16 September 2024
When Bronwyn said she was going to look into astrology software after getting a reading at a psychic fair the other day, I figured it'd be good to have a look into the software itself and see what I could find. So, with Bronwyn's help, I identified a few popular astrology programs and got to work installing them on my PC and poking around them.
16 September 2024
Are you desperately seeking a side hustle? Then consider the perennial growth industry of astrology. Projected to reach $22.8 billion by 2031, prognosticators thrive in times of uncertainty. As I wrote back in 2022, their reach has never been wider, with social media platforms providing a new audience with the promise of few or no regulations regarding health claims or disinformation.
23 January 2024
It was Wellington Day yesterday, so this newsletter is a day later than usual. It's been a very warm weekend here in Wellington, but I've spent most of the weekend inside, with the air conditioning on, working on our plagiarism project (no, we're not planning to plagiarise from elsewhere to fill our newsletter!). Between Dan Ryan and myself, we have enough coding skills to be able to write software tools that are making our job of detecting and displaying cases of plagiarism much quicker - so I've been spending the weekend writing software.
9 August 2021
A couple of weeks ago I talked about the NZ Skeptics putting together a submission for the Ministry of Justice in response to their new Hate Speech proposals. You can read our submission on our website, but I thought it would be fun to use EleutherAI's free online GPT-J-6G deep learning model to write a submission for us. I gave the software the first few paragraphs of our real submission, and then clicked the button to guess the next hundred or so words. I then fed the result back into the algorithm so that it could create the next block of text, and so on.
9 August 2021
Recently I've been playing with some deep learning software - OpenAI's GPT-2 and GPT-3, and EleutherAI's GPT-J-6G. These are NLP algorithms. No, not that discredited garbage Neuro-Linguistic Programming - in this case NLP stands for Natural Language Processing.
16 September 2018
I had a phone call this week from "Spark". I spoke to a couple of Indian gentlemen who explained that my private IP address had been made public, and that this meant that my internet connection was compromised.