A PCB business card is a great way for electrical engineers to impress employers with their design skills, but the software they run can be just as impressive as the card itself. As a programmer with an interest in embedded machine learning, [Dave McKinnon] wanted a card that showcased his skills, so he designed one that […]
One of the fun things about writing for Hackaday is that it takes you to the places where our community hang out. I was in a hackerspace in a university town the other evening, busily chasing my end of month deadline as no doubt were my colleagues at the time too. In there were a […]
Has anyone noticed that news stories have gotten shorter and pithier over the past few decades, sometimes seeming like summaries of what you used to peruse? In spite of that, huge numbers of people are relying on large language model (LLM) “AI” tools to get their news in the form of summaries. According to a […]
We’ll be honest. If you had told us a few decades ago we’d teach computers to do what we want, it would work some of the time, and you wouldn’t really be able to explain or predict exactly what it was going to do, we’d have thought you were crazy. Why not just get a […]
Turns out that training on Twitch quotes doesn’t make an LLM a math genius. (Credit: Codeically, YouTube) The reason why large language models are called ‘large’ is not because of how smart they are, but as a factor of their sheer size in bytes. At billions of parameters at four bytes each, they pose a […]
The physical layout of the SCHEME-78 LISP-based microprocessor by Steele and Sussman. (Source: ACM, Vol 23, Issue 11, 1980) During the AI research boom of the 1970s, the LISP language – from LISt Processor – saw a major surge in use and development, including many dialects being developed. One of these dialects was Scheme, developed […]
Few people know LLMs (Large Language Models) as thoroughly as [Andrej Karpathy], and luckily for us all he expresses that in useful open-source projects. His latest is nanochat, which he bills as a way to create “the best ChatGPT $100 can buy”. What is it, exactly? nanochat in a minimal and hackable software project — […]
Researchers call it “hallucination”; you might more accurately refer to it as confabulation, hornswaggle, hogwash, or just plain BS. Anyone who has used an LLM has encountered it; some people seem to find it behind every prompt, while others dismiss it as an occasional annoyance, but nobody claims it doesn’t happen. A recent paper by […]
There are all kinds of air quality sensors on the market that rely on all kinds of electro-physical effects to detect gases or contaminants and report them back as a value. [lucascreator] has instead been investigating a method of determining air quality that is closer to divination than measurement—using computer vision and a trained AI […]
Recently [Faith Ekstrand] announced on Mastodon that Mesa was updating its contributor guide. This follows a recent AI slop incident where someone submitted a massive patch to the Mesa project with the claim that this would improve performance ‘by a few percent’. The catch? The entire patch was generated by ChatGPT, with the submitter becoming […]