Interesting Links for 23-05-2024

[andrewducker]

1. Google's AI work is driven by fear of being left behind rather than any actual user need.

(tags:ai google )

2. If you're away on the 4th of July (which is in the school holidays in Scotland) then please sign up for a postal vote. It doesn't take long.

(tags:voting UK )

3. Why politicians are Against Waste

(tags:politics waste efficiency uk video )

4. The evidence on rent control is mixed and flawed.

(tags:rental economics )

5. Half of Amazon's workers struggle to afford food and housing

(tags:amazon pay poverty )

6. Here's what's really going on inside an LLM's neural network

(tags:language ai models )

7. How computers encode every character in the world

(tags:unicode text computers )

Comments

[cmcmck]

The Tories! They despise Scots like they despise everyone else apart from their lot.

[ckd]

I'm annoyed that the Unicode post didn't mention Go at all, despite it natively using UTF-8 (including for source code).

This is especially egregious since Rob Pike and Ken Thompson both invented UTF-8 and co-created Go (the latter with Robert Griesemer).

[andrewducker]

That is a strange ommission!

[calimac]

7) US library computerized cataloging practice, which dates back to the 1960s and thus predates Unicode, may very well have adopted Unicode in the 20-odd years since I retired. Certainly they now produce records in CJK and Cyrillic (and probably other writing systems that I haven't seen), which they didn't do in my day.

But the way it was done then: all records were in the Latin alphabet. That meant all those for books not in that alphabet had to be transliterated. (Transliterating Cyrillic on sight was one of my specialties.) So the number of characters needed to be encoded was limited. Besides a few special letters (e.g. edh and thorn in Icelandic), most of the non-regulars were diacritic marks. But instead of having special characters for each use of a diacritic as Unicode does ("a" with an acute accent, "e" with an acute accent, "i" with an acute accent, etc.), the cataloging system had codes for just the diacritic marks. You could then apply the mark to any letter you needed, which avoided the situation I've sometimes encountered with computers where the Unicode subset it supports doesn't include the letter-diacritic combo you need.

[calimac]

1) Why don't they just buy these competing companies? That's what Microsoft used to do.

[andrewducker]

That seems to be what Microsoft have been doing.

I'm sure they will if any of them produce something they can't do themselves.

[hairyears]

An interesting point: and it raises an interesting question.

What if Google's acquisition strategy - and their investment in AI R&D - is informed by a belief that the current AI boom is a tulip mania for useless crap inflated by hype?

I recall that Google have been developing and deploying LLM technologies for machine translation for over a decade: they know the limitations and, if there was any use to be had in any of it, Google would already have deployed it globally.

[channelpenguin]

jnteresting thought.

So why do anything at all? But maybe the budget is negligable if you are Google.

I am an "AI" skeptic. Someday we will have great tools of this sort, to help us do technical tasks, I hope. But we are SO far away. The surface gloss may confuse many, and may actually be enough for task that are all about "surface gloss". But every (for instance) pro developer / engineer I know (including me) has found almost nothing but frustration and timewaste for anything other than making presentations. Right now the tools are worse to work with than the worst intern with the most over-inflated over-confidence in their abilities.

The picture and music "AI"s are scarily close to enough for the bland everyday background music /marketing bumpf for the "average" punter who isn't really into art.

[hairyears]

There is a market for AI among customer service managers and public-sector executives available for lucrative non-executive directorships.

That is to say: benighted and besuited profiteers who seek advancement by cost-cutting so deeply that all value in the activity they defund will be destroyed, shortly after the parasites bank their rewards and move onwards and upwards.

Fortunes have been made already in outsourcing and offshoring costly customer service activities in banking, insurance, and utility billing; and - with extreme prejudice - in public sector IT.

AI is the next level in the process, deepening the destructive effect and opening-up new markets for cheapening and worsening the services and disservices inflicted for profit on the despised.

[channelpenguin]

I totally agree with your analysis.

I just don't understand where they think their profits will come from when us plebs can't afford to buy anything at all because AI took all the jobs...

[andrewducker]

Ah, but if they predict that that's going to happen then there's definitely a drive to squeeze out those last few pennies.