OLDaily

Decentralization enables permissionless innovation
Gordon Brander, Subconscious, 2022/07/25

This post describes Gordon Brander reflections on reading Inventing the Internet by Janet Abbate. It contrasts two design approaches: designing for survivability, and designing for efficiency. The internet was originally developed according to the former principle, though as we in Canada recently learned, the latter philosophy has since prevailed. He outlines are two evolution-inspired paths toward resilience, K-selected and r-selected. The former describes systems that are large, specialized and powerful; the latter describes systems that are small, simple, and massively redundant. The the latter may offer the best protection. "Decentralization, redundancy, diversity, adaptability might be inefficient during stable periods, but together they create resilience." But there's a twist: with each successful layer of decentralization, he writes, "recentralization is inevitable. We see it in nature, too."

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Mobile Video-Conferencing Using Jitsi
Tsahi Levent-Levi, InfoQ, 2022/07/25

Jitsi offers an open source alternative to commercial conferencing platforms like Zoom and Teams. It's "a collection of free and open-source multiplatform voice, video conferencing and instant messaging applications for the web platform, Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS and Android. It is one of the most popular open source real-time media servers out there." This article looks at Jitsi for mobile conferencing and offers an in-depth look at its many components. It also describes the commercial components, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model called JaaS – Jitsi as a Service. It also outlines WebRTC, – the underlying communication technology used by Jitsi and various other conferencing platforms.

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Self-Assessing Creative Problem Solving
Wouter Groeneveld, Brain Baking, 2022/07/25

The point of this post is to introduce the Creative Programming Problem Solving Test (CPPST) intended to help programmers identify creative strengths and shortcomings. According to the authors, "the analysis showed that we could group our questions in three bigger categories: ability (knowledge oriented), mindset (are you willing to put in effort? are you curious?), and interaction (the social aspects of creativity)." As in the other link today, the structure of this analysis (take a look at the test questions) suggests that reasoning requires interacting with the world in some way - discussing ideas, writing them out, etc.

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Large language models can’t plan, even if they write fancy essays
Ben Dickson, TechTalks, 2022/07/25

Large language models (LLM) are the types of artificial intelligence that do things like " generate articles, write software code, and engage in conversations about sentience and life." However, according this article, they are unable to engage in what's known as System 2 thinking. This is the type of thinking that involves methodical planning and analysis. The article describes a new set of tests "that can serve as a benchmark as people improve LLMs via finetuning and other approaches to customize/improve their performance to/on reasoning tasks." The tasks are long and involved and "can't be cheated using pattern recognition". This article makes me wonder whether you need to learn to reason by interacting with the physical world - writing out things and referring back to them, for example.

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