’ll be looking at this data together, we agreed that I’ll gather both our timelines. To enable that, he shared a (revokable) Mastodon API token that I’ve used to configure Steampipe with credentials for both our accounts.

connection "mastodon_social_jon" {
    plugin = "mastodon"
    server = "https://mastodon.social"
    access_token = "..."
}

connection "mastodon_social_elvis" {
    plugin = "mastodon"
    server = "https://mastodon.social"
    access_token = "..."
}

Steampipe’s foreign data wrapper turns each of these named connections into its own Postgres schema. Athough we happen to share the same home server, by the way, we needn’t. A team collaborating like this could pool timelines from mastodon.social and hachyderm.io and fosstodon.org and any other Mastodon-API-compatible server.

(You can do the same thing with AWS or Slack or GitHub or other kind of account by defining multiple connections. Steampipe makes API calls concurrently across parallel connections.)

With this configuration I can read my timeline like so.

select * from mastodon_social_jon.mastodon_toot_home limit 200

And Elvis’ like so.

select * from mastodon_social_elvis.mastodon_toot_home limit 200

If I want to query both in realtime, for example to count the combined total, I can use a SQL UNION. Or I can define umbrella connection that aggregates these two.

connection "all_mastodon" {
    plugin = "mastodon"
    type = "aggregator"
    connections = [ "mastodon_social_jon", "mastodon_social_elvis" ]
}

connection "mastodon_social_jon" {
    plugin = "mastodon"
    server = "https://mastodon.social"
    access_token = "..."
}

connection "mastodon_social_elvis" {
    plugin = "mastodon"
    server = "https://mastodon.social"
    access_token = "..."
}

Now the query select * from all_mastodon.mastodon_toot_home limit 200 makes API calls on behalf of both accounts — in parallel — and combines the results. When we follow the resulting URLs in order to reply or boost, we’ll do so as individual identities. And we’ll be able to use Steampipe queries and dashboards in that same single-user mode. But we’ll also be able to pool our timelines and point our queries and dashboards at the combined history.

Will that prove interesting? Useful? That remains to be seen. I think it’s one of many experiments worth trying as the fediverse sorts itself out. And I see Steampipe as one laboratory in which to run such experiments. With SQL as the abstraction over APIs, aggregation of connections, and dashboards as code, you have all the ingredients needed to iterate rapidly, at low cost, toward shared Mastodon spaces tailored for teams or groups.

—
1 https://blog.jonudell.net/2022/11/28/autonomy-packet-size-friction-fanout-and-velocity/
2 https://blog.jonudell.net/2022/12/06/mastodon-steampipe-and-rss/
3 https://blog.jonudell.net/2022/12/10/browsing-the-fediverse/
4 https://blog.jonudell.net/2022/12/17/a-bloomberg-terminal-for-mastodon/
5 https://blog.jonudell.net/2022/12/19/create-your-own-mastodon-ux/
6 https://blog.jonudell.net/2022/12/22/lists-and-people-on-mastodon/
7 https://blog.jonudell.net/2022/12/29/how-many-people-in-my-mastodon-feed-also-tweeted-today/
8 https://blog.jonudell.net/2022/12/31/instance-qualified-mastodon-urls/
9 https://blog.jonudell.net/2023/01/16/mastodon-relationship-graphs/
10 https://blog.jonudell.net/2023/01/21/working-with-mastodon-lists/
11 https://blog.jonudell.net/2023/01/26/images-considered-harmful-sometimes/
12 https://blog.jonudell.net/2023/02/02/mapping-the-wider-fediverse/
13 https://blog.jonudell.net/2023/02/06/protocols-apis-and-conventions/
14 https://blog.jonudell.net/2023/02/14/news-in-the-fediverse/
15 https://blog.jonudell.net/2023/02/26/mapping-people-and-tags-on-mastodon/
16 https://blog.jonudell.net/2023/03/07/visualizing-mastodon-server-moderation/
17 https://blog.jonudell.net/2023/03/14/mastodon-timelines-for-teams/
18 https://blog.jonudell.net/2023/04/03/the-mastodon-plugin-is-now-available-on-the-steampipe-hub/
19 https://blog.jonudell.net/2023/04/11/migrating-mastodon-lists/
20 https://blog.jonudell.net/2023/05/24/when-the-rubber-duck-talks-back/

In this episode we sit down with Kyle Shevlin from Virta Health, who talks to us about his journey from ministry into tech. Kyle is a senior software engineer (JavaScript, React, and more) who spends his free time golfing, woodworking and playing video games. Hear as he describes his experience with ADHD in the workplace.

