Planeta Libre en Español

I am a teacher. Since January 2013, I have been teaching the “Operating Systems” course at the Engineering Faculty of UNAM . And yes, that means May and November are highly stressful months, where I have to review the work done by my students and… sigh … come to the difficult decisions leading to a numerical score that will, in very very short, represent the 64 hours they spent listening to me talk and how they shaped their understanding, plus the countless (in the sense that I cannot count them...

This post is an unpublished review for Heads we win, tails you lose — AI detectors in education Educators throughout the world are tasked with the difficult requirement of evaluating students’ works, making sure the grades meaningfully reflect the students’ understanding of the subject, and that a graded assignment maps to the relevant work invested in solving it. After the irruption of Large-Language Models in late 2023, this task became obviously much harder: if a widely available computer pro...

This post is an unpublished review for As Answers Get Cheaper, Questions Grow Dearer This opinion article tackles the much discussed issues of Large Language Models (LLMs) both endangering jobs and improving productivity. The authors begin by making a comparison, likening the current understanding of the effects LLMs are currently having upon knowledge-intensive work to that of artists in the early XIX century, when photography was first invented: they explain that photography didn’t result in p...

Finally, some light at the end of the tunnel! As I have said in this blog and elsewhere, after putting quite a bit of work into generating the Debian Raspberry Pi images between late 2018 and 2023, I had to recognize I don’t have the time and energy to properly care for it. I even registered a GSoC project for it. I mentored Kurva Prashanth, who did good work on the vmdb2 scripts we use for the image generation — but in the end, was unable to push them to be built in Debian infrastructure. Maybe...

This post is an unpublished review for The Innovation Engine • Government-funded Academic Research David Patterson does not need an introduction. Being the brain behind many of the inventions that shaped the computing industry (repeatedly) over the past 40 years, when he put forward an opinion article in Communications of the ACM targeting the current day political waves in the USA, I could not avoid choosing it to write this review. Patterson worked for a a public university (University of Cali...

This post is an unpublished review for Python Workout 2nd edition Note: While I often post the reviews I write for Computing Reviews , this is a shorter review requested to me by Manning. They kindly invited me several months ago to be a reviewer for Python Workout, 2nd edition ; after giving them my opinions, I am happy to widely recommend this book to interested readers. Python is relatively an easy programming language to learn, allowing you to start coding pretty quickly. However, there’s a ...

This post is a review for Computing Reviews for Artificial Intelligence • Play or break the deck , a book published in Traficantes de Sueños As a little disclaimer, I usually review books or articles written in English, and although I will offer this review to Computing Reviews as usual, it is likely it will not be published. The title of this book in Spanish is Inteligencia artificial: jugar o romper la baraja . I was pointed at this book, published last October by Margarita Padilla García, a w...

This post is a review for Computing Reviews for Unique security and privacy threats of large language models — a comprehensive survey , a article published in ACM Computing Surveys, Vol. 58, No. 4 Much has been written about large language models (LLMs) being a risk to user security and privacy, including the issue that, being trained with datasets whose provenance and licensing are not always clear, they can be tricked into producing bits of data that should not be divulgated. I took on reading...

Last week, our university held a «Mega Vaccination Center». Things cannot be small or regular with my university, ever! According to the official information, during last week ≈31,000 people were given a total of ≈74,000 vaccine dosis against influenza, COVID-19, pneumococcal disease and measles (specific vaccines for each person selected according to an age profile). I was a tiny blip in said numbers. One person, three shots. Took me three hours, but am quite happy to have been among the huge c...

Found this grafitti on the wall behind my house today: