Monthly Archives: August 2022

Phil 8.31.2023

A house made of bones in the middle of a desert

Heavenbanning is real in the world: We flooded our dating app with bots…to scam scammers

DALL·E Editor Guide

  • The DALL·E editor interface helps you edit images through inpainting and outpainting, giving you more control over your creative vision.

Book

  • I finished the new proposal last night, so now I need to sent it off today – DONE!!!
  • Working on appt with Brenda

SBIRs

  • Tweak Ron’s stuff and add an intro
  • Tweak Rukan’s stuff and add an intro for interpolation and regression sections. Include an intro to Perceptrons and then Attention-MLPs.
  • Start the final pass through the doc

GPT Agents

  • Move “selected experiment” and “keyword” out of the tabs
  • Add a “Create Corpora” tab
  • General TODOs:
    • Implement threads, and make sure that the extended queries work
    • Implement calls to GPT embeddings and verify on small dataset. I could even try Aaron’s Wikipedia cats vs computers idea but use tweets
    • Need to treat AND like OR so that tweets containing multiple keywords work

Phil 8.30.2022

Back from more travels! It’s good to be home

SBIRs

  • Submit expenses
  • 9:00 Sprint planning – done
  • 2:MDA meeting
  • Quarterly report

GPT Agents

  • Working on EmbeddingExplorer
Progress for the last couple of days
  • 3:30 Meeting

Book

  • Finish proposal
  • Schedule Thursday meeting

Phil 8.26.29

Umberto Eco: A Practical List for Identifying Fascists

Multi Dimensional and Domain Operations (MDDO)

  • Cebrowski referred to the traditional concept of combat power being measured in the movement of traditional physical forces through time and space in a physical domain.  But to do this, military forces need information and control from the information domain.  Winning a conflict happens in the intangible cognitive domain is in the mind of the individual war-fighter with feelings of success or failure.  Collectively these individual minds make up the social domain, the shared societal awareness and understandings referred to in culture, values, attitudes and beliefs.

SBIRs

  • Need to either pick up docs or get them printed – getting them printed
  • Quarterly report – Adjusting slots for Rukan’s work. Ron looks like he’s doing better

Book

  • Working on the Elsivier proposal. Finding reviewers

GPT Agents

  • Top2Vec is hanging on the import! Going to try it on another box and see if that will still happen. If it does, then I’m going to use OpenAI’s embeddings until it’s fixed
  • Started!

Phil 8.25.2022

SBIRs

  • Was at the Tech Summit for the last two days. Good to see people again!
    • Pinged Jennifer about Elicit
  • Trip
    • Tix! – done
    • Hotel! – done
    • Car! – done
    • Slides! – done, but not printed
  • Continue on Quarterly report
    • 9:00 Meeting with Ron

Book

  • Respond to Katy’s letter – figuring out who would be good to send this to for review
    • Ping Brenda. I think we’ll need to meet next week – done
    • Wound up writing a short python program to scan through my book to find what’s cited most. Mostly based on this. Handy!
from tkinter import filedialog
import PyPDF2
import re
from typing import List, Dict

filename = filedialog.askopenfilename(filetypes=(("pdf files", "*.pdf"),), title="Load pdf File")
if filename:
    print("opening {}".format(filename))
    # open the pdf file
    object = PyPDF2.PdfFileReader(filename)
    d = {}

    # get number of pages
    NumPages = object.getNumPages()
    print("There are {} pages".format(NumPages))
    # extract text and do the search
    for i in range(0, NumPages):
        PageObj = object.getPage(i)
        # print("this is page " + str(i))
        Text = PageObj.extractText()
        # print(Text)
        reml:List = re.findall("\[\d+\]", Text)
        if len(reml) > 0:
            for r in reml:
                if r in d:
                    d[r] += 1
                else:
                    d[r] = 1
    ds = dict(sorted(d.items(), key = lambda x: x[1], reverse=True))
    for k, v in ds.items():
        print("{} = {}".format(k, v))

GPT-Agents

  • Is today the day to try topic2vec? Sure hope so!
  • Started poking around. It’s hanging on the import. That is really odd

Phil 8.22.2022

Book

  • I seem to have an encouraging nibble from Elsevier, via a side door from another author’s acquisition editor. We will see how that goes
  • Working on grammar
  • Setting up a meeting with my new copy editor. Thursday?

