Terms of service. That information you tend to avoid reading. Good example: Google's newly updated terms of service, which I found out about in an email last week. I decided to read them.
Their updated terms opens with "We know it’s tempting to skip these Terms of Service, but it’s important to establish what you can expect from us as you use Google services, and what we expect from you. These Terms of Service reflect the way Google’s business works, the laws that apply to our company, and certain things we’ve always believed to be true. As a result, these Terms of Service help define Google’s relationship with you as you interact with our services."
Here are a few items I noted:
Some things considered to be abuse on the part of users includes accessing or using Google services or content in fraudulent or deceptive ways, such as:
phishing
creating fake accounts or content, including fake reviews misleading others into thinking that generative AI content was created by a human
providing services that appear to originate from you (or someone else) when they actually originate from us
providing services that appear to originate from us when they do not
using our services (including the content they provide) to violate anyone’s legal rights, such as intellectual property or privacy rights
reverse engineering our services or underlying technology, such as our machine learning models, to extract trade secrets or other proprietary information, except as allowed by applicable law
using automated means to access content from any of our services in violation of the machine-readable instructions on our web pages (for example, robots.txt files that disallow crawling, training, or other activities)
hiding or misrepresenting who you are in order to violate these terms
providing services that encourage others to violate these terms
Take that second item I highlighted about misleading others into thinking that generative AI content was created by a human, Does that mean that if I use their generative AI or some other provider's AI to help write a blog post that I put here with my name that I am violating their terms of service?
Though I would say that Google's Terms of Service is written in plain langauage that most readers should be able to understand, the implications of some of the terms are much harder to interpret.
NOTE: The Google Terms of Service (United States version) that I reference are effective May 22, 2024.
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On March 5, 1975, the Homebrew Computer Club first met in a garage near Menlo Park in Silicon Valley, California.
On that day, I was across the country in my last semester at Rutgers. I had taken one course in computer programming, using Fortran, which had been around in some earlier forms since the late 1950s. We used a box of punch cards to create a program. I had looked into the class as an auditor, for no credit and not on my transcript, because I had talked to the professor after an information session he gave, and he was curious to see what an English major would do in his class.
My afterschool and vacation job in high school was doing printing for a liquor distributor. They had a room with huge computers using tape drives and cards, and I would sometimes wander in there and talk to the operator. Of course, I understood nothing about what he was doing. He was in a unique place in that position because no one in the company understood what he was doing except him and his one assistant. And yet those computers, printed all the invoices which I would later have to box up and file in the warehouse. Though they were using the computer to print them all, no one could access that data from their desktop, so if someone wanted a copy of an invoice, they had to dig through a file cabinet.
That 1970 computer was certainly not for personal use, and no one had a personal computer because they did not exist. Most of my fellow students didn't imagine we would ever have a computer in our home. They were gigantic — a computer easily took up an entire room. And they were very, very expensive, costing about a million dollars each. Not even computer engineers or programmers who made a living working on computers had access to a personal computer.
So this California club served a real need for tech-minded people But many of these tech-minded people wanted to build personal computers for fun. And they decided to start a hobbyist club to trade circuit boards and information and share their enthusiasm. Among the early members were high school friends Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Eventually, they would design and build what tey called the Apple I and II computers and brought them to the club to show them off. Lee Felsentein and Adam Osborne were also members and would create the first mass-produced portable computer, the Osborne 1.
Wozniak would write "The theme of the club was 'Give to help others.' Each session began with a 'mapping period,' when people would get up one-by-one and speak about some item of interest, or a rumor, and have a discussion. Somebody would say, 'I've got a new part,' or somebody else would say he had some new data or ask if anybody had a certain kind of teletype."
I started teaching in a junior high school, in the fall of 1975, and shortly thereafter, the school got a terminal that was connected to a mainframe at some university in New Jersey. It was first used by one of the math teachers for a kind of computer club. I did go to his classroom a few times just to see how it worked but I saw no connection to what I had learned about programming in college.
It would be a few years before the first personal computers appeared in the school We had a lab that was used for the first actual computer class. It was a classroom full of standalone TRS 80s. TRS stands for Tandy RadioShack, though later they were nicknamed Trash 80s. I took a professional development class using those computers where we learned to program in BASIC. I created a vocabulary flashcard program that I was able to use with a few of my English classes during periods when the lab was not being used by the math teacher. The program was crude. The graphics were basically nonexistent, but the kids and I found it very interesting.
