Weeknotes for 2024 Week 46: One month left in the semester panic / / Pomodoro Fuckboy Rabbit Hole

Weeknotes are where I share what I’m working on / thinking about this week and a few things to share without worrying too much about the ideas being fully formed. r We were in Ottawa visiting friends from Wednesday until Sunday. We ate a lot of snacks and went to see the Broadway production of the Lion King and held a cute 3-month-old baby a lot. It was really nice. On Sunday we our flight was at 6am flight so we were up at 3:30am and then flew west, so that was basically midnight our time, so even after 8 hours in airports and planes we still got home before 11am yesterday, so yesterday was weird. There is a month left of classes and ton to do and a lot happening. One day I will find a way to get through a semester without it feeling like a panic in the last month, but not this year.

Thinking About / Working On

• AI Camera: Right now I am prototyping the actual camera and trying to get the basic code working. The guts wil be a raspberry pi and some nice rgb buttons and lights, the code python. The goal remains to have a self-contained unit that will take a picture and then return a text-to-image AI generated picture that allows, through various manipulations of prompts and language, the exploration of bias in text-to-image models. I’m still getting basic functionality up and running, but I have the code and basic prompts running on my phone.
• Sandbox sessions: I feel bad about this project. The basic idea (office hours for makers with snacks and coffee) was good but I am doing 1.5 jobs right now and I haven’t given it enough attention. It’s not exactly failing, often 2-4 students come by because they see the promotions and come in thinking its a special time for new users, so that is important, but the goal was to try to support students and faculty doing bigger projects. Faculty so far have not been interested, but again, I haven’t really tried to get them interested.
• Pomodoro Fuckboy Workflow: I will need to explain this title more one day soon, but I went deep into iOS shortcuts, obsidian, and using AI through APIs to automate various aspects of setting daily goals. I now have 2 very intricate Shortcuts triggered at the start and end of each day to review my schedule, set priorities, remind myself of goals, etc. This is a dangerous rabbit hole for me to go down as a pomodoro fuckboy.

Reading / Consuming / Sharing

Rory Sutherland on Are We Too Impatient to Be Intelligent?

So I’ll end with a very weird question: What does slow AI look like? We’ve automatically assumed that the way we interact with it is instantaneous. Are we sure that’s right? Would it be interesting to be able to say to an AI, Look, over the next three or four months, can you give me some ideas about holidays in Greece? Do we want to make that decision immediately? I don’t think we do. I think we want to see things, refine things, consider things. I think we want to mull them over. I think we want to discuss them.

Venkatesh Rao on Superhistory, Not Superintelligence

Every scientific or technological revolution tears down yet another anthropocentric conceit. This one is tearing down the conceit that our lives are significant in informational terms. That every life story is full of unique richness worth the narration. The humbling thing about the rise of machine learning is not that it shows us how stupid we are in “intelligence” terms, but how empty our lives are, in terms of their information content. This moment in history is like the moment when the structure of the atom was deciphered and we realized that seemingly solid matter was better understood as mostly empty space shaped by fields.