SBIRs

  • Watch Rukan’s talk
  • More quarterly report

GPT Agents

  • Bail on this week’s meeting – done
  • Still need to poke at topic2vec

Phil 8.19.2022

Book

  • Moved the definitions to the front and tweaked a bit. I also discovered that MSWord will open a PDF and then you can use the grammar checking feature, which is nice
  • Send proposal to NYU. Looks pretty straightforward – done!
  • Assemble the annotated ToC + Book and send it to Brenda – done!
  • Set up a meeting to see Rukan walk through his slides

SBIRs

  • Might go to Huntsville on the 29th?
  • Quarterly report

GPT Agents

Phil 8.18.2022

OPT model for online use: opt.alpa.ai

Book

  • Got a decline from Princeton
  • Sent off the last proposal to University of Toronto. Next are the for-profit presses
  • Got a nice decline from the University of Toronto, that suggested I look at NYU press
  • Sent an example proposal to Jimmy, and got a very encouraging response back!
    • I took a look through Dr. Feldman’s proposal. It’s fascinating stuff; very appropriate and timely with regard to how people get their messaging from social media.  I’ve forwarded it to one of my colleagues who signs in the social sciences area to see if it might be a good fit for her portfolio. If she thinks it is, I’d be happy to make introductions.
    • With regard to the proposal itself, I don’t really have any comments. It’s well done and compelling. I just have one comment about the sample chapter, unrelated to the proposal as a whole.  Dr. Feldman includes several 3rd party figures that are not properly attributed, and with therefore questionable permissions.  For instance, Figure 2: Ruby Bridges with U.S. Marshals.  The caption should include information about where the image came from and should indicate that permission was given to use it.  The same goes for figures 1 and 4.  Perhaps he’s planning to sort that all out once he has a contract but authors do need to be very careful about any third party content they include, even in a sample chapter.
  • Getting in contact with a copy editor via school – get the email and sent an intro. She’s $20/hr. I need to send a sample

SBIRs

  • Continue to push MORS up hill – Submitted!
  • More markdown documentation for Chirp – Done!. Also update PyPi – Done!
  • 9:15 standup
  • 11:30 CSC
  • Quarterly report

GPT Agents

  • Install and play with topic2vec?

Phil 8.17.2022

GPT-Agents

  • Continue Chirp submission
  • See if topic2vec works, and if it can tell the difference between ivermectin and paxlovid posts
  • IUI 2023
  • I have a fun idea for a paper. Use a mad-libs approach to mindalle prompt generation and see how well the system(s) perform as the prompts go from normal to borderline. We could use machine image description to validate.

SBIRs

  • Quarterly report
  • Chirp
  • MORS
  • RCSNN/3D graphics

Book

  • University of Toronto press? Looked at this last night, but I had just come back from the dentist and didn’t have the motivation. It’s a letter, so it should be straightforward. Then I think the National Academic press is pretty vague, and may just be a letter too. Then it’s time to poke at the for-profit academic press
  • Send Jimmy an example proposal that he can pass on for a sanity check with his editor.

Phil 8.16.2022

You can really tell that the days are getting shorter

Efficient Training of Language Models to Fill in the Middle (This is basically the reverse GPT concept)

  • We show that autoregressive language models can learn to infill text after we apply a straightforward transformation to the dataset, which simply moves a span of text from the middle of a document to its end. While this data augmentation has garnered much interest in recent years, we provide extensive evidence that training models with a large fraction of data transformed in this way does not harm the original left-to-right generative capability, as measured by perplexity and sampling evaluations across a wide range of scales. Given the usefulness, simplicity, and efficiency of training models to fill-in-the-middle (FIM), we suggest that future autoregressive language models be trained with FIM by default. To this end, we run a series of ablations on key hyperparameters, such as the data transformation frequency, the structure of the transformation, and the method of selecting the infill span. We use these ablations to prescribe strong default settings and best practices to train FIM models. We have released our best infilling model trained with best practices in our API, and release our infilling benchmarks to aid future research.

