Jeremy B. Merrill is a journalist who codes. This is his personal site, with links to his work and his (very occasional) blogposts.
to be hidden Us humans are pretty good noticing the four hidden groupings in a grid of sixteen words in the NYT's Connections game -- at least I am. But I wondered, how could computers do? 1 Not great. At least my algorithm isn't. But it's not THAT bad either. My algorithm gets nine puzzles correct on the first try out of 400 games -- 2.2%. For 20 more (5.0%) it gets two clusters correct and goofs…
Be careful if you’re asking an LLM to do something to each item in a list: the behavior might vary based on the order of the items. I was asking a model to classify a few items in a list according to the same rubric, when I realized that modifying one item changed the classification of another, unmodified item. See the Quarto notebook here .
What a catchy catchphrase. Someone nerd-sniped me in July, essentially daring me to find some more. Here we go. Let’s trick the computer into coming up with more catchphrases like this. See the Quarto notebook here . The Git repo is here .
Recently, Jupyter started using Jupyter Lab’s fancier user interface in ordinary jupyter notebook notebooks. But I had a weird problem. My rendered markdown cells would automatically collapse and hide themselves! The little blue rectangle on the left would collapse itself automatically on all markdown cells in my Jupyter notebooks after I executed the cell with Ctrl-Enter.. I couldn’t see any of…
After two years standing guard over my birdfeeder, I retired the Squirrel Soaker 9000 robot yesterday. It accomplished its mission: armed with custom artificial intelligence and a garden hose, the robot successfully deterred squirrels from stealing the birdseed. Got 'em. While the squirrels spent months jumping onto the birdfeeder, with both a properly-positioned squirrel baffle and the Squirrel…
Update, 5/26/23: The robot worked so well I have declared victory over the squirrels . It’s a classic American story. We bought a house in the suburbs. I set up a birdfeeder. Then, I found myself fighting a vendetta against the squirrels. The dastardly squirrels were stealing the birdseed. Darn you to heck, squirrels! A traditional solution, putting chile powder in the birdseed, didn’t work. Home…
I revealed Google ads that appear on searches for, for instance, “get an EIN” that impersonate the Federal government and fool Americans into paying for something that should be free. Google purports to ban the ads, but they were easy to find. (Google deleted some of the ads after I contacted them.) The continued presence of similar such ads – even after my story – shows Google’s inability or…
If you’re a liberal, Exxon’s Facebook ads might brag about its commitment to clean energy. If you’re a conservative, they might be practically opposite: urging you to defend oil pipeline jobs. I uncovered ads from Exxon that were apparently meant to burnish its public image – but microtargeted in different ways based on partisanship.
When employers pay Google to run ads for job openings on YouTube, Google allowed them to exclude people of “unknown” gender, I uncovered . The employers may not have meant to, but this would ensure that non-binary people wouldn’t see the job ads, raising the specter of illegal discrimination. I found the job ads in this story by training a machine-learning model to recognize text that’s similar to…
Both Facebook and Google accepted ads for merchandise featuring the logo of the Three Percenters militia group, members of which were present at the January 6 assault on the US Capitol. The Google ads in particular openly included the phrase “Three Percenter” in addition the logo, showing apparent shortcomings in Google’s ability to reject ads that violate its stated rules.