Dave's Notebook

Data Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Visualization, and Complex Systems.

Writing slides structure from the Topics slide in marp

May 21, 2023
I use marp to produce most of my slides and found it very interesting to layout the structure of the presentation in the Agenda/Topics slide. This slide acts as an organizer for the presentation.

I might write something like

## Topics

- Talk about awk
- Explain why Julia rocks
  - Show examples

But then I have to create the slides, and the following snippet of shell code allows me to get the code for the slides in my presentation. It takes the file.md and parses the lines starting with '- ' and produces the outline like

---

## Talk about awk

---

## Explain why Julia rocks

---

### Show examples

This is all acomplished with old faithfull awk.

function mdIndex { awk '/^- / {$1="";print "\n---\n\n##"$0 } / +- /{$1="";print "\n---\n\n###"$0}' $1 }

Just put it in .zprofile and you can run it like this and get the results in terminal,

$ mdIndex file.md

or you can pipe it to pbcopy and then paste the output into your editor of choice.

$ mdIndex file.md | pbcopy

A simple CSS trick 4 dithered images

May 18, 2023

<style> p.img { background: linear-gradient(0deg, #c91136 0%, #4343b5 35%, #eebf18 100%); display: inline-flex; } p.img > img { mix-blend-mode: hard-light; } </style>

Readings on strange programming, art and electronics

May 17, 2023

GPT4 experiments - Sparks of AGI

April 18, 2023

Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4 the paper and this video on Youtube by Bubeck at the MIT on March 22, 2023 are a must read/watch.

Interesting Openstreet use for studing Hospital Accessibility

April 05, 2023

William Edmisten made a great page about how he went on to study Hospital Accessibility based on data from OpenStreet. The read is about 15 min, but the author goes all the details needed to understand the process. Very impressive indeed.

Hm, with all the Hostpitals closing in Portugal, should one do something inspired on his work?

A simple JS range one-liner

April 03, 2023
const range=n=>[...Array(n).keys()]

O fim das trotinetes de aluguer?

April 03, 2023

Paris baniu as trotinetes eléctricas de aluguer. Atendendo ao que representa esta medida não me admirava que em breve também Lisboa seguisse o exemplo. O modelo de funcionamento destes negócios representa o abuso completo do espaço público, com total desrespeito pelo espaço pedonal. Se ainda por cima o se tornam inseguras, não há como dar a volta ao texto e as gestões urbanas acabarão por impor restrições ou proibições completas. Sim, a culpa não é das marcas, mas dos utilizadores irresponsáveis. Mentira, também é das marcas que desenham um negócio baseado na apropriação do espaço público, como as esplandas do Covid que nunca mais desapareceram e que comem em muitos sítios mais de metade dos passeios. Mas há licenças. Então terminem-se.

Still reading about AI and GPT and what's next in this space

March 23, 2023
  • Let's cool dow a bit- A very "food for thought" essay where the euphoria about transformers technology (read GPTs) is brought to sane levels, exposing some of its bias, mistakes, and highlighting the ontological differences between what they are and people's expectations of them.
  • Open AI and Reproducible science Open AI is decommissioning Codex (the one that powers Copilot for example), and this creates a serious problem: What happens to the science produced with / based on Codex? How will someone be able to reproduce the scientific results?
  • Tabnine - This is a code completion / assistant a la Copilot. Just trying this out now and ... well as Copilot, I'm really amazed how AI will transform programming if you keep a human in the AI loop. Tabnine and Copilot are not the only ones and are in what might be called gen. 1 AI assistants. I can't imagine what these space will be in 5 years. But Wow. I want in.

The AI Races for March 22:

March 22, 2023
  • Bill Gates published an extensive article on is blog about how he thinks this is a totally game changer technology. The Age of AI has begun is a must read for anyone interested in these subjects.
  • Mozilla presented the Moz://a.ai, a startup community aiming at building trustworthy and open-source AI. With the rapid advances in the field this will become a must if we don't want some kind of violent reaction to it.

Two main developments in the AI generators world

March 21, 2023

Bard is entering public beta, although not globally. > It sucks big time.

Adobe is entering this crazy world with Firefly. Goodbye Designers, Hello cousin with an internet connection and an Adobe subscription.