Some open source software I wrote decades ago was distributed with the then-current BSD license, which included an advertising clause. This hinders the code’s reuse and distribution, so I’m hereby declaring that the clause’s requirements no longer apply to my code, and that the corresponding clause can be deleted from it.
Continue reading "I’m removing the BSD advertising clause"Generative AI (GenAI) systems, such as ChatGPT, can help students as their personal tutor, by allowing them to study what interests them, by providing in depth explanations to topics they didn’t quite understand, by assessing their work and problems with it, and by providing shortcuts to parts of their work that aren’t directly relevant to what they want to learn. However, students sometimes misuse GenAI to derive answers for work they were supposed to conduct on their own as part of their learning, or accept its answers uncritically. For the first type of misuse part of the blame occasionally also lies with educators for giving out-of-class assignments that GenAI can perform with ease. For the second type of misuse students must learn to avoid using unverified GenAI output. Needless to say that in both cases the misuse of AI may also constitute academic fraud and violate their university’s code of conduct. Here is my take on the practicalities of the two cases.
Continue reading "The perils of GenAI student submissions"In an IEEE Software “Adventures in Code” column titled Modular Data Analytics I describe the benefits and use of simple-rolap, a tool suite for relational online analytical processing. I have built simple-rolap based on the Unix make tool and a few shell scripts. With make approaching its 50th birthday, before writing the column I looked for possible modern and better alternatives I might be ignoring.
Continue reading "Unix make vs Apache Airflow"A key part in scientific writing is a description of related work. This section establishes what is known in the given area and the new publication’s contribution. It also provides a signal to reviewers and readers regarding the study’s innovativeness, credibility, and thoroughness. A paper with a shallow related work section may well have overlooked important relevant work that would have supported its theory building, methods, or conclusions. A mistake often made in related work sections is to present them as a laundry list (A did X, B did Y), often in chronological order.
Continue reading "How (and how not) to present related work"I’ve been working with exceptions offered by languages, such as Java and Python, for more than 20 years, invariably as their consumer: catching them when raised by an API and then doing my thing. For the systems I worked on, exception handling mostly involved either quitting the program with an error or re-prompting the user to fix some input. Consequently, my view of them was as a fancy error handling mechanism: syntactic sugar and static enforcement for checking a function’s successful completion. Recently, I refactored the error handling in Alexandria3k, a library and a command-line tool providing efficient relational query access to diverse publication open data sets. Through this the full power of exceptions clicked for me. I suspect that others may share my previously limited appreciation of exception handling, so here is a brief description of the refactoring.
Continue reading "An exception handling revelation"TomTom recently announced it would stop operating their supporting infrastructure by the end of September following its earlier decision to exit the wearables market. This means that its products, such as sports watches, will become effectively useless, as they will no longer be able to export their activities and sync them with tracker sites. Throwing away an otherwise fine watch only because its maker decided to shut down its proprietary infrastructure seems like a sad waste. Here is how you can download the watch’s data and upload it to Strava, a popular activity tracker, using open source software.
Continue reading "Extending the life of TomTom wearables"We have seen many calls warning about the existential danger the human race faces from artificial general intelligence (AGI). Recent examples include the letter asking for a six month pause in the development of models more powerful than GPT-4 and Ian Hogarth’s FT article calling for a slow-down in the AI race. In brief, these assert that the phenomenal increase in the power and performance of AI systems we are witnessing raises the possibility that these systems will obsolete humanity. I’ve already argued that some of the arguments made are hypocritical, but that doesn’t mean that they are also vacuous. How credible is AGI’s threat and what should we do about it?
Continue reading "How AGI can conquer the world and what to do about it"Many of us are worried that Twitter’s increasingly erratic post visibility and user verification policies will curtail our ability to disseminate our work and ideas to a wide audience. Having spent years to attract followers on Twitter, setting up shop on Mastodon sounds like a tough call. Fortunately, anecdotal evidence suggests that dissemination via Mastodon can be more potent than Twitter, even with a fraction of a follower base.
Continue reading "Twitter’s overrated dissemination capacity"The recent open letter calling for a pause in giant AI experiments correctly identifies a number of risks associated with the development of AI, including job losses, misinformation, and loss of control. However, its call to pause some types of AI research for six months smacks of hypocrisy.
Continue reading "The hypocritical call to pause giant AI"Big-tech’s dash to incorporate ChatGPT-like interfaces into their search engines threatens the ecosystem of human knowledge with extinction. Knowledge development is a social activity. It starts with scientists publishing papers and books that build on earlier ones and with practitioners, journalists, and other writers disseminating these findings and their opinions in more accessible forms. It continues through specialized web sites, blogs, the Wikipedia, as well as discussion and Q&A forums. It further builds upon our interactions with these media through web site visits, upvotes, likes, comments, links, and citations. All these elements combined have yielded a rich global knowledge ecosystem that feeds on our interactions to promote the continuous development of useful and engaging content.
Continue reading "AI deforests the knowledge’s ecosystem"
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