HN user
The almost universal opinion is that AI chatbots are damaging, misleading, dangerous, etc. etc. but I suspect there are under reported stories about how AI chatbots helped people deal with depression, grief, addiction, loneliness or some mental health condition. Ideally, the people afflicted improved their lives and no longer felt the need for an AI chatbot.
Are there any such stories or, better yet, academic papers? If so, please post.
I always like to hear about ancient board game reconstructions. Like music and religion, games are something every culture creates. Another recent example is the case of Liubu, a game from ancient China for which the rules were lost. Still, a reconstruction is being attempted by Carnegie Melon:
I had a notion to make a 24 hour clock with just one hand. There is actually a watch company selling such a device and their tagline is that the watch "will change your conception of time". I'd like to see if that is true.
Making a 24-hour clock looks to be relatively straight forward. Most clocks rely on pulses from a piezo electric crystal. Divide the pulse frequency by two with a D-flip flop and the clock goes half as fast.
Was just thinking of making exactly that. I have made Kokoro the voice of my local LLM (qwen 3.6). What do you use for a Japanese tutor app?
For those interested in the subject, animation has quite a history before Disney came onto the scene. I suggest this book:
Before Mickey: The Animated Film 1898-1928 by Donald Crafton
Personally, I remain impressed to this day with the pioneering work of Winsor McCay, the cartoonist who created Little Nemo. Perhaps the best example:
* Must be willing to perform human sacrifices during select astronomical events?
The article states that "Lamarck, on the other hand, used French terms" to describe the clouds unlike Luke Howard whose Latin names such as cumulus, nimbus, cirrus, etc., which stuck and are still with us.
What were Lamarck's names for the clouds?
Cool! How would navigation actually work? Dead reckoning? Inertial? Stellar reference? Pulsar navigation?
Also, the dashed red line is --- SPOILER ALERT! ---- only part of the trajectory in the film, as there is another leg of the voyage not shown.
Coincidentally, I just started on Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch), a repo/book/course by Sebastian Raschka [0][1][2]. Maybe it is a good problem to have to have to decide which learning resource to use.
[0] https://github.com/rasbt/LLMs-from-scratch
[1] https://www.manning.com/books/build-a-large-language-model-f...
[2] https://magazine.sebastianraschka.com/p/coding-llms-from-the...
This "human connection" is over rated IMHO. We create an image of a human musician and too often become disappointed fans because, for example, we disapprove of the musician's lifestyle (the expression sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll exists for a reason), or because of disagreement with the social and political causes the musicians support. Occasionally, fans follow an artist for their commitment to their art later to discover they sell out, like their style changes to pursue mass appeal, or they sell their work to become a jingle for sugar pops or similar. I think it is best to appreciate their creation and admit the person creating it may not be someone to place undue adulation on. To quote a film, I think it is best to "separate the art from the artist".
I realize this museum is more about hardware but software that implements the game also deserves its place in history. To that effect, here is a writeup on Microchess made for the Kim-1 microcomputer:
Very cool! Wouldn't it be even cooler if the museum could score a couple of the very oldest machines? I'm talking about the El Ajedrecista machine (1912)[1] and Caissa [2][3] (named after the goddess of Chess[4]) built by Claude Shannon.
[1]. https://www.chessprogramming.org/El_Ajedrecista
[2]. https://www.computerhistory.org/chess/stl-430b9bbe92716/
[3]. https://mitmuseum.mit.edu/collections/object/2007.030.005?qu...
[4]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ca%C3%AFssa
Technically, these electro mechanical machines may not qualify as computers, but still, what a scoop it would be to get them!
One more meme: Missed the chance to call it Multi-Pass
This "human connection" is over rated IMHO. We tend to create an image of what a human musician is like and we forget that they are, well, human. Too often human musicians have disappointed fans because of their lifestyle (the expression sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll exists for a reason) or because some do not agree with the social and political causes the musicians support. Occasionally, fans follow an artist for their commitment to their art later to discover they sell out in some way, like their style changes to achieve greater mass appeal, or the sell their work to become a jingle for sugar pops or similar. I think it is best to appreciate their creation and admit the person creating it may not be someone to place undue adulation on. To quote a film, I think it is best to "separate the art from the artist".
I've seen a huge amount of videos of sports fans having melt downs when their team/player loses, to the point of destroying their own TVs and attacking their guests. I have to believe gambling is a factor in this behavior.
For a while I worked at what was then the Sperry Rand Corporation (now Unisys) which had some pride in their heritage as the descendant of the Univac Corporation founded by ENIAC inventors Eckert and Mauchly. In a glass case there was a vacuum tube circuit said to be a memory unit of the original ENIAC. No one seemed to know much about it, casting doubt on the claimed provenance of the device.
The tube circuit resembled the ones shown in the photo linked below (although none of those in the photo are from ENIAC).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Women_holding_parts_of_th...
Did any other old timer like me get reminded of Creative Computing magazine?
How about opening up the game for humans to play? Can you beat your AI?
Yes, he is the same author. You will recognize his drawings in the Stars book.
Even if you don't have a telescope or binoculars, you can still enjoy naked eye star gazing. The book that got me started and which I highly recommend: The Stars: A New Way to See Them by H. A. Rey
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stars:_A_New_Way_to_See_Th...
Just to get your nostalgia juices flowing again, someone recreated the Defender sound engine in the browser.
I don't care to start a debate about who first invented television when, but I remember hearing (conformed by wikipedia [1]) that Leon Theremin, inventor of the musical instrument named after him, demonstrated mechanical television at roughly the same time.
Making AI companions is becoming a widespread little hobby project. Many have created them and shared instructions on how to do it. My preference would be to use local resources only (say, with ollama), they can even be made with voice recognition, TTS, and an avatar character.
While I have not interfaced my AI with all the services that Clawdbot does (WhatsApp, Slack, etc.) I don't think that is too much of a stretch from my very simple build.
There is a video update from the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center. (I could only find this on Facebook) https://www.facebook.com/reel/1190509063198524
I'd be more concerned about just slop, whether AI or human created. And the fact that Youtube content is overwhelmingly slop - regardless of creator type - is not news at all.
And yet, penny dreadful editions and pulp magazines that existed before pocket books... did they have the same effect? Or did they only produce pocket book writers?
I know someone pursuing a degree in meteorology at well known university for the subject and I asked that person if they are being taught about these and other AI weather models, about how they work, how to evaluate them for effectiveness, etc.
The answer: AI is not even covered, at least at the undergrad level. This is just a sample of one, so are any other universities educating future meteorologists on this subject?
For the dedicated fan, the complete collection of Peanuts strips is available in several volumes.
https://www.fantagraphics.com/collections/the-complete-peanu...
I remember my grandmother saying that Peanuts characters look like children but spoke like adults and that was what she liked. Apparently, kids saying "good grief" was unheard of back in that time, as were kids generally being disappointed and sad.
Cool! Reminds of the Music From Outer Space synth in which the designer makes the claim that it "can actually get a child away from a television" and includes a video to prove it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6M_KrZByz4
MFOS Weird Sound Generator
https://musicfromouterspace.com/index.php?CATPARTNO=WSG001&P...