free speech isnt free

 This thought has popped into my head at random times, but in particular when I read an article like this one:

https://www.theverge.com/news/637228/madison-square-garden-james-dolan-facial-recognition-fan-ban

If you don't agree free speech isn't free, next time you see your boss go tell them off. 

Free speech isn't free from repercussions. I guess that means free speech is only free from government retribution and not from ....what's the right word....civil retribution?

I can only imagine the way you can have the idea of free speech truly freely is by being anonymous otherwise if someone connects it to you, there can be benefits and drawbacks.

apples

 A few months ago maybe, I thought, I should eat more apples, cause if an apple a day keeps the doctor away why not?

I discovered a curious side effect.... My heartburn problems subsided a lot. Like very noticably so.

I will admit I've been trying to eat healthier in general, this year in particular so that's also a factor, but even if I eat something and I start to notice heartburn, an apple later and I'm feeling great 

This may not work for everyone but it has been honestly life changing so if you get heartburn, I'd say....give it a try (unless you're allergic), what's the worst that happens, you eat a few extra delicious apples?

generative AI, and knowledge work

 I read an HN (comments) on the impacts of generative AI on critical thinking...https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43484224

I have thoughts up front....yes there is likely a loss of the inquisitive nature of some things. I think, I don't need to think too much about this until the AI fails then I'll figure it out. But then again, at some point maybe AI will stop failing, and then we have a utility. 

Just because a calculator can add numbers doesn't automatically remove our critical thinking in math, but as I'm writing this I do think....how much of math is doing things that calculators are doing or using critical thinking to either solve proofs/etc or design computing systems to solve proofs, or conjectures or whatever. 

So what does that mean for generative AI? 

I also sometimes think about things like this as forms of abstractions. Like because we can write in python it changes the critical thinking we can and do, do, because we don't need to worry or care about which assembly operation we need to perform to move some data to memory or whatever, we just say, python do, and it does. Does that make us think less critically? Maybe? But also maybe not? Maybe it gives us other things to think critically about. 

I do plan to read (or listen) to the PDF referenced by the HN link, maybe I'll have different opinions after that.

always ready presenting

 I'm the last like 3 weeks I have been asked to present by 3 different people. (2 of the request made today lol)

This got me thinking..it's probably a good idea to have a ready made presentation I can use at a moments notice.

The problem is that it's always nice to talk about different topics or different things about a particular topic (not rehashing) so another thought is just always be taking notes in almost a PowerPoint form, so that when asked you're like 50-75% there, you have the content, make it look pretty and good to go.....

I've done a little of this, I just need to continue to be good at staying on top of having presentations always ready.

Do you have this problem? How are you prepared? Do you just say no? (Which I also have a tough time doing ;))

10 unusual uses of Large Language Models

It's high time I mention large language models here.

I'm sure you're aware, or have heard of them, however large language models are a transformer based approach of using Machine Learning, trained on large large corpuses of text, (think all of reddit, or all of youtube captions,etc). Which now are able to answer a considerable number of questions.  (Including coding/etc).

Ignoring all the ethical concerns (which of course there are lots, and we can talk about them later).

Here's where things get fun. I wanted to talk about unusual (to me) cases of LLM's I've used. So here goes!

1. I have asked LLM's to build me a playlist of songs that are popular for various times. (And subsequently asked it to write code to search my library for songs, which it failed to find well, I may try again with a local LLM and pass the song names in as groups, and see if that does better).

2. Upload a picture of my shirt, ask it to give me ideas how to tweak it with cricut iron-on's to make it unique, but also fit the theme.

3. Plan out stops or recommend places to visit for a trip. (Basically a trip advisor)

4. I used ChatGPT to figure out what airports to fly out of for various universities. (As part of my Conferenceships Chair Role for acsac.org)

5. Make lots of little apps. Ever googled QR code generator? How about extracting audio from a video? Yep pretty easy with ChatGPT to create a basic server and front end.

6. Rewrite Christmas songs to be silly?

7. Double Check doctor diagnosis/supplemental questions for doctors visit!

8. Aid in making a commercial detection algo using ffmpeg

9. Copy/Pasted a schedule into ChatGPT and asked for a ics (calendar) file....and surprise it worked great!

10. Asked it to plan out my lawn care activities for the year, and make a calendar file to load to my phone so I know when to do what!

 

What else do you use it for?

 

Mr beast??

I came across this a while back (maybe also from hacker news) https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YaG9xpu-WQKBPUi8yQ4HaDYQLUSa7Y3J/view

 It's an interesting read and makes me wonder how much of what he claims about video retention applies to written communication. Specifically proposals. My goal is to try some of the techniques, and see if my proposals are viewed as better or not :).

 I'm also interested in taking a Mr. beast approach to proposals to read and see what makes a proposal successful and worth funding.

Another interesting comment in the doc says something along the lines, if you don't keep learning new things you will run out of things to draw from. So always be discovering/consuming new things. 

Anywho I think it's a worthwhile read that almost leaves you out of breath by the end with how aggressive things feel. I think it's a mindset you can approach to many fields not just youtube creation for Mr. beast. Being out of breath is Not necessarily in a bad way, but just is.

acting

 

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances;

 

I used to wait tables at Pizza Hut (yes they had dine in, and yes they had waiters/waitresses, crazy right?) and I often thought about how I felt like there were parallels with what I did to acting. The goal being to take my customers out of the every day, and create a space where they don't have to worry or think about anything but enjoying themselves at the meal. You ask how they are doing, perhaps you truly deeply cared what they said....but if you didn't, you acted like you did.