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• From Pastor to Programmer

Kyle Shevlin

Kyle Shevlin is a software developer that lives and works in wonderful Portland, Oregon. He describes himself as a simple, Midwestern man who happens to be the forbidden lovechild between a Vulcan and a Viking. Make of that what you will. He has a motto that is the driving force behind his work, “With all things, leave them better than you find them.” He sees something that could be better, he tries to find a way to make it better. Lastly, lest you think of him as only a software developer. When he's not working, he's probably working on his golf game. He plays in tournaments all around the Pacific Northwest and occasionally even wins one once in a while. He has a nascent golf blog he's just getting started to share some of his insights into the game with others. When he's not playing golf, you can probably find him playing video games with his wife 5 or having a good beer and food with some friends.

radiohead lyrics @radioheadlyrics
Dreamers, they never learn / they never learn / at the point of no return / no return #radiohead #AMSP pic.twitter.com/8DJ33feLyv

I've been exploring using Adafruit Stemma QT to create really cool DIY prototypes without any soldering here on the site. It allows you to very quickly throw together prototypes and do testing for various ideas. I recently ordered a bunch of new Stemma QT devices including the Adafruit ESP32-S3 Reverse TFT Feather and a MLX90640 IR camera module that I wanted to turn into a DIY thermal camera. I wanted it to be small and battery powered. In this guide I'll show you the parts I used to build it as well as the code. Let's get started!

Source

Amidst the excitement about using large language models to generate code, it's easy to lose sight of all the other ways that the things programmers have built can be used to make programming better. One example is this work, which looks at whether we can use natural language processing to assess the quality of method names. The authors collected ten rules (shown in the table below) and used them to score names from like setIconItemStatus() from several software projects. (That name gets a score of 10 out of 10, by the way.) The authors recognize that the rules are not fully objective—for example, they split on whether the first letter after an acronym should be capitalized or not—and automatic tools sometimes struggle because of grammatical ambiguities (e.g., words that can be both nouns and verbs), but their work points the way toward a new generation of code checking tools.

#	Standard Name	Rules
1	Naming Style	A single standard naming style is used.
2	Grammatical Structure	If there are multiple words, they form a grammatically correct sentence structure.
3	Verb Phrase	It is a verb or a verb phrase.
4	Dictionary Terms	Only natural language dictionary words and/or familiar/domain-relevant terms are used.
5	Full Words	Full words are used rather than a single letter.
6	Idioms and Slang	It does not contain personal expressions, idioms, or slang.
7	Abbreviations	It only contains known or standard abbreviated terms. All abbreviations are well known or part of the problem domain.
8	Acronyms	It only contains standard acronyms. All acronyms are well known or part of the problem domain.
9	Prefix/Suffix	It does not contain a prefix/suffix that is a term from the system. This standard does not apply to languages such as C that do not have namespaces.
10	Length	Maximum number of words is no greater than 7.

Reem S. Alsuhaibani, Christian D. Newman, Michael J. Decker, Michael L. Collard, and Jonathan I. Maletic. An approach to automatically assess method names. In Proceedings of the 30th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program Comprehension, May 2022. doi:10.1145/3524610.3527780.

An approach is presented to automatically assess the quality of method names by providing a score and feedback. The approach implements ten method naming standards to evaluate the names. The naming standards are taken from work that validated the standards via a large survey of software professionals. Natural language processing techniques such as part-of-speech tagging, identifier splitting, and dictionary lookup are required to implement the standards. The approach is evaluated by first manually constructing a large golden set of method names. Each method name is rated by several developers and labeled as conforming to each standard or not. These ratings allow for comparing the results of the approach against expert assessment. Additionally, the approach is applied to several systems and the results are manually inspected for accuracy.

People are waiting longer to have kids or not having kids at all, which leads to more dual income households with no kids.

