This week I have learned:
- the delights of getting together en masse. It was our annual conference at the beginning of the week, and so we had three days to explore and connect with people from across the organisation.
- disposable applications are a thing now. Well, at least I think they are. Here’s an app I built in about 20 minutes to illustrate the content of the workshop I ran on Tuesday. It’s not brilliant, but it’s useful enough… https://mattballantine.static.domains/ValueMapping/index.html
- more and more I’m drawn to the Steam Diesel analogy to understand where using LLMs to write code sits.
- I also have been pleased to see more people getting into critiquing LLMs use and abused of anthropomorphism. They are powerful tools, but they’re not “intelligent” in a general sense. Just computational.
- Claude is quite good at solving Wordle. ChatGPT and Gemini are abysmal. More detail to come on that.
The week in media:
Read
- have completed The Haunted Wood by Sam Leith, which I enjoyed overall (but it dragged a bit towards the end).
- Now started More Everything Forever and it’s making me think that the reason we have religion is to stop people believing in even more preposterous things.
- This piece about anthropomorphism, ELIZA and more: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/stuart-winter-tear_in-the-1960s-we-mistook-imitation-for-understanding-activity-7336987685774876673-EAdG
Listened
- continuing my Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Albums and now on number 146 (play along yourself at mattballantine.static.domains/top500)
Watched
- the last episode of the current series of Race Across the World
Next week:
Submissions.
The week in photos:
mmitII 