New and Old #98
Friday roundup and commentary
ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web, The New Yorker, Ted Chiang, February 9, 2023
This is a very good piece, and it brings all this worry over AI back down to earth. You should really read the whole thing, but Chiang compares ChatGPT to a “lossy” compression of the internet, as opposed to a “lossless” one, which is basically what search engines are. And then he analyzes it according to this analogy.
This is the core of that point:
Imagine what it would look like if ChatGPT were a lossless algorithm. If that were the case, it would always answer questions by providing a verbatim quote from a relevant Web page. We would probably regard the software as only a slight improvement over a conventional search engine, and be less impressed by it. The fact that ChatGPT rephrases material from the Web instead of quoting it word for word makes it seem like a student expressing ideas in her own words, rather than simply regurgitating what she’s read; it creates the illusion that ChatGPT understands the material. In human students, rote memorization isn’t an indicator of genuine learning, so ChatGPT’s inability to produce exact quotes from Web pages is precisely what makes us think that it has learned something. When we’re dealing with sequences of words, lossy compression looks smarter than lossless compression.
It’s occurred to me that I actually do what this “AI” does. My wife and I watch a lot of YouTube videos, and I’ll often imitate one of the people we watch. There’s one channel called The Fish Locker, by a British fishing and coastal foraging enthusiast.
He always opens his episodes with “Hello, welcome back to The Fish Locker,” and then specifies where he is: “out on the boat,” “out on the shore,” “out on the shore at night.” In a few episodes, he says he doesn’t like oysters. In a number of episodes, he’ll rattle off the names of a bunch of sea creatures: “Clams, mussels, cockles, winkles, limpets.” In a couple of episodes, he points out predatory dog whelks, which bore holes into other creatures’ shells to eat them. In one episode, he threw back a big crab because it was missing a claw, and he remarked that you’d barely get one crab cake out of him. He frequently explains what implements and tools he’s using or carrying. He refers to shellfish as “massive” or “stunning.”
So here’s me if you say “Write a Fish Locker Episode”:
“Hello, welcome back to The Fish Locker, out on the shore at night. I’ve got my foraging hook and my foraging bucket, and we’re going to forage for some shellfish. Here’s an oyster, but unfortunately I don’t like the taste of them. Over here we have an absolutely stunning king scallop, but unfortunately there’s a predatory dog whelk on him. And just take a look at these massive slipper limpets just next to some mussels and cockles. Under this rock, I can just see an absolutely amazing edible crab, well over minimum landing size. But he’s only got one claw, so there’s hardly any meat on him.” Etc., etc.
Do dog whelks attack king scallops? I don’t know; I’m just recombining bits of input into a plausible output. I’m an AI. But I’m not, and neither, I don’t think, is “AI.”
The Last Flight of the Vulcan, Vulcan To the Sky Trust, October 29, 2021
In 2007 the mission to return Vulcan XH558 the sky was complete, thanks in large part to the generous support of thousands of Vulcan fans. Following the most complex and demanding heritage aviation restoration project, millions of people were able to enjoy the sight and sound of the Avro Vulcan again. XH558 went on to fly for eight years, performing a second display career that many people never expected to see, but sadly, 2015 would be XH558’s final display season.
Vulcan XH558 flew as a Complex category ex-military aircraft through a Permit to Fly (PtF) from the Civil Aviation Authority. A condition of the Complex category is that the aircraft’s original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are contracted to provide ongoing airworthiness design support. By 2015, their input was very limited as the engineering capability of the Trust had developed, however their support remained a legal requirement. The acknowledged reason for this is that in the case of a serious incident, the CAA wanted the OEMs to shoulder the airworthiness responsibility. Unfortunately, at the start of the 2015 display season the OEMs notified the Trust that this support was to be withdrawn at the end of that year, as they felt that they could not find people with sufficient expertise to help. Despite the best efforts of the Trust to address this, in the end it was reluctantly accepted that the OEM’s minds would not be changed, so concentration was focused on putting on the best farewell season possible.
Someone pointed me to this article when I was writing about manufacturing and the loss of technical knowledge recently. This is in that genre, and it’s a bittersweet and really interesting piece. Check it out.
“And that place no longer exists. In fact, there’s no record of it, but for the fact that I was actually having a conversation with Delegate Jeion Ward who mentioned to me that she and her whole family used to go to that hotel,” Mullin says. “The history of that is already being quickly lost.”
That last part is key. That old hotel no longer exists outside the pages of old copies of the Green Book. So Delegate Ward dug up an old 1940 edition of the Green Book and brought it to the House floor.
Also this:
The first step in commemorating all these places will be to identify them all. The Negro Motorist Green Book, as it was called at the time, was in publication from the 30’s to the 60’s, and the Library of Virginia has no copies of any of the editions.
Now, nobody at the time really thought any of these places were “historic.” Most businesses have simply been forgotten. But it is alarming how little of the history of the American roadside has been preserved, remembered—or even acknowledged as history.
The Green Book, obviously, should not have had to exist. But it did, and it’s amazing to think that these books, and others with less unfortunate origins, are now literally the only evidence that hundreds of once-popular establishments ever existed. That feeling—knowing a place existed but not having anything to prove it—is not a nice one. To the natural churn of the commercial roadside, we should try harder to add some of the stability and permanence of memory.
Bachelor Frog Cooking: Basic Tomato Sauce (Marinara), Luca Gattoni-Celli, November 26, 2020
Gattoni-Celli is a Northern Virginia housing advocate, but he’s more than that, as this great crash course in homemade tomato sauce shows. If you’ve never made tomato sauce from scratch (i.e. with raw canned tomatoes and seasoning, rather than jarred or bottled sauces), this is pretty much on point. And if you like tomato sauce, you should definitely try it.
The only disagreement I have is the onions. Gattoni-Celli says the garlic is optional, but to put one or two medium onions in the sauce. In my Italian-American home growing up, it was practically a crime, an unacceptable Americanization, to add onions. I’m not sure if it actually is, or who started that. But garlic is standard, and onions, if you must, are optional. (And if you like a little kick, throw in some crushed red chili flakes, Calabrian if possible.)
But really, either way, try it!
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