Brombær is trying out sitting like a human today. #DogsOfMastodon
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RanaldClouston
@RanaldClouston@fediscience.org
mastodon 4.6.9Lecturer in Computer Science at Australian National University.
See my introduction post @RanaldClouston@fediscience.org
He/him.
557 Followers
424 Following
21 Posts
Joined November 07, 2022
The Australian National University's annual #Logic Summer School is running for its 34th time! https://comp.anu.edu.au/lss/ . Starting on 7 December, we'll have a week of lectures by locals, including a series by me titled 'Foundations (plural) of Mathematics', and then a week from our overseas guests Amal Ahmed, Natasha Dobrinen, Rod Downey, Rustan Leino, and Sara Negri. We have some funds we can use to support students to come to and stay in #Canberra , including international flights: see the 'grants' section of our homepage (menu accessed via top left corner in mobile), so please spread the news if you know students who might benefit.
Finished an interesting romp through the scientific and technological history of the representation and transmission of information, from talking drums to Wikipedia, with Claude Shannon's information theory taking the star turn. I appreciated that the author isn't afraid to look beyond hype and offer mild scepticism: on Norbert Wiener's more grandiose tendencies, or attempts to turn memetics into an academic field (also, any serious discussion of memes in a 2011 book is always going to read amusingly, given how the word has mutated). I'd be fascinated to know how Shannon, with his program for generating plausible (ish) English text, would have reacted to LLMs - the ultimate victory of 'information' over meaning? The author is active on Mastodon: @gleick@mas.to . @bookstodon@fedigroups.social #bookstodon
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@carloangiuli @samth my favourite Coolio story is the time he visited Canberra and somehow involved himself in a local debate about public transport;
"American hip-hop legend Coolio has hailed Canberra’s light-rail project as “dope” and told Yarralumla residents concerned their suburb could turn into a ghetto that it probably already is one."
https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/6138308/light-rail-dope-or-nope-coolio-says-yes/
My daughter was trying to describe an object to me, and came up with "the washing-up stick with one end that looks like a Hungarian puli".
The word she was failing to bring to mind, was "mop".
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@mkerjean I once had someone tell me that the L in LICS stands for Lottery (which is probably a little unfair, but works as a reminder that there's always a big random factor in low-acceptance-rate venues, and a lot of good work gets turned away that could have been credibly accepted).
Nod your head and break your neck!
https://youtu.be/W7FfCJb8JZQ?&t=85
Break Ya Neck by #BustaRhymes ; song starts at 1:25 into the video.
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@dhobern@scicomm.xyz @david_coombe_cbr@aus.social I got my copy at the Lifeline bookfair :)
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@MartinEscardo @jonny I once received a review that stuck with me, which recommended acceptance and complimented the sophistication of my mathematics, but then added that they were worried that I was just adding epicycles.
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@randahl my father in law enjoyed that there was a cookbook called 'God Mad', which sounds like something a superstitious caveman might declare.
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@lindsey reminds me of the one weird trick for designing an operational semantics that is type-sound and strongly normalising (do nothing).
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@parismarx i feel like we could have seen this exact headline 10 years ago, but it would have said 'algorithm' rather than 'AI model', probably to describe the exact same software
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@standefer@fediscience.org Haven't seen anything; nothing on the website http://www.aiml.net/ (which isn't very well maintained). If it follows the pattern of the last edition, papers won't be due till March next year I guess.
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@heretical_i@kafeneio.social @ianbetteridge@writing.exchange Of course, if you play as the top hat, your parents will buy you a couple of properties. Remember to explain to other players who go bankrupt that they should have worked harder.
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@consequently this sounds great. Is it something you've written up yet?
Finished reading this collection of short stories and critical and philosophical essays by Borges, mostly from the 1940s, and unfortunately bounced off it pretty hard. His very short stories are written (and translated) in a style that I found dry and laborious, stuffed with literary, philosophical, and religious references, leaving little room for the usual pleasures of reading fiction, like engaging characters. This is in line with his intentions I think, as he focuses squarely on astounding the reader with ideas, but (and this, of course, is no criticism of him!) many of the ideas have permeated our culture in a way that reduces the wow factor they would once have carried. E.g. the pointless recursive repetition of his Library can be seen in Piranesi, Backrooms, etc. So definitely historically interesting and I don't regret reading it, but not very engaging. @bookstodon@fedigroups.social #bookstodon
The only King I recognise
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QSzOvzi33c
'KING' by #BakerBoy
#JukeboxFridayNight #Royalty
Baker Boy - KING (Official Visualiser)
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@KathyReid@aus.social Congratulations! When you say you defended your thesis, did you opt in to an oral examination?
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@thesiswhisperer@aus.social thanks for this. Do you have resources specifically on *supervising* ND PhD students? Things are going well so far for me on that front so far, but anything that could help me do better would still be appreciated.