Skip to main content

Posts

The Shifting Scope of Assumed Privacy with LLMs

10 years ago a CEO standing on stage making a joke about someone’s web query would have been shocking instead of funny. This is because of major backlash that happened 20 years prior when AOL open sourced the query logs of 650000 random people to developers resulting in journalists using the query list to track down individuals with personally identifiable information in the logs. Those affected AOL users did not know they were in this now-public repository. But now our assumptions of scope of privacy are significantly shifted because of the era of social media that followed in the ensuing decade. The advent of micro-blogging along with vertical tools for yelping our food, foursquaring our shopping habits, tweeting our quips or instagramming our lifestyles expanded the scope of where the cameras and public visibility approached closer into our personal sphere. We came to be familiar with the concepts of privacy in a narrower scope of our private daily lives. But there is still confusi...
Post a Comment
Read more
Recent posts

People Like Us

I attend a lot of online conferences and conference calls in Silicon Valley. I had gotten used to the “ Brady Bunch era” of Zoom call grids of checkerboard faces in our pandemic era. But something has shifted in the last year. Now often the meeting room grid designed to show call participants is filled with black boxes that say <companybrand>AI. I know these are LLM based transcription services that folks have employed in their stead which sync automatically to calendars to transcribe meetings that the person doesn’t attend. Having a meeting transcribed is great. But having dozens of AI listening scribes that outnumber the people who actually show up in person to the call does something strange to the meeting dynamic.  In a call I joined this week the host, a very smart friend of mine, was switching off all the AI attendees one by one. After a few minutes the blank identities were gone and the screen was filled with live human faces again. It was just like pandemic Zoom call...
Post a Comment
Read more

“Novel view synthesis” fine in photos or grief bots perhaps, but not for science bots

I've been reading about the opportunities and perils of chatbot technologies recently. This is in part spurred by books written by Karen Hao and Sarah Wynn-Williams about industry players in the sector and in-part inspired by the recent articles on psychological peril for young people engaging with chatbot apps discussed in recent news where bots allegedly prompt humans into self-harm after humans prompt them for advice. Separately, I have also been exploring approaches to capture 3 dimensional holograms called Gaussian Splats. Gaussian Splat synthesis does not use neural network stable diffusion. The two approaches seem metaphorically similar though. One is generative, one subtractive. One helps you see the real world with greater clarity, the other can be used to create fictional images. So I've been thinking about this boundary of truth enhancing and truth abstracting. My views aren't so much about the software approaches themselves, but rather what people can and ten...
Post a Comment
Read more

Could we make Gaussian Splat capture of Saggitarius A?

A couple of years ago I was studying the technique of capturing Gaussian Splats (3D holographs) with a group based out of England. We used the software from the Google spinoff Niantic Labs to stitch thousands of photos together in a technique called photogrammetry. The compelling thing about creating captures of Gaussian Splats is that, unlike a “mesh” or point cloud 3D capture, every point in space captured in a Gaussian Splat can have multiple hues to each voxel. (Voxels are the word for pixels in 3D space contrasted to 2D surfaces.) So as you move through the hologram, every point in space around you can have different colors that change as light reflects or refracts differently through each captured point in the space. The benefit of this is that the holographs look volumetrically real like the holodeck concept from Star Trek. Around that time I was discussing Gaussian Splats with my friend Ben, who also is from the UK coincidentally. He had worked in light-field capture with Lytr...
Post a Comment
Read more

Far-seeing Devices for Accessibility

The German word for TV is Fernseher, meaning far-seer. I often think about that concept of the fixture of our living rooms which allows us to teleport to perspectives of other places far away. A mode of communion with others, distraction, learning. We are societally connected across the world like never before. We tend to live our lives situationally in our local communities, then at some point in our evenings we teleport our awareness into the lives of others for the snippet of time that came to be known as prime time . This slot of our societal calendars is reputed to have the broadest attention span of collective conscious focus. It came to have that moniker because of marketers seeking to have some time during the hour of evening news or entertainment that would give their messages the broadest appeal to the space-portal's "share of voice" in this communal time of focus. When terrestrial TV fragmented into multi-platform and multi-screen surface areas along with the p...
Post a Comment
Read more

Resurrecting the third dimension from the second

I remember my first time witnessing a hologram. In my case it was the Haunted Mansion ride at Disney World when I was six. As the slow-moving roller coaster progressed, we peered down on a vast ballroom beneath us with dozens of ghostly figures appearing to dance in front of the physical furniture that adorned the room. Walt Disney World - Ghosts in the Haunted Ballroom I asked my brother to explain how the illusion worked. He had a book on optical illusions that we would pore over, fascinated and bewildered. How does that still image appear to be moving, I wondered? I could see the two distinct parts of the illusion if I covered either of my eyes. But it appeared to come alive and move with depth when seen with both eyes open as my brain assembled the parts into a synthesized whole. In elementary school, I went to a science museum to learn more about holographic film. Holographs are easy to create in static film. It’s the perspective of having two eyes with an extrapolated...
Post a Comment
Read more

Reflections on the evolution toward volumetric photography

During college I read Stephen Jay Gould’s books on natural history in the animal kingdom with fascination. He writes extensively on the many different paths distinct species took to develop eyes through successive enhancements in different branches of the tree of life. The development of eye designs and uses were randomly selected for benefits conveyed over time in enhancing survival traits for those species with them over lesser complex traits of their predecessors as biological competition increased over time. In science workshops as a youth, I designed pinhole cameras simulating the pupil of the eye and enjoyed taking apart old cameras to study how their shutters worked. When planes land, I’d notice inverse images of the ground projecting on the ceiling of the plane’s cabin, like a retina image, through the pupil-like windows. I’d study and ponder about General Relativity, the cosmic limits of light’s speed, and its implications about the nature of the cosmos and its origins. With t...
Post a Comment
Read more