Open Source World
We trace the history of the open source movement, its massive influence on the world, and why businesses should pay attention.
Daring Bits
What is the purpose of software? - This blog unveils the single, unifying principle of software design: the reduction of cognitive load. The elements of cognitive capacity, and ways to optimize for them, are explored.
Apple bringing chips home - While most of the world’s semiconductor manufacturing is nestled precariously in Taiwan, Apple announces a multibillion-dollar deal with Broadcom to manufacture key components for its devices in the United States.
Your DNA is in the air - Researchers demonstrate the retrieval and analysis of human environmental DNA (eDNA), raising alarms about potential abuses by law enforcement, ethnic profiling, and the erosion of privacy rights.
Open Twitter - Twitter open sources its pushservice and Tweetypie code. Pushservice handles content recommendations to users, while Tweetypie handles the reading and writing of Tweet data.
Hear me RAR - Decades after his 40-day WinRAR trial expired, Devin Coldewey finally purchases the shareware. Meanwhile, Microsoft adds native support for rar to Windows 11 - for those willing to upgrade.
Calling all Linux gamers - The Linux Game Jam 2023 is an event that invites participants to come together and create games specifically designed for or on GNU/Linux. The jam rules stipulate that game submissions use freely licensed assets, with bonuses awarded for games released under a Free/Open Source software license and those developed using open source tools.
Robot (Government) Overlords
Robot elections - OpenAI’s Sam Altman proposes licensing requirements for AI development, on fears that the robots will interfere with US elections. Did licensing requirements stop the FBI? 🤔 [Ed. Licensing is just to protect entrenched large companies, also LLMs are not AI.]
Lowering the AI drawbridge - Ready for a shock? In the last ten weeks, AI technology has advanced 20 years by comparison to other technologies. Need $1B to train your LLM? Now it’s $100. And it’s on your laptop. And it’s out in the wild. Steve Yegge lays all of this out in this blog, explaining why AI is as foundational to society as fire and physics. We don’t see it coming, and we can’t begin to predict the transformations that are about to take place.
DarkBERT - This paper introduces DarkBERT, a language model trained on Dark Web data, which addresses the linguistic peculiarities and challenges of the Dark Web domain, demonstrating superior performance compared to existing language models and providing a valuable tool for research in the Dark Web.
Home automation with natural language - Chris Greening shows off some ChatGPT hackery by connecting it to a Raspberry Pi and controlling various lights in his home. The project showcases the potential for large language models to facilitate communication between different systems and services through human language instead of APIs.
