As a university professor, back in the early days of this when students were just copy / pasting output directly I was really hoping the model builders would implement steganographic fuzzy hashes.
Not that it's the ideal solution. But it would be really neat.
Buildings are a fantastically complicated and interesting complex problem space. I found my architecture studio students using it to ask technical and code questions about the buildings they were tasked with designing. I observed that the inaccurate information it was returning was compounding...
To be clear, I say "inaccurate" rather than "wrong" in this case because even if the information it returns is factually correct to the question being asked, students don't have an understanding of the complexity of the interdependent tectonic, regulatory, and spatial / experiential factors of a building sophisticated enough to ask their questions of the specificity and nuance necessary to get a good output that addresses the entire problem.
Anyway - with the students still learning to ask questions the right way, and the conditionally-incorrect facts making their learning more complicated rather than less, I hit on a strategy for them to use LLM's that seemed to help much better.
I suggested that instead of ask the LLM for the factual answer, or even better for the facts and an explanation, that they ask it to direct them to the proper place in the source material to find the answer themselves. Then, to treat it like a lab partner. IE:
Hey Claude I'm looking for "x."
Claude: "look at foo, bar."
Thank you - chapter (foo) part (bar) table (goo) says "car." However I notice that footnote (hoo) says there's an exception if "dar." Which is what I have. Walk me through this exception...
It seemed to have good results as a guide to understanding the disparate bodies of knowledge that they will eventually have to keep together in their heads and work synthetically and non-linearly through, rather than just as an external source of blindly trusted authority.
Generally states can't. I wonder if what could technically trip you up is the lack of tax stamps. But can you get in trouble for having unstamped cigarettes? I'd think generally no.
The argument for "it shouldn't" could be that it's a federal supplier and/or some sort of RnD exception. Not sure if NIST would even sell to a private buyer.
Much less than it discourages its use. Tobacco lobbies are fighting price increases tooth and nail, they wouldn't if it didn't work. Countries where the price has gone up have seen decreases in on-going consumption and new addictions. Countries where it's cheap (relative to local income) still have high level of smoking (and second-hand smoking).
Or retail at $15 per pack of twenty over-under the counter at your nearest “convenience” store, if it hasn’t been fire bomber over night in Melbourne, thought that seems to have eased off a bit since they arrested that guy.
In light of the topic (and because of personal gripes), i think a link to the actual podcast, RSS feed and all, would be more appropiate than big techs radio-show version of it.
Victor Papanek's Design for the Real World [0] is a foundational text in the area of Appropriate Technology (cited here by others).
Essential reading alongside the Illich (also linked by others), Pye's Nature and Art of Workmanship [1], and Winner's "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" [2] for those interested in.... Let's call it an ecology OF technology?
And also the Papanek was probably the book that felt most like a forbidden text in undergraduate architecture school...
Who runs this site? There doesn't appear to be any information on this. A whois search returns nothing illuminating.
So... is it part of the parable they're trying to tell that they're seeing who will go against the exact sort of advice they're giving? Or does this -just happen to be- the kind of shady data gathering that they're warning against?
to quote the site itself, "We spent a generation teaching people the first rule of the internet: never give out your real identity to strangers."
Absolutely, if they're not asking for your information, as they were when I visited the site. The Wayback Machine snapshot here [0] shows a site identical to the one I visited.
I distinctly remember seeing an exhibition of this work in Los Angeles in the early aughts. For the life of me I can't remember where. The photos were shot with a macro lens and blown up so that each specimen was ... 12" square? maybe bigger?
Even then there were dozens upon dozens of them on display. It was mind bending.
If you're just learning about the Wallpaper Groups from this and feel like you've seen them before, it is probably from the work of MC Escher [0].
If you want a great recent survey, an episode of (the inimitable and now restarted) In Our Time from last month goes into the friendship / mutual influence of Escher and Coxeter. [1]
I run workshops about the use of modular systems in facilitating non-expert participation in architecture. One I did (at the CAAD Futures Conference in 2023) was with Zometool. It was a blast and really successful.
In preparation I also got to interview the late great Steve Baer, inventor of the Zome (among many other things - seriously look him up, he's one of the most brilliant people of the past 100 years imo). It was a huge honor.
The book chapter the organizers were supposed to do about the conference workshops never materialized (hrmph), but I've done other little collaborative build projects since, so one day I'll document them all together.
He appears in an old CBC documentary about the Yorkville neighborhood and the hippies there from then.
https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/1.3202122
*ETA: Whoops I just realized he was born in SC, but he grew up in Virginia. So THAT'S where he fled to Toronto from.