Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
You might perhaps have seen the news that a Google Engineer has become convinced that an artificial intelligence that they created has become ‘sentient’ (self-aware). Is this true, has this AI called LaMDA really become self-aware? Short answer – no. Slightly longer answer – Seriously, just no. So what is going on here, what has … Read more
At the recent Google I/O conference there was a demo of Google’s new Duplex AI Assistant. It was quite frankly amazing, so rather than describing it, you can instead see it yourself. Here is that demo … As you listen to it making real calls to book an appointment, you find that not only is … Read more
Today I’ll try something slightly different and will instead offer a few notes on how to leverage Google to find stuff out. I should however start with one very important observation, Google search is just a tool, and like any other tool it is perhaps akin to a piece of rope that you can either climb with … Read more
OK, so let’s forget all the serious stuff and have a bit of fun instead today. Years ago I well remember that if you entered exactly the correct keystrokes into Excel97 (yes that long ago), then it would start up a flight simulator that the authors had buried in the code, ah but alas it … Read more
Nothing serious today, time for a break. So when it comes to April 1st, Google won the Internet for the day (and perhaps every other day as well). Go to Google Maps, click any location, then right beside the usual satellite view, click that new logo, and it renders the map into a Pac-Man game that … Read more
Have you ever wondered how Google manages to cope with the ever increasing volumes of data? Well, we have some new insights. Google has published a paper about Spanner, their scalable, multi-version, globally-distributed, and synchronously-replicated database. It is the first system (so they claim) to distribute data at global scale and support externally-consistent distributed transactions. The … Read more