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This is another article in my “Take the antidote” series against AI hype. Read parts one here and two here. We’re going to be using the questions laid out in part one to navigate this story.Earlier in August, the media reported on EVO 2, a GPT (generative pretrained transformer) that is trained on genomes, instead of text, to predict create viable genomes. Like ChatGPT, it is a Transformer-based “generative AI” model; however, since it’s scoped to a single domain, it...
This is another article in my “Take the antidote” series against AI hype. Read parts one here and two here. We’re going to be using the questions laid out in part one to navigate this story.Earlier in August, the media reported on EVO 2, a GPT (generative pretrained transformer) that is trained on genomes, instead of text, to predict create viable genomes. Like ChatGPT, it is a Transformer-based “generative AI” model; however, since it’s scoped to a single domain, it...
Encountering websites or even the idea of them are great starts toward making one. Stronger incentives include not only enjoying their designs, but also reading text, viewing images, or listening to media embedded within. These activities don't require having made a website. Neither does the more involved step of getting in touch with webmasters by comments, guestbooks, email, social media, or any other contact method. Any or all of what I mentioned can be considered valid...
AKA I wish I lived like a monk, but in order to do that I have to be that monk. I'm 33 years old and I'm not getting any younger; my gynecologist told me a couple of years ago (the first time I met her, actually) that "Once you hit 30 you unlock your new routine sickness for life", and mine is digestion issues. Nothing surprising as I've always had anxiety-induced nausea ever since I was in elementary school1, at some point the whole system was bound to collapse. I don't...
It’s all starting to feel a bit 2016 again, as on successive days we have to process the deaths of Dolly Parton, Tim Curry and Yayoi Kusama, three people who in their own very different ways, channelled their art as much into being themselves as into doing or making stuff. We still have the music, the movies, the art but not the blonde locks, the raised eyebrow, the fact of living in a psychiatric hospital. And of course we have the vexed question of how important each...
I uninstalled NetNewsWire from my iPhone today. Last night, as I was dozing off, I had this feeling, this feeling that I've had many times in the past, that reading so much on the web may not be a good thing. Like I'm not getting the time to think, or read longer stuff - essays and books. This is not new of course. What is also not new is this want to write more, write more meaningful stuff. Both stream and garden. Not just stream. And of course it was a thing I did when I...
Radio access networks to merge in wholesale joint venture2degrees and One NZ say they plan to merge their radio access networks in a jointly-owned wholesale business.The transaction will be subject to approval from the Commerce Commission and the Overseas Investment Office. If they get the go ahead the companies aim to complete the project in the first half of 2027.A new company will manage shared physical assets like antennas and base stations. Both carriers will then buy...
2nd Place, City Scenes, State Fair of Texas 2026. Three of my photos just won ribbons at the State Fair of Texas. They were printed at 11x14" on foam core. One was shot on an 18-year-old DSLR, the other two on a four-year-old iPhone. This 2nd-place photo is one of the iPhone's. Proof that if you're sharing your work online, or printing it no larger than 11x14", you don't need a fancy camera to take a good photograph. I was in the ice room of an old hotel, noticed the...
¿Sabéis que día es hoy? 27 de agosto y hace 35 años del famoso correo que mandó Linus Torvards pidiendo ayuda para un nuevo sistema operativo que estaba haciendo y que se considera la fecha de nacimiento de GNU/Linux.Como regalo de cumpleaños para todos los linuxeros, en especial para los novatos, oFuente: Malagueños originales y libres
“You must be regular and natural in your habits, like a bourgeois, that you may be violent and original in your work.”- Flaubert
An attacker stole around $8.7 million from the Moonwell defi lending protocol after manipulating the price of an illiquid token called MAMO. After pumping the MAMO token price, they "borrowed" various assets and abandoned the overinflated collateral.This theft is the fourth Moonwell exploit in less than a year, following a $3.7 million oracle manipulation attack in November 2025, another oracle attack in February 2026 amounting to $1.78 million, and a $1 million governance...
Every list of the sexiest moments in movie history starts the same way. Ursula Andress walks out of the Caribbean Sea in a white bikini in Dr. No and cinema is never quite the same again. It's such a famous image that it's easy to assume it tells you everything about how she felt about her own body. It doesn't. The real story, the one about what she actually said and did about nudity for the next sixty years, is a lot stranger and a lot more interesting than one costume. A...
Watching this movie tonight. Spielberg, Hanks, DiCaprio, Williams soundtrack, hard not to fault. What’s struck me is the other actors, Amy Adams, Jennifer Garner, Ellen Pompeo, Martin Sheen, Elizabeth Banks, all of whom I’d totally forgotten. What a fun movie, sometimes it’s nice just to kick back and chill out. Thanks for reading and keeping RSS alive. Visit my site for more.
Elves are classically pretty bishonen and self-serious, but the fact that in OSR games they fight as well as a Fighter while magic-using as well as a magic-user makes them the perfect OC-do-not-steal anime protagonist character option. This is good. Only the small-souled will object to it. As I have long maintained, race-as-class options are a positive. The swordfighter-that-can-cast-spells (aka "gish") is so conceptually perfect, so immediately appealing to the eternal...
A new post from ben.balter.com · Read it on the web →The build pipeline behind Open and Async is absurdly over-engineered—five formats out of one Markdown source, a real browser auditing every push, the works. I built it to satisfy my own compulsions, not a standard (or, more honestly, as an exercise in structured procrastination: elaborate tooling is a great way to not write the book it’s for). Then I went to check whether the ebook was actually accessible and found out...
807 blog posts across 14 years. That’s how much I’ve published on my blog at the time of this writing. And here’s the question I’ve been turning over in my mind: “How do I convey that kind of volume across time in a more interesting way than a mere reverse-chronological list?” I’m not hating on reverse-chronological lists. I love my list view. I use it all the time to find stuff I’ve written. But it’s only one way of navigating and digesting all my posts. “What would be...
I'm still digging into a mystery about the models I've been training; although an increasing number of them beat the OpenAI GPT-2 small weights on the narrow technical measure of the loss they get on a test set, they're not as good at an instruction-fine-tuning test. While reading about MoE models, I came across this paragraph in the Switch Transformers paper: Our paper considers the common NLP approach of pre-training on a large corpus followed by fine-tuning on smaller...
Academia is in turmoil regarding partially or wholly AI-written research. AI-written work is being submitted to journals, but it isn’t clear how much. Publisher, journal, university, and department policies are emerging and fluctuating. Technology develops, rendering recently enacted policies ambiguous, vague, or subject to unintended loopholes. With everything in flux, it’s impossible for norms to develop. There is no general sense of whether and what kind and what degree...
Pfff, it's been a while, right? I had sort of promised myself that I'd spend more time here, writing this and that, and a bit of the other. But like most things with me these days, nothing much came of it. Priorities changed, interests wained, and life got in the way. As it often does. Since the last time I wrote, back in July, I have been on holiday in Italy. Tuscany, to be exact. It was too hot, but we had rented a nice house with a private pool, which was nice. We went...