Overview: Science&Technology

The "executive summary" of my 5-part bundle of 1/1/2023, which "provide a snapshot of my current thinking into how a decentralised collective intelligence ecosystem could be bootstrapped into existence."

Starts with articulating I've been meaning to write for many years about the oncoming AI-driven content flood: "The dark forest theory of the web: ... life-like but life-less state of being online... overrun with bots, advertisers, trolls, data scrapers, clickbait... algorithmically manipulated junk... eerily devoid of human life ... liv…

This piece captures and then explores exactly what I've always thought about the future direction of myhub.ai: imagine what would happen if you had your own personal AI assistant operating across your content - your public posts, private library (including content shared from friends, stuff in your reading queue, etc.) and the wider web, emph…

"Ipop gloop glog bluba droma floom gloope splog slopa" - This sentence means "The happy slime sees the earth under the sky while eating the slime's food" in Glorp. Here's the breakdown of the sentence:ChatGPT and I invent a fictional language spoken by slime-people... It understands subordinate clauses ... so understa…

Is ChatGPT creator OpenAI "a potential Google slayer. Why look up something on a search engine when ChatGPT can write a whole paragraph explaining the answer?" It's very capable, but "struggles to distinguish between truth and falsehood... often a persuasive liar... a bit like autocomplete on your phone... trained on pretty muc…

"WordPress developer Johnathon Williams ... demonstrated that, with a little bit of expert guidance, ChatGPT can drastically reduce the amount of time it takes to extend WordPress... the plugin [written by GPT] ... worked on the first try... the best results from asking ChatGPI to generate entire functions versus specific filters or actions..…

Another piece pointing out that ChatGPT, while "easily the most impressive text-generating demo to date... trained through a mix of crunching billions of text documents and human coaching", should not be trusted."a generative AI is what it eats", and ChatGPT ate countless biases in the content it processed. "No one should …

The claims re: ChatGPT by "fascinated evangelists... [that they] contain “humanity’s scientific knowledge,” are approaching artificial general intelligence ... even consciousness", are simply "a distraction from the actual harm perpetuated by these systems. People get hurt from the very practical ways such models fall short in deplo…

"ChatGPT is not overly reliable... surprising how often ... right, but they can also be plausible and wrong a lot of the time, and downright obviously wrong some of the time... responding with errors of fact, ... responses that may only be true for certain (biased) contexts... wary of providing evidence or citations ... [but] happy to make up…

Articulates exactly my problem with most Tools4Thought, hence the "super simple Thinking Tool" I want at the heart of myhub's CMS."Perhaps something as simple as having the word ‘Tool’ first causes us to focus on the tool more than the thinking... to confuse thought as an object rather than thought as a process... [causing us t…

"I spent a few minutes in conversation with ChatGPT."This was both me kicking ChatGPT's conversational tyres and exploring its limits, both those it admits to and those it does not.Key takeaways from a first reading:Many, but not all, content creators are screwedFor "writers, journalists, copywriters, consultants, and even publ…

"fine-tune GPT-3 on their own data, creating a custom version tailored to their application" improving reliability for more use cases and making the model cheaper and faster. Any dataset of any shape or size, plus "incrementally add data based on user feedback... less than 100 examples to start seeing the benefits ... doubling the n…

ChatGPT... is going to change our world much sooner than we expect, and much more drastically

Betaworx announcing "nine companies we selected and invested in for our THINKCamp accelerator program ... new technologies ranging from large language models and generative AI to graph databases and high-fidelity spatial user interfaces — to create tools for for how we may think."All probably worth checking out, ranging from Gordon Brand…

Discourse graph refers to an information model which represents scientific discourse by distilling "traditional publication down into more granular, formalized knowledge claims, linked to supporting evidence and context through a network or graph... knowledge claims ... as the central unit".Why? "Standardizing the representation of …

