Matt Waldman’s Reads Listens Views is back and devoted to a short list of recommended reads, listens, and views for the week.
Welcome
If you’re new to the Rookie Scouting Portfolio blog, welcome. Every Friday, I post links to pieces that I’ve found personally compelling or to content I hope will eventually scratch that itch when I get around to it.
You may not like everything listed here, but you’re bound to like something.
Reads
Let’s begin with two posts from Scott Woods’ blog — a librarian who makes lists of a lot of things on his site. Let’s examine one about books for kids and one for adults.
28 More Black Picture Books That Aren’t About Boycotts, Buses Or Basketball
A machine learning system “comes so close to mimicking human writing that it could potentially be used for “deepfake” content:
Due to concerns about large language models being used to generate deceptive, biased, or abusive language at scale, we are only releasing a much smaller version of GPT-2 along with sampling code. We are not releasing the dataset, training code, or GPT-2 model weights. Nearly a year ago we wrote in the OpenAI Charter: “we expect that safety and security concerns will reduce our traditional publishing in the future, while increasing the importance of sharing safety, policy, and standards research,” and we see this current work as potentially representing the early beginnings of such concerns, which we expect may grow over time. This decision, as well as our discussion of it, is an experiment: while we are not sure that it is the right decision today, we believe that the AI community will eventually need to tackle the issue of publication norms in a thoughtful way in certain research areas.
You’ve Read a Ta-Nehisi Coates Book. Now What?
Listens
John and Ravi aren’t the only mega-talents in the family.
Views
The work of Tuco Amalfi on display at “Melt.” This link has a lot more of his work.
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