Some people are ok with letting a major part of our lives go forgotten. The type of people who delete an email after “taking care of it”. But the world needs memory, lest we forget all the important lessons of our past. I will agree that there is value in “starting fresh” and that not …
Tag: macro
Pillars of life
The project A Sign In Space reached an important milestone last year. A team of researchers was able to extract a cellular automaton and obtain a very interesting configuration, displaying what appears to be an amino acid diagram. It might still be too early to discuss the ramifications of this conclusion. But it’s not too …
On programming using LLMs
I have just realized that Il Post released part of an interview I gave on the topic of vibe coding a few months ago (article in Italian). I have many problems with the term Vibe Coding, but I suspect the expression will gradually fade, and it will return to being just “coding”, like wireless phones …
Plotting an equirectangular SVG onto stereographic projection
Github repo. And by plotting, I mean both converting vector coordinates and tracing the result on a piece of paper. Because it all starts with a pen plotter and a love for mini planets. It always amazes me when I seem to be the only person on the planet to have a given problem. No …
Calcomp Pacesetter 2024/2036 Manual
I salvaged a pen plotter from the early ’90s. The owner, a retired architect, was ready to free up some space in their home after decades of disuse. The unit was in fair condition and required hardly any maintenance: some cleaning, tightening of a belt, and a slide rail that needed lubrication; after that, it …
Releasing Stream of Consciousness
Warning: this post makes extensive use of unprofessional anthropomorphization. Today I’m releasing a new project called Stream of Consciousness. It’s a website where you can read the thoughts of Livia Pacifica, an imaginary person powered by Large Language Models, vector databases, and plain old storytelling. Livia is a digital artist. She uses text-to-image models to …
Folklore.org stories collected in epub format
I’m the furthest thing from an Apple fan, and I’m barely capable of operating a Mac or an iPhone. But I find some aspects of its early company culture fascinating and Folklore.org is a fabulous resource for a glimpse into that. I’ve just finished turning the stories collected there into an eBook in Epub format. …
Paradocsical – impossibly good docs
My good friend Davis and I have been working together on creating a repository for our favorite documentaries. As of today, this receptacle takes the form of a website where anyone can go through our curated list of what we consider the finest documentaries ever made, and can stream the ones that are available free …
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 …