Rad Geek People's Daily

What I’m Reading: Danny O’Brien, Oblomovka, 16-17 March 2023:

. . . AI certain[ly] seems to be generating massive crop surpluses: Whisper was literally a side project for OpenAI so that they could use it to parse and suck down video sources for GPT’s maw. I find this to be just one of the indications of an age of wonder. I’ve spent years worrying that open source was falling behind commercial speech recognition tooling, and OpenAI just chucked one over the transom as favor. Oh, and it also translates, tolerably, and sometimes accidentally.

But my point here is what a pleasure it is to run these tools locally. As Simon, now AI whisperer to the world, notes, there’s a substantial difference from feeding an LLM through a grate in OpenAI’s door, to having it run under your own control, and/or passing around the model among friends and submitting it to the processes of open improvement. . . .

— Danny O’Brien, only fans
Oblomovka, 16 March 2023.

The PC was always intended as a machine that augments individual abilities. . . . In this way of thinking about digital tech, the personal computer is an extension of your brain and its abilities. Its memory is to help you remember; its processing power is there to help you think faster; its network connection is for you to reach out to others; its interfaces are to connect more closely to you. It is yours in the same way as your hands belong to you, as your eyes, as your imagination.

Something has taken us from that tradition. . . .

— Danny O’Brien, some fire in me yet
Oblomovka, 17 March 2023.