Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 18

A fun, accessible introduction to how machine learning works…and how it sometimes doesn’t!

Still relevant despite recent advances in AI-generated imagery and text, because the new systems still work on the same principles as the ones that were around three years ago. They just have a lot more data and processing power. This also means they have the same limitations and blind spots. What was it trained on? How was it trained? (This is the most obvious way human bias can leak into an AI model.) How well is the goal specified? And of course, did the AI actually latch onto relevant details, or did it notice that all the training pictures labeled sheep had green fields and blue skies, and completely ignore the actual sheep?

These are things to keep in mind as we enter the landscape of generative AI tools like ChatGPT: You can train an LLM to write a book review, and it’ll give you a great piece of text that reads like a book review – but it’s not going to have actually evaluated the book. For that, you’d have to train another AI to categorize books as good, bad, interesting, dull, and so on. But even that can only be as good as its training data. (I don’t remember whether the classic phrase “garbage in, garbage out” is used anywhere in the book, but it still applies today!)

The author has a blog/newsletter, AI Weirdness, where she pushes AI over the edge to sometimes hilarious results.

I really wanted to like The Book of Boba Fett. I like Fett well enough and I like Fennec Shand…but I just couldn’t get into the story of him trying – clumsily – to become a crimelord.

The flashbacks showing his escape from the Sarlaac, his captivity and later acceptance into a Tusken tribe were fascinating, and I would cheerfully have watched more of that!

I think the problem with the show is that they put everything that audiences wanted out of a Boba Fett show into The Mandalorian. Cool armor and weapons, has his own code, always seen with the mask on, flies around the galaxy and gets into fights… They had to do something different for a Boba Fett show…but the approach they took just didn’t work for me.

(Spoiler: Also, I was so mad at Luke and Ahsoka in their guest spot. The two people in the galaxy best suited to understand that denying Anakin familial attachment is what enabled the dark side to get its hooks in him, and there they are repeating the old order’s mistake with their first student.)

Hilarious self-parody of TNG-era Star Trek. Funny on its own, but even better if you know the shows it’s riffing on. Great as a diversion or as a palette cleanser after watching something more serious (like, say, Picard).

Toward the end of the first season they start mixing in episodes with Big Changes™, Important Events, Mysteries and continuity. It’s not bad when it does those episodes. But I think it’s better when it plays to its strengths: the absurdity of the situations and the way the characters play off each other.

A very lightweight social networking server, with a very clean web interface for viewing public posts. Compatible with Mastodon apps and interacts well with Mastodon and other major ActivityPub platforms on the Fediverse.

It’s not meant for handling zillions of users. GoToSocial is more for setting up a server for your group or family or friends (or even just yourself) on a spare Raspberry Pi or cheap VPS host. I’ve got it running quite well on a 1GB Linode.

You can run it as a semi-private server, so your group can interact locally without the posts leaking, and still share public posts with followers on Mastodon etc.

(It is server-only, though. You can manage settings on its website, and view public posts, but all the interaction has to be done through an app like Elk, Ivory or Tusky.)

Right now it’s still in alpha.

• Not all features are implemented yet.
• It has trouble with some other Fediverse platforms (but that’s improving as bugs get sorted out!)

I wouldn’t recommend it as a complete solution yet, because, well, it’s not complete.

But it already handles the basics: Sharing pictures and words, and interacting with people on the same and other servers.

The Andre Norton books I’ve read over the last couple of years have all been on the action/adventure side of sci-fi, and this is no exception. What I found myself thinking about was how fuzzy, and sometimes arbitrary, the line between science fiction and fantasy really is.

90% of the book takes place on a world with pre-industrial technology. There are two factions with sufficiently-advanced technology that might as well be magic. The Cold War elements of the earlier books are pushed aside by the local conflict on Hawaika, with a handful of stranded humans and dolphins caught in the middle with nothing more high-tech than scuba gear and a convenient translator device. It could easily be a portal fantasy!

While the adventure was entertaining, I started paying more attention to the tropes connecting to the other books and, in some cases, being turned on their heads. Instead of a desert they spend most of their time on the ocean. The pair of empathic coyotes are replaced with a pair of telepathic dolphins. And the rough-and-tumble square-jawed agent finds himself out of his element so much (he has so little telapathic ability that the villains can’t even attack him mentally) that by the end of the book he’s desperately searching for situations where he can do manly things and fight with his hands or physical weapons, while the main battle is waged by women with “magic” and telepathy.

(There was also a floor maze that had to be danced properly to activate some great power, almost a decade before the first of Zelazny’s Amber novels.)