Some predict that superintelligent AI will command all the world’s resources, including us, and will use those resources — including, unfortunately for us, our atoms — to further its goals. This atom-borrowing will lead to the death of everyone, these people think. Call this prediction doom. What I want to…

Last week I took a look into what Irish far-right had to say about the anti-refugee protest and violence in Sandwith street in the centre of Dublin. I noted a couple of things: first, how it was odd that, among people concerned with this issue in Dublin domestic affairs, it…

(edited with a couple of additions 15/05) On 12 May, in the centre of Dublin, there was a protest against an area where refugees had been sleeping rough. It ended: With the area the people had occupied burned and with protesters and their supporters self-congratulating: Take a moment to admire…

For the past couple of months I’ve been reading the news in Chinese. …

Recent eye-catching developments in AI shed light on a very old philosophical question: what can we know based on experience? All talk is of AI. Coders’ jobs are — for now — made much easier by language models that can make writing a program as easy as autocompleting a text…

After the invasion of Ukraine Russia banned a bunch of Western social media, including Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, and Twitter. A notable absence from this list is Youtube. Why so? It’s not from any great love for the platform. Indeed, last August the government said that though they weren’t planning on…

It seems that money in general and cryptocurrency in particular has become a focus for geopolitics recently. Xi’s trip to Russia has made salient Russian-Chinese trade and the increasing demands that it be carried out not in dollars. …

I made a sort of combo wordle/geoguessr style game to help learn about the geography of China, both what things look like and more standard x is north of y facts. A further bonus is that you can learn some Chinese characters, maybe. It is here. (This is extremely untested…

Last week was another year in deep learning. GPT-4 stole the show, Google seemed to whiff it, right now I’m in a library trying to get LLaMA on my $450 PC. China’s Baidu also released, or at least introduced, their own model. …