 

 

Now I do work in tech, and many times I feel like I don't fit in, people think I know things that I don't, that I'm an expert in some things that I'm not. There is of course the phrase fake it till you make it, which gives me similar vibes to the above. Sometimes you have someone that really is truly and deeply an expert in things, but often, we are just people who have had some experiences in a topic and that's all people need. Sometimes you just have to get outside your own brain and just act like you know what the heck you're doing....and do it.

I've done this a lot in the past, and it's worked out well, lately it's been feeling like, why are people coming to me, I'm not an expert.....but I guess maybe I am in some ways that I just can't and won't acknowledge. Time to step out of that mindset and own what I am and do and am capable of.

sometimes doing random things is ok

 

I went on a trip recently and I was of course making last minute updates to my DMS driving app.

By default I have 2 modes, normal daytime mode which is just a boring bootstrap table of black text, with alternating white and gray cell colors per row....very boring.

 Then I have a night mode it is entirely black background with a darkish green text, ....for night time...

I've been thinking for a while how can I make this work better on cell phones. I have a few problems if I have too many columns, then the text has to be tiny to see anything and we'll....if you're driving, trying to glance at something tiny in the car is not ideal. I asked ChatGPT to help me out.....it's far from done, but it's progress. I asked for it to make me a page that changes the font randomly (I don't even know what the default font is but who cares let's try other things), changes the background of the page to a random color and changes the font to a random color.... I didn't review the code too much because if it didn't work I haven't default modes, and its a display page so it's not modifying the underlying database or code, so low risk, potentially......some amount of reward.

Here is an example of the randomly generated page. (Oh I also had it add a save option so if I really liked it I can continue using it, the save option kinda works but that's a story for another day).

 

I know I know, the colors are appalling, but if I'm being honest, it's legible, somewhat, so I don't mind, plus I can just hit refresh page and it'll give me a new color scheme.

I'm planning on running with this, and fiddling with my display, I have 2 columns that are the most important, and other columns that would be 'nice'. I also have more content that I'd like to have, maybe some kind of what food is nearby that automatically pops up either within 10 miles of a place, or maybe if the time is of arrival of a city is within 11-1pm so we can easily see what's in the area. Maybe using LLMs as a semi family preference filter for kinds of food.

I'm just gonna say it, sometimes doing random things is a good thing, it inspires new ideas and things maybe you hadn't thought of before. Try to put a little more intentional randomness in your life.

(Funny side note, for a bit I would be working on multiple projects with roughly equivalent priority, so I would just take out a 50 cent piece, which is of course more fun than a quarter, dime, nickel, or penny, and flip it, heads I work on problem X tails I work on problem Y. Was a fun way to have a bit more randomness, and also reduced my decision making requirements).

Have a great day!

(I'm trying to get into the habit of blogging more again)

fungibility

Money fungibility has a lot of valuable properties.  I want to talk about one silly idea I thought about. What if money wasn't fungible.

I was reading an article about patent trolls today on hacker news. It mentioned naming and shaming these patent trolls, but what if money wasn't fungible, what if we had pihole for money, with blacklists, white lists, and overrides.

What if tomorrow I could grab a list and say, I won't accept money from, or purchase from a business who accepted money from a particular person (or list of people)....effectively cutting them out of society at least....somewhat. if enough people said, I won't accept the dollars that the trolls used, then businesses would have to decide, are there enough people who will accept the money, or will they end up with useless dollars and eventually have to block them out as well.

While it can be fun to think of these ideas I am actually really glad we have fungible money. This example can be extended in lots of ways, and can really make a mess of things. What if you accidentally let it slip you voted for a particular law, and enough people didn't like the law. Could the above happened to you, etc. 

Phew, I'm glad cash is fungible.....

This ignores credit cards, or other forms of money that we currently use. I wonder if anyone has built these kind of tools for CC payment processing.....probably not the cc companies, but they prob have lists of some sorts, though it's in their best interest for everyone to spend $$ because they capture value on every transaction.

*To be fair, that doesn't mean some of these things can't be done with fungible money, it would likely just be at a small scale, or would require considerably effort and is just not even a little realistic.

slurp slurp slurp

 So I got bored the other day, and thought, I wonder if my website is in chatgpts model......so I started asking about onaclovtech, and sure enough my main page is on there. 

This got me thinking, a. You might be able to build a bit of a personal archive of (hopefully not PII) things that you can then reference later if they update models to current updates. This is kinda neat.  I did see something on hacker news recently talking about this personal archive but that would possibly work best for local LLMs what they were talking about

I've also wondered about building a form of an attached knowledge base that I can reference, such as preferred foods, etc, so if/when the option of pre ordering or ordering for delivery happens, maybe I can just say, hey can you order me food from X and it'll just know, yes he likes this. I don't stray a ton, but one could argue if I said, I've had x,y,z then it can infer maybe I'd try something new each time.  Maybe give me a hey, you haven't tried p, or q, wanna give one a try? 

Lotta potentially interesting things if it can reference your knowledge base, something I'd like to get better at developing!!