John Healy's Tech Blog

Category: Computer

Posts related to computer hardware and software

  • The darkside of AI – outages and shortages

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    Another gold rush is underway. Recast as the AI tech boom. Yet, AI is power hungry, a voracious beast consuming vast amounts of electricity. And water [1]. And those gas-fired power plants [2] … Generative AI data centers are expensive to build, expensive to operate, and tax the electric grid and our limited water resources (like the Colorado River). Companies that invest in AI see…

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  • Generative AI sans horse sense – unreliable narrators by design?

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    I like the way that I can do a Google search using a photo – drag & drop it into a search box – to identify its content. I like the way I can extract text from a photo (providing the photo has sufficient resolution on that content). And Amazon uses AI to summarize the gist of product reviews (to some degree). But in the rush…

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  • Spending for AI’s pot of gold – powering profit?

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    High hype … trippy chips … gooey guardrails … pending legislation … the electric grid … pay, pay, pay, payday … cloudy cloud forecasts … • Washington Post > “Big Tech keeps spending billions on AI. There’s no end in sight.” by Gerrit De Vynck and Naomi Nix (April 25, 2024) – Much of the money is going to new data centers, which are predicted…

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  • AI chatbot hallucinations – mind those P’s and Q’s

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    This is no joke! You’ve heard about this – whether AI chatbots mind their Ps and Qs. So, beware of nonsense. Statistically, how often do AI hallucinations happen? Yes, there’ll be updates … “We can’t stop hallucinations, but we can manage them.” (Maybe like the Id and Ego?) • Wiki > Hallucination (artificial intelligence) In the field of artificial intelligence (AI), a hallucination or artificial…

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  • Apple’s M-Series security – promises ≠ perfection

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    “GoFetch” is in the tech news cycle this week. Hopefully you know whether you have an Apple M-Series Mac. The M-Series (aka Apple silicon) computers advanced better performance and energy efficiency. How about security? – faster data pipelining is tricky (via so-called optimizations). Obscurity’s no guarantee (like, really, the front door key’s not in a nearby flower pot, eh). This article (below) provides an overview…

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