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Daring Bits
Open Source Freedom - John Carmack makes the case for open-source absolutism as a basic first amendment issue, emphasizing the importance of free access to state-of-the-art AI algorithms and models without restrictions. He argues that restricting open-source AI hinders progress and innovation, likening it to past concerns about strong encryption, and suggests that open-source AI should be untethered by politics and censorship. Hear hear!
Anti-Pegasus Box Keeps Spies Away - Pegasus spyware poses a significant threat to journalists and activists globally, with recent revelations about its use via ad networks. This article suggests using DNS filtering, like Pi-Hole, as a potential solution, but notes it’s not a complete safeguard and highlights the need for additional cybersecurity measures.
AMD Acquires More Open Source - AMD has acquired open-source AI software vendor Nod.ai to enhance its AI software capabilities, especially in LLVM and MLIR compiler infrastructure. Nod.ai’s SHARK Machine Learning Distribution will help reduce manual optimization efforts and deployment time for AI models across AMD’s product families.
Compute Anything on Bitcoin - BitVM is a new computing paradigm for Bitcoin that allows any computable function to be verified on the Bitcoin network without the need for upgrades or new op_codes. Some potential use cases include decentralizing applications, but it doesn’t solve trustless bridging for sidechains, and it’s also slower, more expensive, and more complex than Ethereum’s EVM. Still pretty cool though.
The Economics of Programming Languages - This talk by Elm’s creator Evan Czaplicki offers insights into the funding sources for creating and maintaining programming languages and their impact on language design and development practices.
How Phone Hacking Inspired Apple - In the late 1950s, a young blind boy, Joe Engressia, discovered that he could make free long-distance calls by whistling a specific note into the phone’s handset due to his perfect pitch. This discovery led to the underground culture of “phone phreaking” and indirectly inspired Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak to start Apple Computer after they learned about it from an Esquire Magazine article in 1971.
Robot Overlords
Seeing Robots - This video shows off the impressive performance of multi-modal AI, specifically LLaVA 7B v1.5, which accurately describes images, and even offers insights about what it is looking at. Just imagine the potential for accessibility applications.
OpenAI’s Blacklist - A Twitter user claims to have discovered a list of blacklisted websites that OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 avoids using, including Breitbart News and the Epoch Times, citing reasons like “conspiracy theories” and “hate speech.” The discovery was made when the user asked ChatGPT to provide a list of credible and non-credible news sources. OpenAI denies keeping such a list, naturally. Maybe if OpenAI was open, we could verify. 🤷♀️ Ah well.
18th-Century AI - Researchers from the University of Jyväskylä have simplified deep learning, a popular artificial intelligence technique, using an approach based on 18th-century mathematics. They found that combining simple network structures in a novel way can achieve similar or better results compared to deep learning, making AI models more interpretable and transparent.
LLM Researchers Unify Reasoning, Acting, and Planning - A new framework called LATS (Language Agent Tree Search) has been introduced to enhance the decision-making abilities of large language models (LLMs) by using them as agents, value functions, and optimizers. LATS leverages external feedback to address the limitations of existing techniques and has demonstrated its effectiveness in various domains, achieving a 94.4% score for programming with GPT-4 and a 75.9 average score for web browsing with GPT-3.5.
So We Shipped an AI Product: Did It Work? - Honeycomb, a company offering observability and monitoring tools, developed Query Assistant using LLMs (Large Language Models) to help users query their data more effectively. While Query Assistant showed positive results in some metrics, it fell short of expectations in terms of adoption by Free tier users, but it did help improve manual querying retention, the creation of complex queries, and the use of boards and triggers among active teams.
Parkour Robots - These researchers demonstrate robot parkour skills using a low-cost robot equipped with imprecise actuation and a single front-facing depth camera. They trained a neural net policy in simulation with reinforcement learning, enabling the robot to perform precise parkour maneuvers, including high jumps, long jumps, handstands, and navigating novel obstacle courses with varying physical properties. The better to chase us all down. 🤖 Wait, wut?
Squishy Robots - Northwestern University researchers tasked an AI model with designing a walking robot, resulting in the creation of a unique, squishy, purple robot with unconventional “legs” powered by air. The AI utilized a rapid evolution process to iteratively improve its designs, leading to unexpected features that challenge traditional assumptions about efficient design in robotics. Squishy and unintimidating is more our speed.
Liberty Toolbox
OpenIPC - OpenIPC is an open-source operating system aimed at replacing closed, insecure, and unsupported firmware on IP cameras with ARM and MIPS processors. It offers binary pre-compiled files for easy installation and provides access to source files for further development under the MIT License, with support expanding to various processor types beyond HiSilicon.
OBS Studio Portable - OBS Studio Portable for Linux offers the latest OBS Studio pre-loaded with third-party plugins and features for live streaming and screen recording. It includes 50 third-party OBS Studio plugins, Chromium Embedded Frameworks for browser sources, NVIDIA and VA-API accelerated video encoding, various effects filters, audio capture support, and integration with multiple protocols, making it suitable for running OBS Studio on different Linux distributions.
