The tragedy of the commons is a false and dangerous myth | Aeon Essays
Author: Evan Menogue
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Steven Johnson using gen AI to create text-based games, future of Archival curation?
Steven Johnson works at Google on the NotebookLM product, a research tool with a long-context window.
This essay ponders what the future of AI might be when long-context becomes more available and might be a useful knowledge assistant. He also reflects on what the future strategies might be for organisations working with AI.
All of which suggests an interesting twist for the near future of AI. In a long-context world, maybe the organizations that benefit from AI will not be the ones with the most powerful models, but rather the ones with the most artfully curated contexts. Perhaps we’ll discover that organizations perform better if they include more eclectic sources in their compiled knowledge bases, or if they employ professional archivists who annotate and selectively edit the company history to make it more intelligible to the model. No doubt there are thousands of curation strategies to discover, if that near future does indeed come to pass. And if it does, it will suggest one more point of continuity between the human mind and a long-context model. What matters most is what you put into it.
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Gruber weighs in on gen AI’s usefullness as a knowledge worker tool
Gruber is finding usefulness as a basic research tool, like assigning tasks to a college intern.
Daring Fireball: Don’t Throw the Baby Out With the Generative AI Bullshit Bathwater
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Compare / track changes on PDF files
The Word track changes or compare documents is a handy tool for quickly checking if a document has been altered, but when it comes to PDFs what are the options? The full Adobe Acrobat app has a Compare files function built-in, just enter ‘compare’ in the Find text or tools control and select an ‘old’ and ‘new’ PDF. Results are quite comprehensive.
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Extracting videos from Android Motion Photos
A MP4 video file follows the JPEG image file in a Android Phone ‘Motion photo’ with a filename starting MVIMG
EXIFTool can extract the video files with a single command, from Phil Harvey EXIFTool Developer:
Here is a command that will extract the video from all jpg images in a directory and store the videos with the same file name as the jpg but with extension .mp4:exiftool -b -p “${trailer;s/.*(\0\0\0\x1cftypisom)/$1/s}” -ext jpg -w mp4 DIR
– Phil
…where DIR is the name of a directory/folder containing the images. On Mac/Linux/PowerShell, use single quotes (‘) instead of double quotes (“) around arguments containing a dollar sign ($).Wow, thanks, that works. I would never have been able to figure that out myself. Would you be so kind as to explain the “-p” parameter to me, please?-b
Output metadata in binary format. That’s what I’ve tried.-p “${trailer;s/.*(\0\0\0\x1cftypisom)/$1/s}”
What the hell are you doing here? I found this link but it doesn’t help me:
https://exiftool.org/exiftool_pod.html#Advanced-formatting-feature-ext jpg
Process files with the specified extension-w mp4
New filename extensionDIR
Directory or filenameThis uses the advanced formatting feature as you surmised to remove everything before the MP4 header. The “\0\0\0\x1cftypisom” string is the binary MP4 header. “.*” is everything before that. The s/// is the Perl substitution operator (ie. search and replace), and it replaces everything up to and including the header with just the header (“$1” is everything inside the brackets in the search pattern of the substitution operator). Read about “regular expressions” if you want to know more about the syntax.– Phil
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The UX of LEGO Interface Panels
User interface and usability engineering and design primer
https://interactionmagic.com/UX-LEGO-Interfaces/
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MARTI initiative for metadata for AI
Understanding MARTI: A New Metadata Framework for AI – Metadata for AI Responsibility, Transparency, and Integrity