"I first decided to try scribing the Betaworx Render session on Plexus using Obsidian and try publishing it via GitHub (context). That didn't work, so when I saw [[rtnf md]] I thought I'd give it a whirl... the idea [of Plexus] is simple:post your thoughts into a defined shared brain on Plexus - eg : https://render.plexus.earth/the …

Another scribe of the Betaworx Render conference on Thinking Tools (context), this time in good old-fashioned blogpost form, with scans of handwritten notes to boot. Contrasting this with some of the other annotations, it's a good example of the difference between "someone else's notes" and "someone else's blog post&q;…

I've been invited to write a chapter for an upcoming book on Personal Knowledge Graphs (PKG). My chapter will encompass each user’s PKG, the Social Knowledge Graph created by networking them together via the Fediverse, Solid hosting, AI writing tools and Decentralised Autonomous Organisations.This post provides a first draft of its Introducti…

A neural network to help web content authors efficiently and completely characterise their content using the site taxonomy. Accuracy improves with use.

A YANSS interview with Adam Grant, author of Think Again: The Power of Knowing What you Don’t Know. Generally an "extensive exploration of how to rethink your own thinking", including his WorkLife podcast interview of Margaret Atwood on procrastination.(When annotating a podcast I really like a transcript, but there was none for this epi…

A "How I use it" from Ivo. "Roam changed the game [by] ... treating the data as a graph ... [and] allowing blocks to quickly be nested, referred to, embedded, created from a piece of text in a block, appear in the sidebar, being searched and queried".Ivo developed a way of ontologising his Roam graph: "In the context of a…

"it's a start... Musk argued that disclosing what amplifies or downranks tweets would reduce the risk of “behind the scenes manipulation.” [but] algorithms alone offer limited insights" because it's not just an algorithm that defines what you see: it's a huge dataset - "content that enters the platform, each user’s p…

"for nearly a decade... my own views have whipsawed between extreme skepticism and cautious optimism. These days... a crypto moderate... much of the crypto market consists of overvalued, overhyped and possibly fraudulent assets ... [but] it isn’t all a cynical money-grab, and that there are things of actual substance being built" Most …

the vast majority of defi apps rely heavily on oracles, middleware entities that connect smart contracts to resources outside of their native blockchains. Without oracles, blockchains are like computers without internet access... Often referred to as hybrid smart contracts ... [oracles enable] smart contracts that can react to real-world events a…

"DAOhaus is a no-code platform for launching and running DAOs. It is owned and operated by the community. All DAOs on the platform utilize the glorious open-source code of Moloch".Also see their glossary: https://daohaus.club/docs/users/glossary

tokens Trojan horse principles of cooperatives directly into highly financialized spaces... [but] as tokens that double as governance rights can be sold on secondary markets... DAOs can learn from cooperatives’ emphasis on long termism... DAOs could introduce more forms of decentralized governance into cooperatives.

"Not every DAO mints its own currency, but ... Friends With Benefits,,, [has] $FWB... minted on the Ethereum blockchain... Membership: 75 $FWB... only one million $FWB tokens... When I first heard about Friends With Benefits this year, membership was already valued at $350. Today, it’s over $9,000."... like most DAOs, grants one vote per…

"Olympus is building a community-owned decentralized financial infrastructure to bring more stability and transparency for the world.... Olympus was ideated by Zeus and built by a distributed pseudo-anonymous team."Sees itself a a "store of value: ... Stablecoins are vulnerable to inflationary policies, while Bitcoin or Ethereum su…

"The Fingerprints DAO collection is composed of NFTs that revolutionized the use of smart contracts as art.". Includes:"26 Autoglyphs, the first ... “on-chain” generative art pieces on the Ethereum blockchain... the event data contains the full output of the generator - codified instructions, in a character art pattern, to the artwo…

Starts by covering the first IRL NFT/crypto conference, before seguing: "smart investors are not buying seven-figure JPEGs these days... looking past NFT artwork entirely... to Web3... decentralized internet service [running] on public blockchains, with token-based reward systems that allow users to profit from their online activities."e…