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mkalus shared this story .

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mkalus shared this story from Das Kraftfuttermischwerk.

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Jake Carlini hat sich aus zwei Kinderfahrrädern ein Paar Rollerblades gebaut. Sonderlich praktisch scheinen die nicht, machen aber ihren Job und Carlini hat bewiesen, dass das möglich ist – und manchmal geht es ja um mehr auch nicht.

(Direktlink, via Neatorama)

mkalus shared this story from Das Kraftfuttermischwerk.

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Ich habe bisher noch nie auf einem dieser die Innenstädte vollmüllenden E-Roller gestanden und habe mir auch vorgenommen, dass das so lange so bleibt, bis ich in die ewigen Jagdgründe einziehen werde. Ich laufe lieber 45 Minuten durch die Stadt als auf so ein Teil zu steigen. Daran wird auch dieses Geschoss nichts ändern, dass aktuell in Korea bestellt werden kann und das es auf eine Höchstgeschwindigkeit von 150 km/h bringen soll. Eher im Gegenteil. Preis für das Ding: 16.500 Dollar.

(Direktlink)

(Direktlink)

mkalus shared this story from Alex Ellis' Blog.

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If you’re already one of the many people who use Firefox Relay to save your real email address from trackers and spammers, then we’ve got a timesaver for you. We are testing a new way for Firefox Relay users to access their email masks directly from Firefox on numerous sites.

Since its launch, Firefox Relay has blocked more than 2.1 million unwanted emails from people’s inboxes while keeping real email addresses safe from trackers across the web. We’re always listening to our users, and one of the most-requested features is having Firefox Relay directly within the Firefox browser. And if you don’t already use Firefox Relay, you can always sign up.

How to use your Firefox Relay email masks in Firefox 

In the physical world, we limit sharing our home address. Yet, in the online world, we’re constantly asked for our email address and we freely share it with almost every site we come across. It’s our Firefox Relay users who think twice before sharing their email address, using email masks instead of their real email address to keep their personal information safe.

So, when a Firefox Relay user visits some sites in the Firefox browser and is prompted to sign up and share their email address, they can use one of their Firefox Relay email masks or create a new one. See how it works:

We hope to expand to more sites and to all Firefox users later this year. 

Additionally, Firefox Relay users can also opt out of this new feature so that they’re no longer prompted to use an email mask when they come across the pop-up. If they want to manage their Firefox Relay email address masks, they can visit their dashboard on the Firefox Relay site.

Thousands of users have signed up for our smart, easy solution that hides their real email address to help protect their identity. Wherever you go online, Mozilla’s trusted products and services can help you feel safer knowing that you have privacy protection for your everyday online life. 

If you don’t have Firefox Relay, you can subscribe today from the Firefox Relay site.

Start protecting your email inbox today

Sign up for Firefox Relay

The post Email protection just got easier in Firefox appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

Twitter to charge academics $500K a year for limited data access

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Wired reports that Twitter is planning to charge researchers a minimum of $504,000 a year to access less data than they used to get for free. https://twitterisgoinggreat.com/#twitter-to-charge-academics-dollar500k-a-year-for-limited-data-access

OpenAI, Mar 14, 2023

At some point, a new version of GPT will be as remarkable as a new version of a browser is today, but I still remember the days we waited with bated breath for Netscape 4. It feels like that. Anyhow, today is the day they're launching GPT-4. Here's the blog post. Here's the launch video (still 75 minutes in the future as I write).

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Lorcan Dempsey, Mar 14, 2023

I don't believe in the idea of a 'career ladder'. Oh, certainly, it would be nice (and preferable) to earn more money based on increased experience and expertise, but that's different. The traditional 'career ladder' inevitably ends up with people in the 'top rungs' of management being paid the most and having the most power. That's the model explicitly endorsed by this post: "Good leaders will be drawn from across the full range of the library." Now, simple math tells me most people will never get to the top rungs. The concept presupposes some sort of hierarchical model of (library) organization, which I also dislike. All this is justified by the 'special' skills leaders must have, over and above their actual expertise. But I don't see any of this as grounds for granting them status, privilege, wealth or power.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Bryan Alexander, Mar 14, 2023

