⚙️ Work
- TIDraw.net is gone. I let the domain registration lapse because we weren’t using it in the TI anymore and I didn’t feel like continuing to pay for a domain registration just for something to do. I have the web whiteboard running at https://draw.darcynorman.net and will leave it there.
- The schedule and registration for this year’s Teaching Days went live. Lots of great sessions planned.
- I’m still trying to nudge the formal review of Zoom’s AI Companion feature along the process. Almost 9 months after opening the ticket to start the review…
- [Redacted]
🔗 Links
AI
Nikhil Suresh @ Ludicity: I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again (via Ben Werdmuller and like half of Mastodon). A mildly NSFW take on machine learning and the hype around it, from a data scientist.
Unless you are one of a tiny handful of businesses who know exactly what they’re going to use AI for, you do not need AI for anything - or rather, you do not need to do anything to reap the benefits. Artificial intelligence, as it exists and is useful now, is probably already baked into your businesses software supply chain. Your managed security provider is probably using some algorithms baked up in a lab software to detect anomalous traffic, and here’s a secret, they didn’t do much AI work either, they bought software from the tiny sector of the market that actually does need to do employ data scientists. I know you want to be the next Steve Jobs, and this requires you to get on stages and talk about your innovative prowess, but none of this will allow you to pull off a turtle neck, and even if it did, you would need to replace your sweaters with fullplate to survive my onslaught.
Nick Heer @ Pixel Envy: On Robots and Text. Perplexity apparently ignores Robots.txt declarations to block it from crawling web pages. But it’s still worth trying to block this crap. To me, it’s not even about avoiding genAI-ingestion (although that’s part of it) - it’s about adding some friction to companies that are building a business model around breaking the way the WWW works. There’s a decent robots.txt file by cdrans on GitHub that looks to be current.
A webpage being rendered through Perplexity is actually being reinterpreted and modified. The original text of the page is transformed through automated means about which neither the reader nor the publisher has any understanding.
Aphasia
- Australian Stroke Foundation & Aphasia Association: Aphasia Handbook (via Kate Bowles and Mathi Gwithyas). A great booklet about aphasia and how to support a family member with aphasia. This would have been extremely useful to help us learn how to better support dad through his aphasia. He wound up getting so frustrated that he just gave up trying to communicate at all.
🍿 Watching
I haven’t really been a fan of soccer, but watched the Copa America 2024 game between Canada and Argentina. Wow. I mean, we lost. But against the top team, with the best player on the planet? Canada held their own, and had some amazing chances. Great game.
And the Oilers’ comeback in the Stanley Cup Final series has been incredible to watch. The game 7 final should be intense.
📚 Reading
- still working through The Mammoth Hunters.
🧺 Other
I’ve been working on my fitness, getting up early to do a training ride up some hills every morning, and going for an actual ride on weekends. Strava says my fitness is the best it’s been in 18 months, thanks to how incredibly low I’d set the bar. I’m hoping to keep the upward trend, without injury or illness or whatever health BS always seems to come out of nowhere when I start to get fitter again.
The chart shows when my back acted up last year and I was basically off the bike for 5 months. And the tail end of the a-fib nonsense the year before. Surely, 2024 will be the year this health stuff stops getting in the way…
🗓️ Focus for next week
- 1:1 meetings
- Hiring committee interviews for a position in the TI
- Team walking meeting to University District for ice cream!
- My annual performance review. Dun dun dunnnnnnnn…