Gunnar Wolf - Nice grey life

If we ever thought a couple of years or decades of constant use would get humankind to understand how an asymetric key pair is to be handled… It’s time we moved back to square one. I had to do an online tramit with the Mexican federal government to get a statement certifying I successfully finished my studies, and I found this jewel of user interface: So… I have to: Submit the asymetric key I use for tax purposes, as that’s the ID the government has registered for me. OK, I didn’t expect it to be used for this purpose as...

Large language models (LLMs) have awed the world, emerging as the fastest-growing application of all time–ChatGPT reached 100 million active users in January 2023, just two months after its launch. After an initial cycle, they have gradually been mostly accepted and incorporated into various workflows, and their basic mechanics are no longer beyond the understanding of people with moderate computer literacy. Now, given that the technology is better understood, we face the question of how convenient LLM chatbots are for different occupations. This paper embarks on the question of whether LLMs can be useful for networking applications. This paper systematizes...

Internet users, software developers, academics, entrepreneurs – basically everybody is now aware of the importance of considering privacy as a core part of our online experience. User demand, and various national or regional laws, have made privacy a continuously present subject. And privacy is such an all-encompassing, complex topic, the angles from which it can be studied seems never to finish; I recommend computer networking-oriented newcomers to the topic to refer to Brian Kernighan’s excellent work [1]. However, how do regular people –like ourselves, in our many capacities– feel about privacy? Lukas Antoine presents a series of experiments aiming at...

Digital humanities is a young–though established–field. It deals with different expressions in which digital data manipulation techniques can be applied and used to analyze subjects that are identified as belonging to the humanities. Although most often used to analyze different aspects of literature or social network analysis, it can also be applied to other humanistic disciplines or artistic expressions. Digital humanities employs many tools, but those categorized as big data are among the most frequently employed. This book samples different takes on digital humanities, with the particularity that it focuses on Ibero-American uses. It is worth noting that this book...

The current boom of artificial intelligence (AI) is based upon neural networks (NNs). In order for these to be useful, the network has to undergo a machine learning (ML) process: work over a series of inputs, and adjust the inner weights of the connections between neurons so that each of the data samples the network was trained on produces the right set of labels for each item. Federated learning (FL) appeared as a reaction given the data centralization power that traditional ML provides: instead of centrally controlling the whole training data, various different actors analyze disjoint subsets of data, and...

If humans and robots were to be able to roam around the same spaces, mutually recognizing each other for what they are, how would interaction be? How can we model such interactions in a way that we can reason about and understand the implications of a given behavior? This book aims at answering this question. The book is split into two very different parts. Chapters 1 through 3 are mostly written with a philosophical angle. It starts by framing the possibility of having sentient androids exist in the same plane as humans, without them trying to pass as us or...

Since December 2023, I have been publishing the reviews I write for Computing Reviews as they get published. I will do a slight change now: I will start pushing the reviews to my blog as I write them, and of course, will modify them with the final wording and to link to their place as soon as they are published. I’m doing this because sometimes it takes very long for reviews to be approved, and I want to share them with my blog’s readers! So, please bear with this a bit: I’ll send a (short!) flood of my latest four...

I have been a very happy user of my two SK-8845 keyboards (one at my office, one at home) since I bought them, in 2018 and 2021 respectively. What are they, mind you? ) The beautiful keyboard every Thinkpad owner knows and loves. And although I no longer use my X230 laptop that was my workhorse for several years, my fingers are spoiled. So, both shift keys of my home keyboard have been getting flaky, and I am basically sure it’s a failure in the controller, as it does not feel to be physical. It’s time to revisit that seven...

As it seems ChatGPT would phrase it… Sweet Mother of God! I received a mail from my University’s Scholar Administrative division informing me my Doctor degree has been granted and emitted (yayyyyyy! 👨‍🎓), and before printing the corresponding documents, I should review all of the information is correct. Attached to the mail, I found they sent me a very friendly and welcoming XML file, that stated it followed the schema at https://www.siged.sep.gob.mx/titulos/schema.xsd… Wait! There is nothing to be found in that address! Well, never mind, I can make sense out of a XML document, right? Of course, who needs an...

Please note: This review is not meant to be part of my usual contributions to ACM's «Computing Reviews». I do want, though, to share it with people that follow my general interests and such stuff. This article was published almost a year ago, and I read it just after relocating from Argentina back to Mexico. I came from a country starting to realize the shock it meant to be ruled by an autocratic, extreme right-wing president willing to overrun its Legislative and bent on destroying the State itself — not too different from what we are now witnessing on a...