I remember one teacher who was in the professional development class, saying we will all have to learn to program in the future. I was sure she was wrong. I had no doubt that computers would play a role in our teaching future, but I was also sure that other people would be writing the programs and we would only be users.
The first computer I had in my classroom was an Apple IIe. Since I had some computer background and more so because I had some interest in learning more, I became the computer coordinator for the building. That meant my computer had two disc drives so that I could copy software that we had purchased and were allowed to copy. MECC was a big source of classroom software back then.
The first computer I bought for home use was the same as what I had in my classroom which made sense because then I could use the software home too. This hardware was expensive. I paid more for the Apple dot matrix printer than I paid for my laptop last year.
We remained an aApple school, and an apple family for a few years until a new person moved into the position of district computer coordinator. He swapped out all the Apple computers for what we would call IBM clones, but we're the early Windows95-equipped computers. When I bought my next computer, it was one using Windows 95.
When I left teaching secondary school in 2000 and went to work at NJIT, all the computers used Windows except for the school of architecture, which was an Apple Mac building. They were their own little tech world. And so I lost contact with the Apple world in those days when even TV commercials and print ads would argue about whether you were a Windows or Mac kind of person. I remember one professor saying to me that he was surprised I was not using a Mac because I seemed like "a creative type."
It can run up to seven miles per hour, and swim. It can climb steps and scale hills at a 40-degree gradient. It can be outfitted with sensors, night vision, arms, and deployable drones. It is a robotic dog — a “quadruped” platform developed by Ghost Robotics and enhanced by AT&T that, to date, has been used to patrol military zones. Now, the telecommunications giant is pitching a new use for this AI-friendly technology - campus security and safety.
The robot has a 24/7 perimeter patrol, can spot “unidentified” personnel, and disperse unruly protests. Smewhaat Orwellian.
Huang's Law and Moore's Law are technology "laws." Maybe it is more accurate to say they are observations, but "law" has become attached to these observations since they appear to remain true.
Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years. Moore's law is an observation and projection of a historical trend. Rather than a law of physics, it is an empirical relationship linked to gains from experience in production.
Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel (and former CEO of the latter), posited in 1965 posited the idea and projected this rate of growth would continue for at least another decade. In 1975, looking forward to the next decade, he revised the forecast to doubling every two years. His prediction has held since 1975 and has since become known as a "law".
Moore's prediction has been used in the semiconductor industry to guide long-term planning and to set targets for research and development, thus functioning to some extent as a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Huang’s Law has been called the new Moore’s Law. It seems that the law that the same dollar buys twice the computing power every 18 months is no longer true.
Huang's law is an observation in computer science and engineering that advancements in graphics processing units (GPUs) are growing at a rate much faster than with traditional central processing units (CPUs). The observation is in contrast to Moore's law as Huang's law states that the performance of GPUs will more than double every two years.
Jensen Huang was then CEO of Nvidia and at the 2018 GPU Technology Conference and observed that Nvidia’s GPUs were "25 times faster than five years ago" whereas Moore's law would have expected only a ten-fold increase. As microchip components became smaller, it became harder for chip advancement to meet the speed of Moore's law.
Huang's Law and Moore's Law are concepts primarily associated with the semiconductor industry and technology advancements. However, their principles can be extended and applied to various domains beyond technology.
You can extend Huang's Law to other fields where exponential growth or improvement is observed. For example, consider advancements in renewable energy efficiency, healthcare outcomes, or educational achievements. The idea is to identify areas where progress follows an exponential curve and apply the principles accordingly.
Both laws highlight the concept of scaling - either in computational power (Moore's Law) or AI efficiency (Huang's Law). You could apply this principle to other systems and processes where scaling can lead to significant improvements.
I am imagining a discussion (probably in a classroom setting) about ethical considerations, such as the impact of rapid advancements on society, and focus on responsible and ethical development in various fields. That certainly is true currently in discussions of AI.
Terms of service. That information you tend to avoid reading. Good example: Google's newly updated terms of service, which I found out about in an email last week. I decided to read them.
Huang's Law and Moore's Law are concepts primarily associated with the semiconductor industry and technology advancements. However, their principles can be extended and applied to various domains beyond technology.