Weeknote 2023 Week2
Published on
by 
James Ravenscroft
I’m pretty rubbish at #weeknotes but I want to try and get better at them.
Things I Achieved
- My main achievement for this week has been (hopefully) finishing my PhD thesis corrections - essentially your viva examiners give you a list of stuff that needs a bit of tweaking and you have 3 months to address them. My list was pretty short so it hasn’t taken me all that long to go through them.
- I managed to get out for walks most days this week which should help me shift some of the winter insulation I accumulated over christmas. While I walk, I like to listen to the Three Bean Salad podcast.
- I’ve accepted two invitations to give talks on AI and ML at public events later in the year. More details on those when I can share them.
- I’m trying to get into the habit of doing more note-taking and writing down my thoughts. I’ve only really just discovered the magic of knowledge management and second brains. It kind of amazes me that I got this far in life without being very good at.
- We are trying to cut down meat and dairy consumption. This week I used oat milk in all my recipes at home and it was great. We also had veggie (soy-based) sausages in a couple of recipes and they were delightful. I keep forgetting to order oat-based coffee while I’m out and about so that is a goal for next week.
Things I watched
- Mrs R & I watched The Rig on prime. It’s a sci-fi show set on an oil rig. It’s got an all-star cast and notably Emily Hampshire from Schitt’s Creek playing a hard-ass corporate oil exec which I found a jarring contrast from Stevie Budd.
- We went to see M3gan in the cinema - if you’re not familiar, think Chucky but instead of evil possessed doll, evil AI robot doll. It was quite fun and less of a shlock horror, more of a dark comedy. The film does not take itself seriously at all which meant that, even though it’s about AI and ML, I was able to suspend my disbelief and enjoy.
- I watched some of this video about how easy it is to use PKM notes to procrastinate instead of doing useful work. I say some of because I got annoyed and stopped watching. I feel like taking this attitude sucks all of the joy out of it. Some of us enjoy tending to our digital gardens and find it soothing and cathartic ;)
Stuff I Read
- I’ve subscribed to noted.lol, a blog and newsletter all about self-hosted software. It’s a great little newsletter and I’ve already found a couple of interesting packages through it (see below)
- I’ve been reading the BCS ITNow magazine from Winter 2022 that’s been sat on my side-table for a couple of weeks. There are quite a few articles that seem to shower the silicon valley ultra-capitalistic view of Web3 in glory but then there’s a poll about how most BCS members asked about crypto and NFTs thought it was garbage. A mixed bag!
- ChatGPT is everywhere at the moment. There are lots of predictions that it could lead to a dark internet full of generated content but I fear that it’s already led to a dark internet full of terrible takes on ChatGPT. So many articles are variations on “here is a screenshot of a prompt I fed into ChatGPT and here is the output. Isn’t it clever?” Here are a couple of actually interesting articles about it:
- Unskilled Cybercriminals May Be Leveraging ChatGPT to Create Malware - people with limited or no software development background have been using ChatGPT to develop malware tools. Whilst I don’t buy that developers will be out of a job any time soon, the system can produce some useful code snippets that someone could feasibly string together into a program.
- China, a Pioneer in Regulating Algorithms, Turns Its Focus to Deepfakes - WSJ - apparently China are already looking into regulating generative models. I think the cat is out of the bag on this one, you can’t contain digital assets that have leaked onto the internet. However governments could, presumably, limit access to large volumes of GPUs needed to train LLMs (and even infer on bigger models).
Software Packages I Learned About & Tried
- Zellij is a Golang terminal workspace + multiplexer - its a bit like tmux on steroids. I watched an interview with it’s lead maintainer by charm.sh’s BashBunni. I haven’t had the chance to try it yet but I’m a big fan of
tmuxso it looks very interesting to me. - memos - a lightweight/foss memo tool. It feels a bit like a cross between twitter and pinterest and tumblr. I can post links and thoughts there along with hashtags and go back and find the stuff that I posted about. I am going to try integrating memos into my discovery and reading workflow for a little bit. The third party MoeMemos app for android provides pretty good mobile support.
- shiori - a self-hosted bookmark + archive system, again written in golang and fairly lightweight. It seems to do quite a nice job of saving readable archived copies of articles (like wallabag). My only gripe with it is that there’s no way to pass in new URLs by query param. This would allow me to ‘share’ sites to shiori via the android context menu and the very handy URL Forwarder app.