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| -rw-r--r-- | content/posts/denounce-ai.md | 41 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | content/posts/dijkstra-knuth.md | 35 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | content/posts/good-cs-books.md | 23 | ||||
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diff --git a/content/posts/_index.md b/content/posts/_index.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..92d54ab --- /dev/null +++ b/content/posts/_index.md @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +# Posts + +--- diff --git a/content/posts/denounce-ai.md b/content/posts/denounce-ai.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..4cd12be --- /dev/null +++ b/content/posts/denounce-ai.md @@ -0,0 +1,41 @@ ++++ +date = '2025-09-12T23:08:15+02:00' +draft = false +title = 'Denounce AI' ++++ + +Recently I have read a blog post by [Jamie Zawinski](https://www.jwz.org/) on [Anthony Moser's opinion](https://anthonymoser.github.io/writing/ai/haterdom/2025/08/26/i-am-an-ai-hater.html) about the current developments in AI. +Now I want to try to formulate my own arguments against the overwhelming reliance on AI nowadays. +It's been my point of view for a while, however I would like to now clearly state why I think the direction the technology world is heading is wrong. + +AI, although currently being hyped beyond reason, has been around since the previous century. +However, with the release of ChatGPT to the public, generative models have entered the lives of everyone. +As a Computer Science student I have first hand witnessed the effects of a paradigm shift in many domains, and after 2 years I believe that relying on content generated by artificial intelligence is simply harmful. + +As an avid fan of english literature I really like reading well-written books. +It is a great feeling to be able to appreciate the intricacies of the language and the craftsmanship of the author, who has taken the time (sometimes decades) to write about a certain topic. +If you read a lot, you can often tell a well-written book from a poorly constructed one, and if enough people realize this, the society awards great writers with prizes and honors. +However, with the rise of large language models, essays, books, novels and much more can be created with a single prompt to the model. +While the quality of such writing can often be questionable, it's important to realize that this takes away the very essence and purpose of writing in the first place. +When you put pen to paper you both try to advance your own thinking and convey your feelings and views to a broader audience. +It is your opinion and findings that matter, and this is by no means a trivial process. +Using artificial intelligence to write for you, or help you write, or correct your writing defeats the purpose of writing something in the first place. +This is also the right moment to point out the current concerns regarding this for the book authors and artist of any other kind as well. +AI is slowly getting better and better at this kind of work, rendering virtually impossible for me right now to distinguish e.g., electronic music generated by AI and created by humans. +This poses a threat to the literature and artistic community, and by proxy, to readers and everyone interested in art. +I consciously cannot use such technology knowing that it displaces the very people I admire the work of. + +What is even more interesting is that many large language models are trained on books, which are later completely discarded and thrown out. +Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI model, has destroyed millions of print books to train their AI. +[Here](https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-millions-of-print-books-to-build-its-ai-models/) is a very good article about this. +In essence, to train the AI, one must scan the books first, preferably quickly. +According to Anthropic, the most efficient way to go about this is to strip the books of their cover, rip out the pages and scan just the printed paper. +This irreversibly destroys the books, which are later thrown out. +It's a good moment to ask oneself -- is this what I'd like to happen to my book, if I ever wrote one? +I will not raise the ethics concerns behind such actions, it's also not my aim to start a debate about this. +However, I think the question above is worth asking to yourself. + +I think the point made by [Hayao Miyazaki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayao_Miyazaki), the studio Ghibli founder behind some of the best animated movies of the last century summarizes it pretty well. +Recently there has been a viral video going on of him saying in 2016 how he believes AI to be _an insult to life itself_. +As strong of an opinion as it is, I sympathize with his standpoint of view. +Being an artist and designer, seeing your life's work being completely overtaken by soulless software must be terrifying. diff --git a/content/posts/dijkstra-knuth.md b/content/posts/dijkstra-knuth.