Category Archives: Uncategorized

Everyone’s all, “Wow, chatGPT, amazing, a real milestone, everything will change from now on”. And they’re right – but probably don’t realize that this is not the first time something like this has happened. In fact there’s been wave after … Continue reading →

Everyone’s heard about chatGPT, the latest and most sophisticated chatbot to date.We all know it can bs proficiently about ‘soft’ topics like English literature. I decided to quiz it about a hard topic, mathematics. As you probably know, I have … Continue reading →

The axiom of choice (AC) seems harmless enough. It says that given a family of non empty sets, there is a choice function that assigns to each set an element of that set. AC is practically indispensable for doing modern … Continue reading →

Art is what you can get away with.– Marshall McLuhan [All the images in this post were produced with generative AI – Midjourney, DALL-E 2, Stable diffusion.] I used to teach the AI course at the University of Victoria – … Continue reading →

Power concedes nothing without a demand. -Frederick Douglass When the late Ed Ashcroft and I invented Lucid, we had no idea what we were getting in for.

When Ed Ashcroft and I invented Lucid, we intended it be a general purpose language like Pascal (very popular at the time.) Pascal had while loops and we managed to do iteration with equations. However in Pascal you can nest … Continue reading →

Recently there was a post on the HN front page pointing to a GitHub repository containing an old (2019) version of the source for PyLucid (I don’t know who posted it). It generated a lot of interest in Lucid but … Continue reading →

I recently graduated my 17th and last PhD student, Monem Shennat. This is the abstract of his dissertation with my annotations (the abstract of a University of Victoria dissertation is limited to 500 words). The problem he tackled was that of … Continue reading →

I have some theories about these modes – for example, cropping one into the other. I tried them out on the Monna Lisa and … read on!

Recently my PhD student gave a rehearsal of their 20 minute oral presentation. It was ok. Average. In other words, (seemingly) long, and boring. Like so many people’s technical talks. What can you do? What you can do is follow … Continue reading →