One of the things I hate most about the current AI craze is the apparently sanctioned ignorance in business and computer science about how the rest of the world works. Canada’s “Leaders Prize” just announced a $1 million prize for an AI application to automate fact checking. This assumes that a “fact” exists in the […]
Category Archives: Technology
Advertising makes the internet worse; here’s what that means
I remember standing in Microsoft Research New England, talking with a few brilliant mathematicians and computer scientists. Twitter had just started including ads in their feed, and there was much grumbling and surprise. I responded that Twitter only had a few choices–fewer, given that they were giving away their service for “free.” A quick look […]
Logic Functions Bonus Round for Synth Nerds
I learned about the XOR function, and pretty much everything I know about logic functions, from modular synthesis. Modular synthesis, like AI or any other media technology, works on a set of conventions ensconced in a set of standards. A modular synthesizer is basically an analog computer (this is a whole other post, which I […]
A Few Random Thoughts on the Politics of the Logic Functions
Burç Kostem pointed me me to this wonderful piece by Matteo Pasquinelli on the history of neural networks. In the middle, there’s a small historical detail that I never quite grasped before: In 1969 Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert’s book, titled Perceptrons, attacked Rosenblatt’s neural network model by wrongly claiming that a Perceptron (although a simple […]
New Text: Reflections on the MP3 format
“Reflections on the MP3 Format”, Interview by Geert Lovink in Computational Culture.
“With over a hundred millicuries, there’s no fun and games”
The tech had just invited a resident to watch me taking my dose of radioactive iodine. I remarked that I was eager to photograph the pill. That wasn’t allowed–once the pill was out, it was going into me. No fun and games. We walked into a small room with a list of regulations on the […]
(Not) Her Master’s Voice
Roughly two weeks ago, Wolfgang Ernst came to Montreal. I missed both talks, as I was at the University of Michigan.* But we did meet up on Saturday for a visit to the Musée des ondes Emile Berliner, whose back areas are filled with old media technologies, as well as many versions of the His […]