Matisyahu's Blog

Woke up this morning, had a brisk walk before work and afterwards I had a cooling down before showering up and getting ready for the day. Today was fairly busy with events taking place that impact the industry i work in so there were plenty of things that needed to be done particularly when dealing with returning customers. Tonight I worked an extra hour just to clear some stuff out of the queue – this is one of the benefits of working from home is being able to do some extra work and not having to time it up with when the next bus or train will be leaving town.

On one of my breaks I finally got the last two shelves of my pantry sorted out – all of the cups (glasses, coffee mugs etc) are on one shelf and the plates, bowls etc, are on the other shelf and now it is looking a whole lot less chaotic than before. The kitchen is now looking really well organised and I’m looking forward to some cooking on Tuesday next week – I’ll buy some mince, onions, mushrooms, pasta sauce etc. although I am tempted to make some chilli but whatever the case maybe it’ll be a more enjoyable experience now that I have the right tools for the job.

I checked for Chrome updates today however it appears that it has been pushed off for release on Thursday (Wednesday US Time) and hopefully with that will come the update for ublock Origin Lite. I really do wish that US based businesses would have more than one office where these extensions, apps etc. can be approved because while the US has a holiday the rest of the world continues on with the expectation that things keeps progressing. Apple released a beta of their 26.6 update which makes me wonder whether we’ll see a 26.7 or whether 26.6 will be the last major update before version 27 is released (there will be future updated for 26.x I’m sure but they won’t include new features but instead solely focusing on bug and security fixes).

I was watching a video on AI – it is a good feeling knowing you’re not the only person who refuses to be sucked into the BS vortex that the tech dude bros are insisting on imposing it upon others.

As I’ve said in the past, the technology industry has a habit of reinventing the wheel and the replacement they create ends up being worse than what they replaced. One of the examples given in the video is creating a todo list based on reading through Slack – sounds like a great idea in theory until you realise that there is a benefit of actually reading through it yourself. Yes, reading through Slack may take you longer but the benefit is that it jogs your memory as you read through the messages, it maybe pick up something that the LLM doesn’t pick up on, you may see a reference to another source that you follow up on to provide context and thus make sense of what was posted. There is a benefit to reading an email, you can pick up on the tone of the email, how the other party is reacting to a particular idea where as with an LLM summarising you miss the nuance in the email itself.

Language is more than just words, there is a whole lot of baggage that comes with how people write, the words being used, the order in which something is discussed etc. all of this gives you an insight and the suitable questions you may need to ask in follow up to seek further clarification. This is also the problem when you start using AI in academia where the the journey is replaced with an instant answer that lacks nuance. When you’re finding information it is the journey of getting there, of going down paths that turn out to be dead ends but you gain the experience and pick up some extra knowledge you wouldn’t have otherwise gained. I think in the long term the other downside is the loss of curiosity leading to a damping of creativity – an unwillingness to experiment with an uncertain outcome in favour of wanting to have instant gratification (assuming that what the LLM provides isn’t a load of nonsense). Just to finish this post off, I am reminded of what George Carlin said – when viewed in context to how the humanities have been devalued within education, the push for AI to replace teaching children how to be curious and seek out knowledge, it isn’t surprising how the far right thrives in a such a society.