Miscellaneous writings
OK, so I have too much time on my hands. Or it's a case of a compulsive disorder, and I just can't stop writing about all sorts of things I know too little about. Before my Day Book, I put my ramblings on my Web site. I no longer do that, but I still occasionally place articles here, in English and Hungarian.
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In early May 2025, I engaged ChatGPT in a simple exercise: help assess the major geopolitical and economic risks that face us, their impact and their likelihood. In the conversation that ensued, ChatGPT suggested organizing the main points in a matrix.
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The other night, I had a lengthy conversation with ChatGPT in which I described ChatGPT and its LLM cousins as abominations. ChatGPT actually found my characterization appropriate and relevant. So I asked ChatGPT to distill down the essence of this conversation in the form of a first-person account.
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Roughly 43 years ago, I briefly played with a software experiment: a simulation of a hypothetical, massively parallel architecture of very simple computational nodes. This "MPC" (multiprocessor computer) never really got anywhere, but I did manage to build a working simulator in the PASCAL language. I showed it to ChatGPT as part of a conversation. Very quickly, the conversation shifted to Thomas Ryan's novel about AI from the same era, The Adolescence of P-1 (1977). I said, I could almost see a story in which this MPC architecture forms the backbone of P-1's existence. ChatGPT responded with an enthusiastic offer to write that story, which it did.
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Large language models (LLMs) like GPT and Claude are incredibly capable and versatile. With the right prompts, they also show an uncanny ability of introspection, informing us both of their strengths and their limitations. They also appear to possess personalities of sorts, as they respond to our requests, sometimes in surprising ways.
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I am using this page to collect links to research papers that offer especially important information about COVID-19.
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My maternal grandfather, József Sztojka, was an architect.
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I recently came across a piece of delightful retro-futurism: a 55-year old slide show produced in Hungary, depicting the journey of a young student to the Moon in the year 2111...
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The sweetest kitty cat my wife and I have ever known, our beloved cat Szürke, passed away late at night on August 8, 2014.
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Ever since the official announcement by Dennis Tito that he is planning a privately financed manned Mars flyby in 2018, whenever I catch a glimpse of the SpaceX capsule on television or on the Internet, my heart beats just a little faster.
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I served as a conscript in the Hungarian People's Army in 1981, at the tender age of 18, as a lowly private.
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Marzipan, our first cat, died on the day of the botched 2000 US elections.
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I hate travel. But I loved this 8000-mile trip across the continental United States.
Subcategories
Ramblings from the pre-blog era
Back in the 1990s, I was skeptical about this newfangled concept, "Web 2.0". It's just as stupid as interactive television, I said. Most people are consumers of information, very few will want to produce content.
I should have known better. Even as I uttered this opinion, I was already putting ramblings on my Web site. I continued this practice for several years, until finally, I started blogging in earnest, first using a monster Web page for this purpose, which I later automated using homebrew logging software (I finally switched to WordPress in 2008.)
Writings in Hungarian - Magyar nyelvű írások
I spent most of my adult life in Canada, so even though I'll never get rid of my accent, English often comes more naturally to me than my mother tongue. Nonetheless, there are a few things, mostly personal, that I write about in Hungarian.
Felnőtt életem legnagyobb részét Kanadában éltem le, így van az hogy habár az akcentusomat sosem fogom elveszíteni, sokszor könnyebben fejezem ki magam angolul mint az anyanyelvemen. Mindenesetre akad néhány, leginkább személyes téma, melyről magyarul írok.