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1f0e140 --- /dev/null +++ b/content/posts/dijkstra-knuth.md @@ -0,0 +1,35 @@ ++++ +date = '2025-12-14T17:14:30+01:00' +draft = false +title = 'Dijkstra and Knuth' ++++ + +It has long lingered on my mind to reflect partially on my experience of the last 3 years, as the B.Sc. of Computer Science I have recently undertaken is soon coming to an end. +Fortunately, this is not the end of my journey as a Computer Scientist, but there are specific things that I did not realize about Computer Science before I embarked on this endeavour, most important of which is this: Computer Science is 90% reading and understanding and 10% coding. +I believe it to be the most important thing I have learned about the field itself in the last 3 years. +Here is why. +Dealing with complex problems is hard. +Programming is all about solving complex problems, programmers live by optimizing our code the best we can, and try to find solutions to problems that we encounter while doing so. +While it is no doubt nice to have a working code that does something cool, or a solution to a problem that meets the specification, I don't think that is the mindset a programmer should have -- that is, at this stage, to solve a problem is not about getting to a solution _somehow_. + +Solving coding tasks requires time. +This might be difficult to admit for some, as it has been for me. +But understanding a problem requires patient reading and digesting the context, possible solutions and most importantly doubts one might have about their own solution. +Needless to say, if you have solved a problem without asking questions about it, then it wasn't a difficult (by proxy important) problem to be solve in the first place. +Reading code is hard. +It's sometimes like reading an essay in a foreign language. +Your head hurts, your eyes are getting sore, and after 6 hours of staring at the screen you conclude you don't understand anything anymore. +One of my favourite quotes about computing from Temple OS creator, [Terry Davis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_A._Davis), reflects this perfectly (it's too long to include here, so [this is the link to the GoodReads quote page](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10916333-what-s-reality-i-don-t-know-when-my-bird-was-looking)). +It would almost seem like this time has been wasted, since you might have not produced a line of code. +Nevertheless, this is all there is to programming. + +After 3 years, it appears to me that my views about Computer Science aligns with those of Donald Knuth and Edsger Dijkstra the most. +I had first stumbled on Donald Knuth's blog long ago, while exploring Jamie Zawinski's blog and looking for top figures in CS to study. +On his [blog](https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html) Knuth writes: _What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study._ +There it is. +Computing takes time. +There's no silver bullet yet, and we as programmers have to take our time to think about problems in depth. +There have been many comments on the peculiar style of teaching and way of being of Edsgar Dijkstra, but I believe he has made some really good points about this too. +What describes my experience over the last 3 years well is his quote: _The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility[...]_. +I think this the approach to take, because so often computers help us verify and point out that we indeed really don't know anything, we are just pretending we do. + diff --git a/content/posts/good-cs-books.md b/content/posts/good-cs-books.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c4c25f4 --- /dev/null +++ b/content/posts/good-cs-books.md @@ -0,0 +1,23 @@ ++++ +date = '2025-07-25T11:29:52+02:00' +draft = false +title = 'Good CS books' ++++ + +0. Frederick P. Brooks, _The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering_. + +1. Carl Hamacher and Zvonko Vranesic, _Computer Organization_. + +2. David A. Patterson and John L. Hennessy, _Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface_. + +3. Andrew Tanenbaum, David Wetherall, Nick Feamster, _Computer Networks_. + +4. Tanenbaum, A.S., Bos, H.J., _Modern Operating Systems_. + +5. Maurice Herlihy, Nir Shavit, Victor Luchangco, Michael Spear, _The Art of Multiprocessor Programming_. + +6. Philip. K. Dick, _Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?_ + +7. Daniel Keyes, _Flowers for Algernon_. + +8. Peter Seibel, _Coders at Work_. diff --git a/content/posts/my-cv.md b/content/posts/my-cv.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b51d555 --- /dev/null +++ b/content/posts/my-cv.md @@ -0,0 +1,7 @@ ++++ +date = '2025-12-20T12:11:48+01:00' +draft = true +title = 'My CV' ++++ + +[Open PDF](/images/cv.pdf) diff --git a/content/posts/useful-links.md b/content/posts/useful-links.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e5f0a5f --- /dev/null +++ b/content/posts/useful-links.md @@ -0,0 +1,23 @@ ++++ +date = '2025-07-26T12:53:30+02:00' +draft = false +title = 'Useful Links' ++++ + +0. [atlarge-research.com](https://atlarge-research.com/) + +1. [jwz.org](https://www.jwz.org) + +2. [denshi.org](https://denshi.org) + +3. [landchad.net](https://landchad.net) + +4. [comfy.guide](https://comfy.guide) + +5. [pad.envs.net](https://pad.envs.net/) + +6. [envs.net](https://envs.net/) + +7. [blog.orhun.dev](https://blog.orhun.dev/no-bullshit-file-hosting/) + +8. [cs.stanford.edu/~knuth](https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/index.html) |