Ai

Jack Cook has a great post about a side-channel attack on web browsers. He explains the attack very well and illustrates it with some nice hands-on examples that run the browser. What I like most is that he outlines how he developed the attack by simplifying a more complex approach and applying AI to the results. It’s quite sobering in its simplicity and power. Really well done. If you have any interest at all in this sort of thing, give it a read.

I love this AI rant from Ludicity. It’s over the top, but captures the essence of the nonsense that surrounds AI at present. I’m not going to piledrive anyone, but it does seem that the case for AI has been overstated as the technology currently stands. ChatGPT is a very impressive chatbot. If you need a very impressive chatbot, then it’s just the ticket. It will impact certain use cases in business dramatically (e.

Ray Kurzweil has been notably prescient with his predictions on how fast AI will come. Genius is a term thrown around often, but he really fits the bill. He’s invented some really cool stuff over a long period of time. His editorial in The Econonomist outlines his nicely bullish predictions about the impact of AI on humanity. The areas he believes will be most impacted are energy, manufacturing and medicine.

The other day, Apple had their WWDC show and tell. Par for the course of any tech company announcement these days, it was focused on AI (but interestingly led off with an overview of all of the content on Apple TV). Apple was a bit late to the AI party, but since they have a device in nearly everyone’s pocket, they will probably be the most impactful on bringing AI to the masses.

This was an interesting take on how AI will impact programmers that resonated with me. It was written by Chelsea Troy who is a staff engineer at Mozilla and CS teacher at the University of Chicago. The post is definitely worth a read. In a nutshell, programming back in the old days used to be building code out of basic logical and data building blocks. Indeed, programmers are still taught these things in academic environments (and sometimes tested on them in job interviews).

An article in The New Yorker about feeling a little sad about the inevitable replacement of coding with AI really hit home for me. I’ve not used AI for coding yet professionally, but I’ve done a couple of experiments that indicate how useful it might be in replacing not only the boilerplate and drudgery but also some of the thinking that goes into it. I don’t think it will eliminate the role of people in creating software, but it will change it dramatically by potentially devaluing all of the deep techy things it was really fun to learn (e.

Amanda Mull has a nice piece in The Atlantic about retail self-checkout. Self-checkout is horrible. For the most part, it doesn’t make things faster and in some cases (like you want to buy a beer), it makes things much slower. The only use case that it works well is if you are picking up a very few items that have big and obvious bar codes and don’t require a bag. Even then, there is a chance things will go awry.

I like the idea of labeling things as written by humans or AI so you know the origins of what you are reading on the internet. Not By AI has some nice badges that I’ve added to my site because, it is written by my primitive human brain. I thought about adding it to each post that I write, but since I don’t use AI to write the articles (except some small parts when I’ve written about AI and want to show some example output) that seemed like too much overhead on each article.

AI is all over the news these days. It’s even inspired a pretty awesome stock market rally. I’ve been doing some exploration of what is out there and one of the more interesting things I ran across was MusicGen. It does what’s on the tin: generates music using a Language Model (LM). It’s interesting even if the music isn’t great, it does fit with the description used to generate it. I haven’t played around with it yet, but I plan to see if I can generate some cool theme songs for my dogs.

I was curious to see how well ChatGPT could solve a simple programming problem, so I asked: Write a JavaScript function to return the prime factors of a number in an array. A few seconds later, it came back with a pretty good answer: function primeFactors(num) { const factors = []; // check if number is prime function isPrime(n) { if(n<2) return false; for (let i = 2; i <= Math.