Patching open-vocabulary models by interpolating weights

  • Open-vocabulary models like CLIP achieve high accuracy across many image classification tasks. However, there are still settings where their zero-shot performance is far from optimal. We study model patching, where the goal is to improve accuracy on specific tasks without degrading accuracy on tasks where performance is already adequate. Towards this goal, we introduce PAINT, a patching method that uses interpolations between the weights of a model before fine-tuning and the weights after fine-tuning on a task to be patched. On nine tasks where zero-shot CLIP performs poorly, PAINT increases accuracy by 15 to 60 percentage points while preserving accuracy on ImageNet within one percentage point of the zero-shot model. PAINT also allows a single model to be patched on multiple tasks and improves with model scale. Furthermore, we identify cases of broad transfer, where patching on one task increases accuracy on other tasks even when the tasks have disjoint classes. Finally, we investigate applications beyond common benchmarks such as counting or reducing the impact of typographic attacks on CLIP. Our findings demonstrate that it is possible to expand the set of tasks on which open-vocabulary models achieve high accuracy without re-training them from scratch.

Alex Jones and the Lie Economy

  • Discerning audiences who stumble on Jones’ show turn him off, but his message excites the credulous who, if they don’t fully subscribe to the man’s views, want to hear more of the same. Lies are almost always more exciting and exploitable than dull truths. Having culled the impressionable from the doubting and boosted their pulse rate, he turns them over to his merchandising wing where he sells survivalist gear and health supplements like Brain Force Ultra, Winter Sun Plus Vitamin D and a variety of “Superblue Silver” products (immune gargle, toothpaste and wound dressing) that Jones claimed could mitigate Covid. It’s not incidental that the products he hawks are presented as the fix for coming apocalyptic perils predicted on his shows. Citing court filings submitted by Jones’ attorneys in discovery, HuffPost reports that InfoWars collected $165 million in sales of these products from September 2015 to the end of 2018.

GPT-Agents

  • Continue Chirp submission
  • See if topic2vec works, and if it can tell the difference between ivermectin and paxlovid posts
  • 3:30 Meeting
  • IUI 2023

SBIRs

  • 8:30 SEG staffing changes
  • 9:00 Sprint planning
    • Chirp
    • MORS
    • Quarterly Report
    • RCSNN/3D graphics

Book

  • University of Toronto press?
  • Started on the Strategy and Tactics in Online Conflict proposal

Phil 8.15.2022

Book

  • Rejection from Columbia
  • Looked at how to hire a copy editor a bit. Found this and this
  • Need to continue submissions, and then start followups.
  • Submitted to McGill-Queens. It’s a Canadian school and I used the deep bias chapter which has the indigenous school fiasco

GPT Agents

  • Working on Chirp submission – finished the (a?) video and edited it down to three minutes. If I have more time I’ll redo it
  • Tweaked the KeywordExplorer UI a bit

SBIRs

  • Working on quarterly report

Phil 8.12.2022

Baseball tix!

Social Simulacra: Creating Populated Prototypes for Social Computing Systems

  • Social computing prototypes probe the social behaviors that may arise in an envisioned system design. This prototyping practice is currently limited to recruiting small groups of people. Unfortunately, many challenges do not arise until a system is populated at a larger scale. Can a designer understand how a social system might behave when populated, and make adjustments to the design before the system falls prey to such challenges? We introduce social simulacra, a prototyping technique that generates a breadth of realistic social interactions that may emerge when a social computing system is populated. Social simulacra take as input the designer’s description of a community’s design — goal, rules, and member personas — and produce as output an instance of that design with simulated behavior, including posts, replies, and anti-social behaviors. We demonstrate that social simulacra shift the behaviors that they generate appropriately in response to design changes, and that they enable exploration of “what if?” scenarios where community members or moderators intervene. To power social simulacra, we contribute techniques for prompting a large language model to generate thousands of distinct community members and their social interactions with each other; these techniques are enabled by the observation that large language models’ training data already includes a wide variety of positive and negative behavior on social media platforms. In evaluations, we show that participants are often unable to distinguish social simulacra from actual community behavior and that social computing designers successfully refine their social computing designs when using social simulacra.