I've been involved in a discussion thread with Bryan Alexander and others around his proposition that we think of "climate change as the new liberal arts." Well, it's not a bad idea, and the traditional definition does need an upgrade; it's not for educating Princeton upperclassmen any more. But climate is connected with an entire ecosystem of ideas and concepts. That's sort of what's intended by the 'donut economics' referenced in this post. As Uri Kelly and Clare Kelly write "Addressing the climate and biodiversity crisis demands transformative changes in our economies and societies." Quite so. But it's not like nobody has been thinking along these lines, which is why I suggested, "I think we'll find that the UN sustainable development goals (SDG) are the new liberal arts." After all, the SDG are not simply what some professor came up with "in a paper, a book, and a lot of public appearances." They're the result of years of global discussion and consultations on these issues. That, to me, seems a more reasonable basis on which to found a redefinition of liberal arts.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Once again, Google and Microsoft are battling for the AI spotlight – this time with news around their offerings for developers and the enterprise*. These are decidedly less sexy markets – you won’t find breathless reports about the death of Google search this time around –  but they’re far more consequential, given their potential reach across the entire technology ecosystem.

Highlighting that consequence is Casey Newton’s recent scoop detailing layoffs impacting Microsoft’s “entire ethics and society team within the artificial intelligence organization.” This team was responsible for thinking independently about how Microsoft’s use of AI might create unintended negative consequences in the world. While the company continues to tout its investment in responsible AI** (as does every firm looking to make a profit in the field), Casey’s reporting raises serious questions, particularly given the Valley’s history of ignoring inconvenient truths.

In leaked audio that Casey reviewed, John Montgomery, Microsoft corporate vice president of AI, explains why the team was being disbanded: “The pressure from [CTO] Kevin [Scott] and [CEO] Satya [Nadella] is very very high to take these most recent openAI models and the ones that come after them and move them into customers hands at a very high speed.” Pressed by a staffer as to whether he’d reconsider, Montgomery responded: “I don’t think I will…Cause unfortunately the pressures remain the same. You don’t have the view that I have, and probably you can be thankful for that. There’s a lot of stuff being ground up into the sausage.”

A lot of stuff in the sausage, indeed. Montgomery was no doubt alluding to the idiom of seeing “how the sausage gets made” – a bloody mess involving parts of the animal most of us prefer to ignore (much less eat).

It may not be pretty, but it’s essential that society understand what’s going into the AI sausage – as well as the decision-making process behind how it gets made. And it’s also essential that companies making that sausage have internal controls independent of the processes (and payrolls) that favor profit and corporate advantage. From what I can tell from Casey’s reporting, it looks like that is no longer the case at Microsoft. The same seems to be true at Google, which famously mishandled the resignation/firing of Timnit Gebru, then the leader of its independent AI oversight team.

Losing independent oversight of corporate actors is scary, because we’ve been here before – over and over again. Remember the Cambridge Analytica scandal? For a brief moment after that mess, the Valley seemed united in realizing that rushing powerful, addictive, and at-scale technologies into the maws of powerful market forces might have some…unintended consequences. Directly after Cambridge, vocal critics Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin set up the well-funded Center for Humane Tech, and Facebook made a slew of promises, including “researching the impact of role of social media in elections, as well as democracy more generally.” It then set up its Oversight Board, the independence of which remains … questionable.

One of the most valuable lessons of Cambridge was a more general reassessment of risk as it relates to tech’s unintended consequences. “Unintended consequences can’t be eliminated, but we can get better at considering and mitigating them,” writes Rachel Botsman in a 2021 Wired piece Tech Leaders Can Do More to Avoid Unintended Consequences. Botsman was particularly concerned with the tech industry’s obsession with speed. “Speed is the enemy of trust,” she writes. “To make informed decisions about which products, services, people, and information deserve our trust, we need a bit of friction to slow us down.” She then quotes CHT co-founder Raskin: “If you can’t determine the impacts of the technology you’re about to unleash, it’s a sign you shouldn’t do it.”

If the companies most capable of unleashing AI aren’t identifying and fully exploring the unconsidered consequences of putting AI into everything, we’re speeding headlong into the same trap we did with Cambridge.

