Test 24
We're back.
"Arjen, what happened to your newsletter?"
Well, this happened. And this.
And now we're back.
Let's pick it back up slow and easy kids.
Science, research, conferences
The scientific community and their conferences can be a crazy bunch. My French friend Sonia went to this conference organised by a person who identifies as a pirate. Walks around the conference dressed up as a pirate. Very cool research though.
At the same conference, the, apparently, (in)famous Johan Rockström hang out (or maybe I mix up events). Never heard of the kind man (impossible personality) but he is (one of the) originators of the Planetary Boundaries Framework.
The planetary boundaries framework highlights the rising risks from human pressure on nine critical global processes that regulate the stability and resilience of the Earth
Very relevant, very cool, very serendipic.
"You have too many books!"
I found there's a word for my condition:
But luckily Umberto Eco comes to the rescue with his antilibrary.
AI is not ...
Semantic stretching can be tricky. You think you agree but you might be talking about completely different topics. Especially in product design and development. Platform, dashboard, portal, insight, user friendly. Everyone agrees, no-one has a clue.
But lately I find myself increasingly annoyed with semantic narrowing. For example, "sport" used to include all sorts of leisure activities like running, rowing, biking, swimming, football or tennis. No, not tennis, tennis is a game. But nowadays, when people say they go "sporting", they mean going to the gym (at least, in The Neterlands). Same for AI. AI used to be the umbrella term for regression models, machine learning, deep learning, decision trees, neural networks, computer vision, natural language processing and what not.
Now, when people (or organisations) ask: "Do you use AI?", they mean: "Do you use generative AI based on Large Language Models (LLMs)?". Which is not only a subset of AI, it's also a dead end. LLMs are probably not the foundational building blocks towards the singularity (or, General AI, or AGI). The kind folks at Apple kindly did some research showing how and why in their paper (The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity](https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/illusion-of-thinking).
Read it. And pick a real sport.
An evening stroll
I was walking my dog the other day when we ran into the chicken
"Good morning chicken!", I said
"Good morning ...", the chicken mumbled
"I have to leave. If they ask, you didn't see me."
I looked at the chicken
"I don't want to go. But I have to go. I must go."
"I know chicken. I understand.", I said, "I never saw you"
"Goodbye chicken ..."
Trust
The currency of productivity.
Stuff to look into * LinkedIn is a Fucked up circus. Flee. * Already happened but needs to be shared: My want of you partakes of me * Data Science at the Command Line
Note: Test 1 - Test 23 were published on an internal company forum. I will revisit some of that stuff going forward. Maybe.
Finally, remind me to write about this some day, I was testing Claude against ChatGPT sycophancy by stating that Disney is worse than crack. Guess what they said?