Russian culture
In The Observer Kenan Malik makes the case that We can revile Putin's violence in Ukraine, but we're not at war with Russian culture.
As he notes:
It is one thing to call for the boycott of state institutions or of those acting in an official capacity. It is quite another to argue that The Nutcracker or War and Peace should be banned because their creators were Russian. That is to accept a Putinesque view of the relationship between culture and nation, of Russian cult
A Critical Look at AI-Generated Software
IEEE Spectrum: Coding with ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, and other AI tools is both irresistible and dangerous – “Most recently, OpenAIlaunched ChatGPT, a large-language-model chatbot that is capable of writing code with a little prompting in a conversational manner. This makes it accessible to people who have no prior exposure to programming. ChatGPT, by itself, is just a natural-language interface for the underlying GPT-3 (and now GPT-4) language model. But what’s key is that it is a descendant of GPT-3, as is Codex, OpenAI’s AI model that translates natural language to code. This same model powers GitHub Copilot, which is used even by professional programmers. This means that ChatGPT, a “conversational AI programmer,” can write both simple and impressively complex code in a variety of different programming languages. This development sparks several important questions. Is AI going to replace human programmers? (Short answer: No, or at least, not immediately.) Is AI-written or AI-assisted code better than the code people write without such aids? (Sometimes yes; sometimes no.) On a more conceptual level, are there any concerns with AI-written code and, in particular, with the use of natural-language systems such as ChatGPT for this purpose? (Yes, there are many, some obvious and some more metaphysical in nature, such as whether the AI involved really understands the code that it produces.) The goal of this article is to look carefully at that last question, to place AI-powered programming in context, and to discuss the potential problems and limitations that go along with it. While we consider ourselves computer scientists, we do research in a business school, so our perspective here very much reflects on what we see as an industry-shaping trend. Not only do we provide a cautionary message regarding overreliance on AI-based programming tools, but we also discuss a way forward.”