Which brings me to the statement at the top of this post – that Microsoft and Google’s enterprise and developer offerings are far more consequential than whether Bing steals a point or two of share from Google search. By offering ever-more powerful large-language models to developers at scale, both companies are unleashing a poorly considered and mostly unregulated technology to hundreds of thousands of developers and entrepreneurs, and by extension, to nearly every business on earth. It’s a gold rush mentality, the very same approach that gave us surveillance capitalism, Cambridge Analytica, and by extension, a widespread erosion of trust in democratic institutions.

Do we really want to run that play again?

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*And yes, OpenAI announced ChatGPT4… 

**Microsoft objected to the possible conclusions that might be drawn from Casey’s story, and he appended their clarifications late yesterday. I’ll also add them here:

The story as written could leave the impression that Microsoft has de-invested broadly in responsible AI, which is not the case. The Ethics and Society team played a key role at the beginning of our responsible AI journey, incubating the culture of responsible innovation that Microsoft’s leadership is committed to. That initial work helped to spur the interdisciplinary way in which we work across research, policy, and engineering across Microsoft. Since 2017, we have worked hard to institutionalize this work and adopt organizational structures and governance processes that we know to be effective in integrating responsible AI considerations into our engineering systems and processes.

We have hundreds of people working on these issues across the company, including net new, dedicated responsible AI teams that have since been established and grown significantly during this time, including the Office of Responsible AI, and a responsible AI team known as RAIL that is embedded in the engineering team responsible for our Azure OpenAI Service. Less than ten team members were impacted on the Ethics and Society team and some of the former members now hold key positions within our Office of Responsible AI and the RAIL team.

 

As more people’s work and personal lives go digital, online privacy and security become increasingly important. Although a virtual private network, or VPN, is not the total answer to protecting your online privacy, it can be a useful part of your security toolkit. However, the VPN industry is riddled with false promises and shady businesses. After sorting through dozens of VPNs and reviewing four security audits, we think the best option for most people is Mullvad, an open-source VPN that’s not only trustworthy and transparent but also fast and reliable.

The last few months it has become clear that AI is no longer our future, but our present. Some of the most exciting ideas for the future of both the internet and the world involve AI solutions. This didn’t happen overnight, decades of work have gone into this moment. Mozilla has been working to make sure that the future of AI benefits humanity in the right ways by investing in the creation of trustworthy AI.

We want entrepreneurs and builders to join us in creating a future where AI is developed through this responsible lens. That’s why we are relaunching our Mozilla Builders program with the Responsible AI Challenge.

At Mozilla, we believe in AI: in its power, its commercial opportunity, and its potential to solve the world’s most challenging problems. But now is the moment to make sure that it is developed responsibly to serve society. 

If you want to build (or are already building) AI solutions that are ambitious but also ethical and holistic, the Mozilla Builder’s Responsible AI Challenge is for you. We will be inviting the top nominees to join a gathering of the brightest technologists, business leaders and ethicists working on trustworthy AI to help get your ideas off the ground. Participants will also have access to mentorship from some of the best minds in the industry, the ability to meet key contributors in this community, and an opportunity to win some funding for their project.

Mozilla will be investing $50,000 into the top applications and projects, with a grand prize of $25,000 for the first place winner. 

For more information, please visit here. Applications open up March 30, 2023.

The post Mozilla launches Responsible AI Challenge appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

Pixelmator Pro 3.3.1 adds 12 new, premium device mockups featuring the latest Mac, iPhone, and iPad devices. In today’s update, you’ll find a collection of beautiful, true-to-life mockups and some stunning stylized versions designed by professional artists.

Designed following Apple’s design standards, the new device mockups are perfect for pretty much anything you can imagine — from personal use to web publishing, product marketing, and more. You can easily personalize mockups by replacing the placeholder images with your own designs, or choose from a variety of beautiful shadow styles and background colors to find the look that works best for your design. And, with pixel-perfect screen sizes, you can be sure your designs will always look exceptionally sharp. If you’d like to learn how you can create pixel-perfect designs yourself, we’ve prepared a quick step-by-step tutorial to help you get started.

What’s more, both the device and background in each mockup are fully editable. This means you can easily move the devices on the canvas together with placeholder images and shadows, combine several devices together, or paste them into other designs.

