benjedwards@mastodon.social / AI and ML Reporter, Ars Technica. Tech Historian. Fast Company / The Atlantic / Retronauts/ https://t.co/Rh4KGhtWM0
Dec 5, 2022 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
It is a grave category error to confuse today’s large language model output for accurate knowledge
The extent ChatGPT is ever correct is due to you already knowing the answer. It hallucinates nonsense just as easily as commonly-accepted fact, making it worthless as an educator
GPT scraped human-written text and now regurgitates it in amazingly novel ways that are accidentally useful when they confirm what we expect in the output
Sometimes that can be a useful tool—and it’s great at fiction. But I would not trust it to teach you anything accurately
Jun 26, 2022 • 11 tweets • 4 min read
The biggest bummer about the decline of Amazon, the rise of surveillance capitalism, the polarization or social media, predatory app stores, is that for a while it felt like nerds were making the world a better place. Now the most successful tech companies are making it worse
For example, which part of the Apple II was predatory? It promised productivity, education, and entertainment. You could program it yourself, repair or expand it without restriction. No subscriptions, no tracking
Jun 24, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Hypothetically speaking, which European country do you think would be most welcoming to an American tech historian and his family
I'm cool with learning any language, although I already know some German
Jul 23, 2021 • 11 tweets • 5 min read
Apple is pulling @litchiedev's great iDOS app after catching us having fun with our Apple devices for tech nostalgia
iDOS adds value to iOS. After yrs of approval from Apple, this decision shows how arbitrary and political their app review process can be
We often forget that video games share a lineage with electromechanical arcade games, thanks to segregation through historical classification (i.e. video/not video). They are direct ancestors of many gaming concepts that would appear in 70s and 80s arcade video games
When I was learning about early PC history in the early 1990s, some accounts like Triumph of the Nerds dealt with personal computers as if they had sprung forth fully formed without addressing any business or mainframe computer precedents. It was misleading
