I’ve been sharing some links around internally at work over the last few months, so I wanted to post them here. Clearly dominated by LLMs Douglas Hofstadter has changed his mind about LLMs, and his perspective is quite sobering. I don’t give much time to folk who are very negative about the future prospects of these tools, but he is so...

https://julian.digital/2023/07/06/multi-layered-calendars/ Is a fantastic post reflecting on the poverty of our calendar applications. The author has sone fantastic suggestions on how to enhance what a calendar can be. I think that the problem with this approach is one of customisation. The product market fit for such an imagined produ...

How likely is it to generate a copyrighted image using a Generative ai tool such a stable diffusion? This question came up in a work context last week and I've been thinking about it. I asked GPT how these tools work, and it came back with "generative image models like Stable Diffusion learn from data to generate new images by applying...

This tweet thread is worth looking at: https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1681748271163912194 What this tells us, and what is worth paying attention to, is that when building on top of LLMs that are outside of your control, the fine-tuning, or model, can move underneath you. If you have strategies for making the LLM work for you ...

This is the editorial https://www.bmj.com/content/382/bmj.p1609, which includes the fantastic line “We are not extracting sunbeams from cucumbers; we are shining a light for the public good.” That’s it, that’s the blog post - the bmj - code sharing. P.s. - if you plug a cucumber into a high voltage source you do get it to glow! https:/...

Dryad has a call out for new members to join our board of directors - https://blog.datadryad.org/2023/07/05/join-us-call-for-nominations-to-the-dryad-board-of-directors/, if you are interested in scholarly infrastructure, and you want to contribute to a community initiative, then this is a great opportunity to get involved. In particul...

Episode link: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001jkzg My rating: B- This episode was about megaliths. Overall we know very little about the people’s who built these, and that comes across in the episode. The episode was not terrible, but not great either. I learnt the following: • there are a lot more megaliths around than I had appr...

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/06/what-does-geoffrey-hinton-believe-about-agi-existential-risk.html what does Geoffrey Hinton believe about AGI risk is a short post by Tyler Cowen about an interview with Geoffrey Hinton. The interview is here, but I don’t have access. There is one quote I want to reflect on. The...

Adam day recently posted a very good overview of the role of precision and recall in detecting fake papers. I’m just going to point directly to his post: https://clearskiesadam.medium.com/where-to-draw-the-line-precision-and-recall-3c39a131c14b The main thing for me is that we always need to be clear about what question we are asking w...

Episode link - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001j45h My rating - a solid A rating. I’d not heard of Stevie Smith before, and found this episode truly delightful. The participants of the episode had a clear fondness for the writing, and their enthusiasm shone through. I ordered a copy of the collected works, and I love them. There i...

Episode link - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001gx0k In the house that I grew up in we had a book of poetry of Donne, but I payed little account to it, and I had only the vaguest knowledge of who he was. I’d rate this episode B-. This episode did a great job of going over his life and works. I’d not realised when exactly he was wor...

I just noticed that SAGE are continuing to announce the 10 year impact awards - https://group.sagepub.com/press-releases/sages-10-year-impact-awards-recognize-research-with-long-term-influence. The pull quote from Ziyad covers it well “Short-term measures of research impact fail to account for the many ways in which scholarship continu...

#Inourtime the title was [[title]] The tags were: [[hashtags]] episode link I know very little about the life or world of Jane Austin, so it was a delight to listen to this episode. My aim with this series of posts is to note down things that I had learnt, however as I knew so little before it would take too long to write, so I’ll keep...

There is a line of thinking about AI that fears the emergence of super-powerful AI. This paper https://www.econtalk.org/tyler-cowen-on-the-risks-and-impact-of-artificial-intelligence/ says that an AI that is capable of building a super powerful AI won’t do that because it will be as scared of the negative consequences as we are. Look, ...

Things I’ve been reading this week: • https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-neither - the cost of fine-tuning GPT-capable models is going from $100M dollars to $600!! • https://magazine.sebastianraschka.com/p/finetuning-large-language-models - a good overview of approaches on fine-tuning • https://www.lorcandempsey....