SBIRs

  • Submit an abstract by 19 August for the opportunity to participate in MORS’ one-of-a-kind event held at the new IDA Center from 27-29 September! With high-level speakers including Dr. Baruch Fischhoff, Dr. Kristen Kulinowsk, Dr. Michael Ford and Dr. Ryan Barrett, the Emerging Techniques Forum (EFT) is one you will not want to miss this year. All abstracts must be submitted in an unclassified format and 1,500 (including spaces) or less characters without images or videos. If you are submitting an abstract for the classified session, indicate the classification level at the time of submission.
    • Mostly done. Need some additional paperwork filled out. Sent that off as well
  • Prep slides for Sprint review and finish off tasks – done

GPT Agents

  • Deploy updated versions for Chirp
  • Test and validate balanced pull
  • Run balanced and proportional 10,000 tweet pulls for ivermectin and plaxovid
  • Try running Top2Vec on tweets to see what the topic spaces look like
  • Try to get some threads in those two spaces and use those to show trajectories through topics
  • If there are enough intersecting trajectories, then create narrative embedding space
  • Had a good talk with Aaron yesterday about his discord group and how that could be a nice source of maps.
  • Submit KeywordExplorer to Chirp Developer Challenge by Aug 19
    • Content discovery apps
    • Include an App built with the required developer tools and meets the above Project Requirements.
    • Include a text description that should explain the features and functionality of your App.
    • Include a description of which category you are submitting to.
    • Include a link to a fully deployed app. 
    • Provide Twitter handle associated with the developer account.
    • Include a demonstration video of your App. The video portion of the submission:

Book

  • Submitted to U Columbia Press

Phil 8.11.2022

We asked some of the philosophers we respect most who have interests in these areas to help us make progress on them. We leaned especially on the early career researchers who are doing much of the running on this topic (Canadian Journal of Philosophy).

SBIRs

  • More writing
  • Work on RCSNN
    • Need to start testing that it draws and runs correctly
    • Had a few bugs to fix but it’s working!
  • Submit an abstract by 19 August for the opportunity to participate in MORS’ one-of-a-kind event held at the new IDA Center from 27-29 September! With high-level speakers including Dr. Baruch Fischhoff, Dr. Kristen Kulinowsk, Dr. Michael Ford and Dr. Ryan Barrett, the Emerging Techniques Forum (EFT) is one you will not want to miss this year. All abstracts must be submitted in an unclassified format and 1,500 (including spaces) or less characters without images or videos. If you are submitting an abstract for the classified session, indicate the classification level at the time of submission.

GPT Agents

  • Test and validate balanced pull
  • Run balanced and proportional 10,000 tweet pulls for ivermectin and plaxovid
  • Try running Top2Vec on tweets to see what the topic spaces look like
  • Try to get some threads in those two spaces and use those to show trajectories through topics
  • If there are enough intersecting trajectories, then create narrative embedding space
  • Had a good talk with Aaron yesterday about his discord group and how that could be a nice source of maps.

Book

  • Submitted to U Illinois Press

Phil 8.10.2022

Some good sources on belief research referenced in this article:

The Strength of Our Political Loyalties Changes Our Actual Beliefs

SBIRs

  • More writing
  • Work on RCSNN – Made some good progress. The generated code is cleaner and easier to read. Need to start testing that it draws and runs correctly

GPT Agents

  • Test and validate balanced pull
  • Run balanced and proportional 10,000 tweet pulls for ivermectin and plaxovid
  • Try running Top2Vec on tweets to see what the topic spaces look like
  • Try to get some threads in those two spaces and use those to show trajectories through topics
  • If there are enough intersecting trajectories, then create narrative embedding space

Phil 8.9.2022

GPT Agents

  • Working on improved one day download
  • 3:30 meeting

SBIRs

  • More report
  • No response yet from Dr. J
  • MDA contracts today – will see how ATO is working
  • More tweaking RCSNN for multiple instances of single class

Phil 8.8.2022

For those of you keeping track of such things, I’m still testing positive. And I largely feel fine, with what may(?) be the odd relapse? I had what felt like a cold that came on Thursday of last week and went through Friday and a bit of Saturday. No fever, though my blood pressure is up a bit and my temperature is reliably up a fraction of a degree from where it normally is – like 97.4F vs. 96.9F. I’ll be curious if things go back to their previous levels after I start testing negative.

Book

  • Start on the remaining proposals
    • Sent a letter to University of California Press
  • Sent Gaia Vince a note over the weekend

GPT Agents

  • Get balanced working with clamping. Got most of the code working in a scratch. Need to migrate to the main branch

SBIRs

  • Sent Dr. J a note on Friday. No response yet
  • Work on the report and start to frame up the slide deck
  • I realize that I can change the module creation to produce multiple instances of the same child class in the generated bdmon code. It should be a minor change. Need to do that and verify that everything still works with the UI