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Why You Need a Thinking Partner (like this Genius)
You may not have heard of him, but James Clerk Maxwell wrote down what we now think of as four equations that define ALL of electromagnetics. You can get a T-Shirt with them emblazoned on it. If you want to know how radio waves propagate, or how a radio functions, or how anything running on electricity…
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A change of perspective is worth 80 IQ points
We’ve all done it–struggled over some problem until a frustrating end of the day. But after “sleeping on it” and stepping into a hot shower, a breakthrough idea pops up, as if out of nowhere. This often comes from getting too close to the problem. A little distance can make a decisive difference. The quotation…
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Pandas Dataframe
Of the myriad ways of integrating your own data with generative AI, this demo is particularly nicely put together. Start with a CSV file, and ask it questions in plain English, including multi-step computations you might normally perform in a spreadsheet. Internally, it crafts and executes snippets of Pandas Python code against a dataframe. Works…
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SCRIBE prompting
Generative AI prompting 101. There’s a lot written about how to prompt AI, especially chatbots and text-to-image generators. But I haven’t seen a ton targeted at beginners, or those who have relied on intuition…so I wrote something. This is a small sliver of a broader ‘AI Literacy’ course I’m putting together and for a limited…
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How I built an AI workstation for $500
Buying a ready-made AI workstation will cost serious dough. For example, a single RTX 4090, as of this writing, is going for north of $1,600 on Amazon. And that’s not counting the rest of the computer… Of course, before you make such an investment you need to have a solid handle on your why. In…
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Stephen Wolfram’s emotional roller coaster
In this video, I learned some new things as well as some new ways of thinking about the LLM space. But what kept me captivated was Wolfram’s seeming emotional roller coaster. It’s probably safe to call Wolfram a True Believer in generative AI. He was at the forefront of making Wolfram Alpha one of the…
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Confabulating AI Capabilities
In an ironic plot twist, it turns out humans had been “hallucinating” (I prefer the term “confabulating”) a rationale for a supposed detector of AI-written text. Hallucination refers to the penchant for generative AI to confabulate confident-sounding ‘facts’ that have no grounding in reality. Many view it as one of the defining limitations of the…
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Free AI training for Technical Professionals (no math required)
Free training period has expired, but join the Problem Solvers Digest for more opportunities to learn. I’ve often wondered how much more productive I would be with a dedicated assistant. In the corporate world, I never managed to convince anyone to assign a full-time employee to me. Now, the point is (almost) moot. Those who…
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Balisage: Where Markup and Language Models Collide…
AI and LLMs have exploded onto the scene at a conference traditionally about markup and related technologies.
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Even Google Can’t Handle the Pace of Change
Even Google can’t handle how fast the AI landscape is shifting. Originally posted on LinkedIn in May 2023. Especially if you haven’t been closely following the whirlwind of AI developments, this one is worth a peek. We Have No Moat (And neither does OpenAI) In this leaked Google document, the author describes several ways in…
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“What are you looking for?”
Originally posted on LinkedIn in April 2023, before I had set up dubinko.consulting. Reposting here because it shares some good thoughts on my outlook. “What are you looking for?” To work for a company that gets acquired is a dream for many, but one of the downsides is the potential for staffing cuts–especially for someone…
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How LLM works. How it’s going to work
Watch this space. This is a first glimpse at how the new generation of AI technology including ChatGPT is going to interact with existing data platforms. 1. An AI coordinator interfaces with squishy humans, accepting a request and figuring out how to respond.2. In so doing it identifies places where it needs to gather additional…