The NIH has a set of data science scholarships for US citizens or residents. Tyler Beck writes: "Please check out this year’s topics here: https://datascience.nih.gov/data-scholars-2023 Specifically related to LitCoin, one scholar will have the opportunity to take the output NLP systems from the LitCoin NLP Challenge and coalesce the b...

#inourtime/notes #astronomy Episode - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001hnlf I’d give this episode a solid B. I already knew quite a bit about Brahe from my background in astrophysics. Much of my internal impression came from reading Arthur Koestler’s the sleepwalkers many years ago - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sleepwalkers-History-Ch...

• Last week I attend the Dryad (Dryad) board meeting - Dryad is a not for profit that helps researchers share research data. This is a topic I’ve been thinking about for some time (a deck I presented on the topic 10 years ago - https://speakerdeck.com/ianmulvany/connecting-data-and-literature). The meeting was generously hosted by the ...

I’ve just landed back in london after attending the dryad board meeting. I have the great privilege of being the treasurer of dryad. We worked hard for two and a half days to assess the current state of dryad and to draft sone strategic goals for the next three years. I feel folk left with the feeling of a job well done. It was a great...

#inourtime/notes#blog This was another great episode of in our time about Rawls’ theory of justice. Episode link: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001h4bz This is what I learnt: • he was a fully 20th century philosopher, born 1921, died 2002. For sone reason I’d always assumed that he was 19th century. • the podcast points to the deat...

Last weekend I took part in a generative AI hackathon in london. Huge thanks to xx and Victoria Stoyanova and Sarah Drinkwater for organising it. (Sarah's writeup - https://betterprogramming.pub/how-to-run-a-generative-ai-hackathon-dc27f8d4fdd0). It was hosted by Entrepreneur First and sponsored by Amazon, the British Medical Journal, ...

I have been doing a lot of reading about large language models in the last few weeks. Here are some of the more thought provoking pieces that I’ve read. I’m pulling out quotes from these pieces, what I think is important about them, and some reflections on them. I don’t fully agree with everything in these posts, but they have all been...

#inourtime/notes #blog/draft #superconductivity #physics A few weeks ago I listened to the in our time episode on superconductivity. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001hfpc It was a really enjoyable episode, though I can’t recall a lot from the episode, I did learn a few things. The phenomenon was discovered accidentally in 1911 by K...

I often have a desire to copy a bunch of URLS from my current safari window, for example if I am opening tabs while at a meeting, to look at the resources that are being mentioned. I might want to capture them later in some notes. I was wondering whether there might be a way to easily grab all links that I have open in my tabs, but ins...

I listened to the episode about the 1872 four-year long Challenger expedition to investigate the oceans of the earth. I’d not known much about this before listening to the episode. In 1870, Charles Wyville Thomson (right), Professor of Natural History at Edinburgh University, persuaded the Royal Society of London to ask the British Gov...

Generative AI, characterised by tools like GhatGPT and MidJourney, has been taking the internet by storm, and they raise so many interesting questions about the nature of expertise, tools to support human creativity, and how AI is going to intersect with humans in the near and long term. There is a world of a difference between reading...

#inourtime/notes/greece The most recent episode of in our time that I listened to was about Demosthenes' Philippics - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001f4ws. This is what I learnt. I’d hear about these works before but hadn’t realised that they are named after a person - Philipp of Macedon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_II_of_...

#blog#inourtime/notes/poo I enjoy listening to in our time ( https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qykl), a radio show touching on all things cultural and scientific. I’ve listened to many episodes, but rarely retain any information. I’m going to blog short notes on what I learn from the episodes. This post is about the great stink of 1...

Deep science ventures opened up applications for its phd program - https://apply.workable.com/deep-science-ventures/j/58DD353058/. The idea is to embed a PhD program within a startup incubator, with a focus on transformative technologies that can help with challenges such as climate change. Their portfolio of projects is inspirational ...

Someone pointed out GlassHealth to me - https://blog.glass.health/company/ - a new startup that is building tools to help doctors. Their first tool is Glass Notebook, an online notebook for doctors to track their information, inspired by tooling like Notion, and dare I say it tools like ToddlyWiki. This whole area of semi-structured do...