Thoughts from a software engineer in Singapore.
AI Ethics: Steering Humanity Towards Immortality or Extinction
Ever since I started to take notice of the recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), from Dall-E and Stable Diffusion to GPT-3, I’ve had this “end-of-the-world” kind of feeling that I couldn’t quite explain. Not like the world is literally ending, but that humanity has discovered something so profound it will change the world forever. In this post I’ll explore what I think AI could mean for the future of human life, and why I think ethical AI research could make all the difference....
Sudden Hearing Loss
Something weird happened to me just over a week ago: I experienced sudden sensorineural hearing loss (SSNHL). I’ve just about fully recovered now, but it was quite scary and very different to what I thought it was going to be like. It started on Monday 20th February. I had just taken a shower and my ear felt strange, quite similar to the pressure from an airplane flight or some kind of blockage....
Discovering New Music Using Spotify and Discogs APIs
Lately I’ve been in the mood for discovering new music. I had mostly been relying on Spotify for this, either looking for new material by bands I already know, or by using the Radio feature, or by searching public playlists. None of these were very satisfactory - I feel like Spotify tends to recommend you the same few bands, even though their library is vast. So I thought, OK, I’ll try searching myself....
Self-hosting a cloud drive with Rclone
For a long time I had been using Google Drive to store all my important documents. It worked extremely well - always accessible no matter where I was, synced across all my devices, and never had to worry about my files being unavailable or deleted. Ultimately though, it didn’t feel like it was mine, and I didn’t like the idea of depending on Google. When searching for an alternative, I considered full-blown cloud solutions like Nextcloud/ownCloud, but they seemed overly complex to me....
Trying Out iPhone
I decided to try switching over to an iPhone, as I mentioned in a previous post. The main reason is that it’s the final step in de-Googling myself, which is an achievement that I’ve been wanting to unlock for a while. I don’t really know if it’s any better for privacy than Android, but it should at least not be worse when configured properly. My phone of choice is an iPhone 7, which I got a good deal on from Carousell a while back, for the sole purpose of setting up an Apple Watch....