Headworx

Opinions on AI are very polarized - from the benign "look how fun/useful/smart it is" to the catastrophic "we have already crossed the point of no return and the human race is doomed". What I find concerning is the people who are really close to AI in general and the recent developments of AI in particular are very pessimistic. From Eliezer Yudkowsky , who says we can’t calculate in advance what happens when AI gets to smarter-than-human intelligence, and the critical lines can be passed without noticing, to the other 50 thousand researchers, scientists and professors signing the open letter calling to pause giant AI experiments . And Elon who thinks that " With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon. ". These people are truly scared. Not so much by what is available today but the by the accelerated rate of progress. Skeptics point to the hundreds of thousands of years it took humans to evolve into intelligent species. But on the other hand the...

A human brain is the hungriest body organ - responsible for more than 20% of the total energy consumption. A huge drain on the organism. ChstGPT-4 drains 1 kWh to answer 3 queries (it is estimated to use 300-watt-hours per request, based on the "single-digits cents" cost stated by Sam Altman. A typical EV battery holds 60kWh. That would be sufficient to handle 200 queries. Text LLM queries. Compare that to the real time analysis of video streams from 8 cameras (as used in Tesla configuration) to draw driving decisions. It all just does not add up. It seems an AI-powered self driving car computer would drain the battery far more than the car's powertrain. Of course there is stil the Moore's law progress, shrinking geometries etc., but it would be foolish to assume the FSD is just an app update away. The hardware required t run this is absolutely massive. You cannot run FSD on an iPhone. It also seems the AI model training dataset requirements have outgrown the budgets ...

I still fly a lot (and this starts building some guilt inside me... you know, all that carbon footprint - but that is for a separate blog post). So I still fly a lot and having a window seat is one of the biggest rewards I could imagine for being a frequent flyer. Forget the upgrades and the lounges and fast security tracks. Dear airline, let me just select a window seat. There is so much going on out there. Flying itself is fascinating - sipping wine while sitting in an armchair cruising at almost the speed of sound in the clouds. And the things outside the window are equally fascinating - the clouds, the occasionally met planes and the Earth from above. I always carry a camera - the Nikon Z50 with the plastic telephoto lens has proven to be a perfect balance for casual window seat aerial photography. And keep collecting the photos - see in my Window Seat album . But interestingly many people don't care about window seats. So often I see them taking the seat and immediately shutt...

I blogged about Gaia GPS several times. It was my go-to offroad / hiking navigation app, mostly because it was offering offline topographic map downloads from variety of sources. But Gaia has had its quirks. It has not been the most easy and intuitive to use and the Android version (although having much progress recently) was lagging behind the iOS one. But now there is the new kid on the block - FATMAP . Although the name sounds weird and coming out of nowhere, the company behind it is Strava, which is very well known by people who do any kind of physical exercise, including trail running and hiking. FATMAP adds this shiny polish on the original concept of Gaia. Seamless visualization of terrain, super responsive user interface, seamless offline support, accurate maps from multiple sources, GPX track uploads, and last but not least - full integration with other activity tracking and planning cloud services such as Garmin.com. I had a chance to put FATMAP to the test when visiting Azo...