The maquech beetle, which some people wear as a living brooch, remains one of the weirdest things I’ve seen in Yucatan. Here’s a description of the tradition.
I remember a full dozen years ago the feeling of independence, tinged with some slight digital survivalism, of running a local version of Wikipedia from my Nexus One smartphone. It was cool, but I used that feature on maybe a couple of flights. I know better now that I feel a similar impulse about running powerful LLMs from my smartphone.
Phishing/Malware attack (“WordPress Patch CVE-2024-46188”)
I’ve received this email: If you follow the link to phishing URL https://us.en-wordpress.org/plugins/cve-2024-46188/, download the file, and analyze the code, you immediately realize that this plugin is malicious and does the following: Pretending to be the Red Cross to perform a sneak attack is one of the vilest things a human being can do. Stay …
Replace a fine-tuned text-davinci-003 with Mixtral 8x7B
In a few short hours, OpenAI will shut down access to a few old large language models, the text-davinci series. Everyone who depended for some project on a fine-tuned version of these models and who hasn’t found a replacement yet might soon feel some pain. I was in that cohort until I found out how …
To mitigate the double-user compromise described here, I’m testing a simple script to automatically boost posts by the #WordPress instance: https://gist.github.com/zkg/30d0c02eabb36b976f706f9c36e22f59
I’ve just finished integrating ActivityPub into my WP blog. Trying out a plugin by @pfefferle
I’ve just demoted the “www” portion of my website domain. It’s now just https://jamez.it
Dactylo-verification bias: the tendency to count all the fingers on the hands in a picture to ensure it’s not an AI-generated image.
This 50-year-old paper by Thomas Nagel on what it’s like to be a bat is for some reason making the rounds recently. Time to read it.
AI and creativity, an interview with Kevin Donnellan
Kevin Donnellan from Explainable was kind enough to interview me with some very interesting questions. Here’s the full interview: First off, The Infinite Conversation. What first sparked the idea, why Herzog and Žižek? And could you talk through how practically you set it up? I wrote extensively about how the idea came about in this article. …