Home » Articles posted by Tony Mason

Author Archives: Tony Mason

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

Archives

Categories

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 50 other subscribers
November 2025
S M T W T F S
 1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
30  

Epistemic Honesty: An Unusual Commodity for Large Language Models

I asked 290 LLMs to summarize a paper that has never existed. 62% of them confidently did. Recently Hiroko Konishi posted on X and wrote a report “Structural Inducements for Hallucination in LargeLanguage Models: An Output-Only Case Study and the Discovery of the False-Correction Loop” that has garnered significant attention. For me, it was like […]

Continue Reading →

The Risks of Using Gemini Code

I’ve been exploring using various AI coding agents over the past year. They generally work by using an API key, which charges per million tokens. That might sound like a lot, but keep in mind that the way LLMs function is by appending messages to all that’s gone before, so the length increases as the […]

Continue Reading →

The Risks of Using OpenAI

I never imagined that the first blog post in a long time wouldn’t be about my research but about recent events that are serving as an impediment to me completing what’s been a very long development cycle. In all of the discussions of AI with which I’m bombarded daily, I haven’t seen anyone talk about […]

Continue Reading →

Reflections on Teaching Distributed Systems

During January through April 2023 I taught CPSC 416 at UBC. It was the first time I had taught this course and it would not have been possible without the assistance I received from others, notably Ada Gavrilovska and Ivan Bestchastnikh both of whom allowed me to use their materials in creating my own course. […]

Continue Reading →

Challenges of Capturing System Activity

A key aspect of the work I am doing for Indaleko is to “capture system activity” so that it can be used to form “activity contexts” that can then be used to inform the process of finding relevant information. As part of that, I have been working through the work of Daniela Vianna. While I […]

Continue Reading →

Brainiattic: Remember more with your own Metaverse enhanced brain attic

I recently described the idea of “activity context” and suggested that providing this new type of information about data (meta-data) to applications would permit improve important tasks such as finding. My examining committee challenged me to think about what I would do if my proposed service – Indaleko – already existed today. This is the […]

Continue Reading →

Using Focus, Relationship, Breadcrumbs, and Trails for Success in Finding

As I mentioned in my last post, I am considering how to add activity context as a system service that can be useful in improving findings. Last month (December 2021) my examination committee asked me to consider a useful question: “If this service already existed what would you build using it?” The challenge in answering […]

Continue Reading →

Better Finding: Combine Semantic and Associative Context with Indaleko

Last month I presented my thesis proposal to my PhD committee. My proposal doesn’t mean that I am done, rather it means that I have more clearly identified what I intend to make the focus of my final research. It has certainly taken longer to get to this point than I had anticipated. Part of […]

Continue Reading →