Ready to try out the new mockups? Check out the What’s New category in the Templates browser to easily keep track of any new templates or mockups added to Pixelmator Pro. Pixelmator Pro 3.3.1 is a free update for all existing Pixelmator Pro users and new users can get it for $49.99 on Mac App Store.

Open in App Store

One of Canada’s foremost authorities in Indian classical dance will offer a workshop in Burnaby on Friday (March 17). Usha Gupta, a member of the Edmonton Arts & Culture Hall of Fame, plans to offer insights into Kathak at Deer Lake Gallery (6584 Deer Lake Avenue) from 6 to 8:3o p.m. Tickets are $25 for the Burnaby Arts council event.

Last September, the Firehall Arts Centre presented Khoj – A Contemporary Kathak Dance Extravaganza by the Usha Gupta Dance Entourage.

In this production, Gupta’s troupe re-imagined this artform by integrating contemporary dance without breaking the bridge to this ancient Indian practice. The company also toured India with this show in 2019-20.

“Kathak tells a story with the hand gestures, the movements, footwork, and expression,” Gupta says. “I do absolutely pure kathak—that’s my media. With that media, you can create anything you like.”

Now an octogenarian, Gupta says that her search for insights into Indian classical dance never ends. She points out that Kathak is actually a hybrid of storytelling and technical excellence.

“It’s sensual; it’s rhythmic; it’s graceful; it’s strong,” Gupta declares.

She’s also a vocalist and teacher of vocal music. Raised in the Punjabi city of Jalandhar, she first learned Manipuri dance. Gupta later immersed herself into the Lucknow form of Kathak. In addition, she’s an authority on Bharatanatyam, which originated in South India.

As an adult, Gupta lived in Mumbai, where she met the legendary Bollywood choreographer Farah Khan. Gupta also spent two decades in the Middle East, teaching and performing dance. She immigrated to Canada with her husband in 1989.

Gupta school thrived from the start

Shortly after arriving, she opened a school in her basement with two students. The community in Edmonton was not well-versed in Indian classical dance in those days, but they welcomed her with open arms.

“They didn’t even know at that time what was the difference between Bharatanatyam and Kathak,” Gupta recalls with a laugh.

She adds that within two months, she had 150 students. And she now has a beautiful studio that houses the Usha Dance Entourage Company.

“On the 20^th of August, I got a lifetime achievement award from the consulate of India in Edmonton,” Gupta says.

Follow Charlie Smith on Twitter @charliesmithvcr. Follow Pancouver on Twitter @PancouverMedia.

The post Indian classical dance expert Usha Gupta coming to Burnaby to share her extensive knowledge of Kathak appeared first on Pancouver.

A Vancouver creative hub that’s home to an art gallery and several artists’ studios is in danger of shutting down due to a large rent increase.

In a snazzy video posted on a GoFundMe page, the Beaumont Studios states that its rent and taxes have risen by 20 percent since 2019. It now must pay $42,000 per month for its space at 316 West 5th Avenue.

In addition, the video notes that the city has already lost more than 150 buildings with artists’ space in the past decade.

“This equates to about 400,000 square feet of creativity and imagination gone,” Beaumont founder Jude Kusnierz says in the video. “This has resulted in artists leaving the city in droves.”

Founded in 2004, the Beaumont has 25,000 square feet of indoor and outdoor space and is home to more than 100 professional artists.

“It’s a place where growing creators can flourish, incubate their creativity, and connect with other like-minded artists exploring their craftsmanship to its fullest,” Kusnierz states.

In addition, the Beaumont houses a community radio station and thrift store, as well as the gallery and recording studios.

Kussnierz is asking the public to donate to the GoFundMe page. If people are unable to provide a monetary gift, she says that the Beaumont would be honoured if people would share their pitch for help.

“While the Beaumont Studios has always operated with a firm resolve of energetic positivity, the risk is very real that we could bear witness to the fall of another of Vancouver’s cultural cornerstones.”

Follow Charlie Smith on Twitter @charliesmithvcr. Follow Pancouver on Twitter @PancouverMedia.

The post Beaumont Studios issues urgent plea for public’s help in response to huge rent increase appeared first on Pancouver.

mkalus shared this story .

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