Planeta Libre en Español

This post is an unpublished review for As Answers Get Cheaper, Questions Grow Dearer This opinion article tackles the much discussed issues of Large Language Models (LLMs) both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This post is an unpublished review for The Innovation Engine • Government-funded Academic Research David Patterson does not need an introduction.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This post is an unpublished review for Python Workout 2nd edition Note: While I often post the reviews I write for Computing Reviews , this is a shorter review requested to me by Manning.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articles written in English, and although I will offer this review to Computing Reviews as usual, it is likely it will not be published.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:

This post is a review for Computing Reviews for LLM Hallucinations in Practical Code Generation — Phenomena, Mechanism, and Mitigation , a article published in Proceedings of the ACM on Software Engineering, Volume 2, Issue ISSTA How good can large language models (LLMs) be at generating code? This may not seem like a very novel question, as several benchmarks (for example, HumanEval and MBPP, published in 2021) existed before LLMs burst into public view and started the current artificial intell...

One of my servers at work leads a very light life: it is our main backups server (so it has a I/O spike at night, with little CPU involvement) and has some minor services running (i.e. a couple of Tor relays and my personal email server — yes, I have the authorization for it 😉). It is a very stable machine… But today I was surprised: As I am about to migrate it to Debian 13 ( Trixie ), naturally, I am set to reboot it. But before doing so: $ w 12:21:54 up 1048 days, 0 min, 1 user, load average: ...