Gunnar Wolf - Nice grey life

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...

How long has it been since you last saw a conversation over different blogs syndicated at the same planet? Well, it’s one of the good memories of the early 2010s. And there is an opportunity to re-engage! 😃 I came across Evgeni’s post “naming things is hard” in Planet Debian. So, what names have I given my computers? I have had many since the mid-1990s I also had several during the decade before that, but before Linux, my computers didn’t hve a formal name. Naming my computers something nice Linux gave me. I have forgotten many. Some of the names...

Almost exactly four years after I started with this project, yesterday I presented my PhD defense. My thesis was what I’ve been presenting advances of all around since ≈2022: «A certificate-poisoning-resistant protocol for the synchronization of Web of Trust networks» Lots of paperwork is still on the road for me. But at least in the immediate future, I can finally use this keyring my friend Raúl Gómez 3D-printed for me:

As people around the world understand how LLMs behave, more and more people wonder as to why these models hallucinate, and what can be done about to reduce it. This provocatively named article by Michael Townsen Hicks, James Humphries and Joe Slater bring is an excellent primer to better understanding how LLMs work and what to expect from them. As humans carrying out our relations using our language as the main tool, we are easily at awe with the apparent ease with which ChatGPT (the first widely available, and to this day probably the best known, LLM-based automated chatbot) simulates...

While artificial intelligence (AI) applications for natural language processing (NLP) are no longer something new or unexpected, nobody can deny the revolution and hype that started, in late 2022, with the announcement of the first public version of ChatGPT. By then, synthetic translation was well established and regularly used, many chatbots had started attending users’ requests on different websites, voice recognition personal assistants such as Alexa and Siri had been widely deployed, and complaints of news sites filling their space with AI-generated articles were already commonplace. However, the ease of prompting ChatGPT or other large language models (LLMs) and getting...

A bit of history: Drupal at my workplace (and in Debian) My main day-to-day responsibility in my workplace is, and has been for 20 years, to take care of the network infrastructure for UNAM’s Economics Research Institute. One of the most visible parts of this responsibility is to ensure we have a working Web presence, and that it caters for the needs of our academic community. I joined the Institute in January 2005. Back then, our designer pushed static versions of our webpage, completely built in her computer. This was standard practice at the time, and lasted through some redesigns,...

As an academic, I have cheered for and welcomed the open access (OA) mandates that, slowly but steadily, have been accepted in one way or another throughout academia. It is now often accepted that public funds means public research. Many of our universities or funding bodies will demand that, with varying intensities–sometimes they demand research to be published in an OA venue, sometimes a mandate will only “prefer” it. Lately, some journals and funder bodies have expanded this mandate toward open science, requiring not only research outputs (that is, articles and books) to be published openly but for the data...

…to talk about the so-called “Intellectual Property”?

As DebConf22 was coming to an end, in Kosovo, talking with Eeveelweezel they invited me to prepare a talk to give for the Chicago Python User Group. I replied that I’m not really that much of a Python guy… But would think about a topic. Two years passed. I meet Eeveelweezel again for DebConf24 in Busan, South Korea. And the topic came up again. I had thought of some ideas, but none really pleased me. Again, I do write some Python when needed, and I teach using Python, as it’s the language I find my students can best cope with....