Author: Liv

Development

Extending Ubuntu via GNOME Shell Extensions in 2024

The “personal computing” market has dramatically shifted from the original visions evolving out of Xerox PARC and the innovation labs of the past into a multi-level mediated… mess.

Thankfully, open source operating systems are thriving, and the barrier of entry into an actually personal computing experience that is tailored to your own environment is lower than ever. With that in mind, in December, I started looking at how I could start to extend my Ubuntu desktop.

This was a really fun project to take on, and I’m itching to start doing more of this as I think through what kind of ways that I want to expand and customize my personal computing environment.

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by Liv10 Min Reading
Machine Learning, Philosophy, Random Thoughts

One Year In – I Still Don’t Use ChatGPT. Here’s How it’s Going.

As an autistic and queer individual, the role that technology plays in identifying, surveilling, and categorizing acceptable behavior within society is not lost on me. Despite using machine learning technology since 2014, I have used ChatGPT one time. The challenge that has come from not using OpenAI products and ChatGPT has actually been in the way that it impacts my relationship with people more than anything else.

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by Liv7 Min Reading
Business & Leadership, Machine Learning, Philosophy, Random Thoughts

Eigenvectors as a Representation of Nuance? (Or, How I’m Re-Visiting all of my Freshman Year Math Classes To Explain my Brain) – Pt. 1

One decision that many organizations may be making right now is how to develop a corporate policy about artificial intelligence. Could, perhaps, an eigenvalue be calculated against a matrix of perspectives within an organization, to represent a new form of communicating the nuance and fluid nature of these complex, multi-cellular entities in which we house business endeavors? To evaluate this idea, I took a small (9 person) survey of team members and asked them to share their perspectives on AI innovation.

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by Liv9 Min Reading
Development, Machine Learning, Philosophy, Random Thoughts

Being a Pregnant Developer in the Age of AI is Weird

As I’m writing this, I’m wearing a green t-shirt with a giant eyeball over my rapidly growing stomach. It’s Halloween, and I’ve decided to dress up as Mike Wazowski – it feels like I’m all stomach these days, so it felt appropriate. My partner dressed up as Boo. Halloween is an especially interesting time of year to reflect on identity and persona: it’s a holiday that encourages people to step into a different character and

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by Liv7 Min Reading
Uncategorized

Auto-saving Browser Documents to Augment Local AI Model Context

I’ve written a bit about my interest in using local artificial intelligence for memory recall, and this week I finally made some progress on a project to start turning some of my earlier thinking into an actual part of my workflow. Memory Cache is a project that allows you to save a webpage as a PDF document, which is then used to augment context for a local instance of privateGPT.

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by Liv4 Min Reading
Development

TIL: Installing YOURLS on an AWS Lightsail Instance using Nginx

Back in 2015, I bought the domain ‘livi.link’ to use as a shortlink domain. Why? It’s freaking adorable, and it meant that I could leave links around the internet that would be immediately identified as mine. I set up a bit.ly account with Twitter authentication, and used “livi links” for years. Then, I deleted my Twitter account, and forgot to detach it from my bit.ly account. Oops. Yesterday, I wanted to make a short link

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by Liv6 Min Reading
Machine Learning, Random Thoughts

Developing Artificial Intelligence while Developing Human Intelligence

I joke sometimes that my entire career to date has been about Learning How to Human – that I was drawn to social VR and metaverse platforms because my neurodivergent self wanted to experience a taste of a world that I could both understand, navigate, and flourish within. As it turns out, there’s a ton of overlap in the product domains of AI and metaverse, because while the core enabling technologies and their interaction modes look quite different from one another, the entire premise of the advancements and opportunities are grounded in emergent behaviors of computers simulating people and reality.

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by Liv6 Min Reading
Uncategorized

Algorithmic Response Re-projection

I ran a Not-Scientific-Experiment using everyone’s favorite liar, Google Bard, to get an example of what “re-projection” for AI responses might look like in a very basic form. While the Bad Experiment above doesn’t showcase the full potential of re-projecting algorithmic responses, it hints at something more to be uncovered. What if we built a dedicated AI application that was intentionally crafted to respond with not one answer, but with many, each response filtered through prompts and datasets that reflected a specific lived perspective?

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by Liv6 Min Reading
Communication, Machine Learning, Philosophy, Random Thoughts

The Metaphor of a Large Memory Model (LMM)

I can understand the appeal of language models. Language – the act and structure of communicating the cognitive processes I undergo on a day to day basis – is observable, whereas memory is not.Over the past several months, I’ve been working through the development of an architecture that may someday allow me to digitize my memory in a more complete way on the glass whiteboard in my office.

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by Liv11 Min Reading
Foundation Models, Machine Learning

TIL: The One-Model-Many-Models Paradigm

Because foundation models are used to build many other models that are trained to new, more specific tasks, it can be hard to evaluate models consistently. The one-model-many-models paradigm attempts to study interpretability of foundation models by looking for similarities and differences across the foundation model and its downstream models to try and understand which behaviors were likely emergent from the foundation model itself, and which come from the derivative models.

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by Liv3 Min Reading