Finally! As of yesterday May 3, Google now supports adding Passkeys to your account. The full blog post is worth a read, but the highlights of why someone would prefer a Passkey over a Password are: Unlike passwords, passkeys can only exist on your devices. Bad actors cannot steal information that you are incapable of giving to them. Great way to stop phishing attacks where users are tricked into giving up their passwords....
Fascinating, but not surprising. We found that both GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 are strongly biased, even though GPT-4 has a slightly higher accuracy for both types of questions. GPT-3.5 is 2.8 times more likely to answer anti-stereotypical questions incorrectly than stereotypical ones (34% incorrect vs. 12%), and GPT-4 is 3.2 times more likely (26% incorrect vs 8%). An important thing to keep in mind is that Large Language Models like ChatGPT are not magic; they train on datasets which were created previously by humans....
The Verge has a good article about Bluesky, an upcoming Twitter-inspired social media network. Similar to Mastodon and like email before it, Bluesky is a federated social network which means a person can have an account on a server they choose. From the article: The [AT] protocol is still in development, but Bluesky’s stated focuses for it are decentralized social networking, algorithmic choice, and portable accounts. I imagine simple algorithms will eventually take over all of the federated space....
Recently, I purchased a Samsung 980 SSD which had a firmware upgrade available. I would normally not upgrade firmware on SSD/HDD devices, or even bother looking for it, unless there was a problem I was trying to solve. Well, turns out this SSD model has some temperature problems1. (The second link is an Internet Archive one, because Samsung doesn’t like to keep forum posts up to help folks in the future?...
…probably not, no. Not today anyways. An excellent video from Paul Hudson at Hacking with Swift explains. What is remarkable about the code which ChatGPT (and, I assume, other Large Language Models) can produce is how close to a correct solution it is, but how wrong it ends up being. All is not lost, of course. A human who knows how to write SwiftUI code could quickly fix up these flaws....
Everything about this study is interesting: Contentedness does increase steadily in line with incomes and even accelerates as pay rises beyond $100,000 a year — as long as the person enjoys a certain baseline level of happiness to begin with. That’s according to the authors’ study of 33,391 people living in the US, published March 1 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal. They say the effect can be observed in salaries up to $500,000, though they lack conclusive data beyond that level....
Just like last year, spent another winter weekend in Stowe, Vermont back in January. It was a great time of skiing, beer, and hot tubs - all of my favorite winter activities. Below is the video summary of the trip. Compared to last year, I have upped my GoPro game to include additional angles that create more variety in the final product. This 3 minute video was made from tens of hours of footage, and I think I only just had enough to make it interesting....
What a great story this is: For those who stay the course to become Cravath partners, it is a lifetime career that comes with a guaranteed annual salary of several million dollars. Underscoring the “lifetime” part are traditions such as the Cravath Walk: every partner is entitled to a procession of past and present partners at their funeral, after which the assembled lawyers chant: “The partner is dead, the firm lives....
Of all the things Twitter could do to drive me away, they’ve done two of the top-tier items over the past week or so. First up, we have “Yes, Elon Musk created a special system for showing you all his tweets first”: When bleary-eyed engineers began to log on to their laptops, the nature of the emergency became clear: Elon Musk’s tweet about the Super Bowl got less engagement than President Joe Biden’s....
From Thomas Rid at the Alperovitch Institute for Cybersecurity Studies: Last week brought two related features of artificial intelligence in education into sharp relief: the first is that all that talk about plagiarism and cheating and abuse is uninspiring and counterproductive. Yes, some unambitious students will use this new tool to cover subpar performance, and yes, we could talk about how to detect or disincentivize such behavior. The far more inspiring conversation is a different one: how can the most creative, the most ambitious, and the most brilliant students achieve even better results faster?...
