Overview: Science&Technology

"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 number of exampl…

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 Brander's Subco…

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 scientific clai…

"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 AI surfaces rel…

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".Good intro: when I first got i…

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 Introduction, i…

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 episode so I …

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 block, I know if I mean …

"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 profile, the algorithms’ traini…

"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 explainers…

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 token, in…

"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 suffer from marke…

"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 artwork itself""Digi…

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."electronic …

"In the first nine months of 2021 crypto startups, especially those that are creating the tools to build a blockchain-based future, raised $15bn in venture capital", triggered in part by "retail speculators... Investors are also betting that, as regulation becomes clearer, institutions will take it more seriously, stirring demand for crypto tax a…

"5 interesting things ... distilled from a helicopter view of trust from various branches of psychology, sociology, behavioural science and Responsible Research and Innovation."focus on others: "perhaps similar to love and happiness, the more doggedly trust is pursued for its own sake, the more elusive it may become", so turn your "attention outwa…

Urbit looks like a fascinating platform to build myhub on: “an open-source decentralized internet project... [to] give control of computing back to regular people... At its most basic level, an Urbit is:A super-private (virtual) computer, combined withan ID, which isconnected peer-to-peer with other Urbit computers"Urbit user access their Urbit i…

Another example of topic-based aggregation being better at avoiding the toxic effects of a socially-based newsfeed (cf Reddit).Flipboard's new feature lets them quickly specify the subjects they care most about from among its 30,000-plus topics... "Flipboard uses AI to classify the articles and videos it’s aggregating and weave them into its main …

"forecasting the future is a complex and absolutely critical job. So how do you do it—and what comes next?"Fascinating series of short interviews with futurists. Some selected quotes:"When it comes to the future, you have two choices: ... build a great big wall to keep out all the bad news. Or you can build windmills and harness the winds of chang…

An interview with Mark Z's, focusing principally on his "overarching goal ... to help bring the metaverse to life... convergence of physical, augmented, and virtual reality in a shared online space... [Defined as] spanning physical and virtual ... contain a fully fledged economy ... unprecedented interoperability” - the latter sounding very much l…

German researchers studying "computational linguistics, hateful and oppressive speech and how social media exacerbates it studied ... five years of discussion between [Trump] supporters on Telegram, tracking how participants “gradually went from discussing governmental overthrow as a theoretical possibility to planning the January 6, 2021 Capitol …

Facebook’s own recommendation algorithms have been inviting users to like pages that share pro-military propaganda that violates the platform’s rules... in 2018 the social media company admitted it could have done more to prevent incitement of violence in the run-up to a military campaign against the Rohingya Muslim minority ...hired more than 100…

"platform focused solely on professional publishing... open source tools for independent journalists and writers ... sustainable business around a free core application, funded by a premium platform as a service to run it on... non-profit foundation ... can never be bought or sold... [all] revenue reinvested into the product and the community. All…

Analysing the impact of cultural diversity on corporate performance by feeding half-million Glassdoor reviews through a "Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modeling" machine learning algorithm: "the “bag of words” approach... inductively infers categories... a statistical model that looks for words that tend to co-occur."Step 1: feed 1 million sent…

The “Brussels effect:... When the European Union comes up with some new tech regulation, it can quickly spread around the world"...To draft its proposed AI regulatory approach, the EC "created a 52-member “high-level expert group” ... collected further input via an “AI alliance” ... published a white paper" to which 1,250 groups and individuals …