Idea man

I’m getting the day off on the right start. I woke at five when Younger finally kicked Missus out of the bed. I laid awake for the next hour, dreaming of things to build with GPT.

Someone mentioned on Twitter that AGI is bring about the renaissance of the idea man. That’s me.

Yesterday was a bit rough as chatGPT was overloaded yesterday. I was trying to do some SQL work and every time I threw my queries into the prompt box I kept getting errors. Then later, after I put the kids to bed, it was fast and snappy. I guess a lot of people are relying on it for work. Even this morning it’s still throwing errors and long delays. I can only see how dependent people are going to become on AGI. It will be come an integral part of people’s toolkit, and not having it will be like losing your phone or internet.

I talked to my cousin J yesterday. I haven’t talked to anyone back home in quite a while, maybe a year, but my brother reminded me that it was her birthday. So I called and caught up and chatted with her for about 45 minutes. Everything is everything; the main concern was about our 87-year old grandmother. She’s not as mobile as she used to be and repeats herself all the time. Her two older sisters have dementia, and that’s a big concern. J said grandma is in ‘pain all the time’ and I responded that I’m only 43 and I’m in pain all the time. Not much, but it’s always something. I can only imagine how it gets when I’m twice that age.

If meditation has taught me anything it’s that pain is always with us. Whether it’s bodily pain, emotional discomfort or whatever, the mind is like a spotlight that can focus in on these discomforts as needed. Even sitting, in itself, causes discomfort, and part of the practice of meditation is to focus on that pain, make it an object of attention while keeping the body still. We’re already dealing with the pain, it’s the fear of the pain in the future that makes us fidget and fuss.

I’ve got work to do this morning. I’m not sure how much crazy stuff I’ll get done to day if GPT is offline. I got some tasks to wrap up from yesterday and plenty of work to prepare for the rest of the day. Hopefully I can get that knocked out and spend the day working on the bot. I’d like to get it working with Stable Diffusion, so that it can generate images when mentioned. I think I might be able to pull that off this week if I have time, then set up some sort of context overlay so that people can chat with it.

I’ve got ideas.

Hooky

A coworker passed on this interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. I’d never paid the guy too much time but I’m paying attention now. There were a couple of standout points that he made, and I’m adjusting my mental models accordingly. Heavy stuff.

Elder is staying home today. She wanted to play hooky — and I’m inclined to let her. She had her choral performance last night — I missed it because Younger wanted to go and they only gave each kid two tickets. She then proceeded to act up during the performance, forcing Missus to leave early. Not pleased.

So I told Elder she could stay home as long as she did her school work: today’s; her homework for the week, which she’s behind on and is due on Friday; and a special project that is due on Friday also. I told her I was going to set her a pomodromo timer and she was going to work off of that for an hour and we’d see how things work. She’s out doing her gym class, and out running and riding her bike around.

I’m fine with her staying home from school. As long as she’s motivated to work, I’m fine with it. I offered her the opportunity to pull out in third grade, during COVID, so that she could do GalileoXP, but she — and her mother — wanted her to go. So back she went. But maybe today is a look at what it might look like for her to homeschool.

I wrote the following message to Younger’s elementary school principal:

I was the one hollering at you about GPT this morning and wanted to follow-up with you on it. To show you what it does, I prompted it to generate the following text for you:

I wanted to bring to your attention a new technology that is going to greatly impact education in the next few years – GPT-3. GPT-3 is a conversational AI model that has the ability to understand and respond to human language with unprecedented accuracy.

This technology has the potential to revolutionize how we approach learning and collaboration in the classroom. Through its ability to generate text based on prompts, students can use GPT-3 to help them write essays and research papers, leading to a deeper understanding of the material.

However, we must also be aware of the potential for students to use GPT-3 to cheat on assignments. We will need to put in place measures to detect and prevent this type of behavior.

Overall, I believe GPT-3 has the potential to greatly enhance the educational experience for both elementary and collegiate students. I would be happy to discuss this further with you and how we can integrate this technology into our curriculum.

Best regards,
[Your Name]


You can access the chatGPT page here: https://chat.openai.com/chat. I encourage you to talk to it and ask it questions: things your teachers and students might ask, and see how it responds. It is very good at ‘imagining’ or role-playing, so you might tell it that you are a middle-school principal dealing with whatever various issues, and see what it comes up with. The language model is somewhat inconsistent with certain subjects, but it’s very good overall.

chatGPT just released last week and it’s ease of use tells me that it’s going to be everywhere soon. I’m already incorporating it into my professional workflows, it’s very good at generating copy or condensing and editing. And for variations, it’s amazing.

Just don’t trust it’s answers. There’s a lot of inconsistencies. That said, I expect these models to continue to continuously improve. The next version of GPT, GPT-4 is expected in the coming months.

Take care, I’d be more than happy to speak more on this if you like.


Consumed

I am shook. All I can think about is GPT.

Yesterday was a mess. Woke up sick and sleep deprived, but I had sprint meetings. I did my best to lead but by two I was a brain-muddled mess. I think we got some work done, though.

Elder has a choral performance tonight, she’s excited. Of course she doesn’t own a white blouse per the requirements, so there was a bit of bustle this morning.

I got sleep last night, and feel mostly myself today. I meditated, but all I did was think about how I’m going to continue my prompt engineering. I’m thinking I’ll start with some axioms and then start talking to GPT about what I want to do. Provide it with a base layer that will serve for it’s training data.

One thing some people are getting hung up on with GPT is that it has a tendency to make shit up, like adding a pineapple to the statue of David’s description or something. I don’t know if it’s an intentional watermark or something in one of the settings, but this is somewhat beyond the point. It’s great at generating endless possibilities; it’s a content generator, and idea machine.

There’s enough there to give one direction toward the next step, or at least a starting point. It’s like a dopamine hit for me, a never-ending font of newness and possibility. It never ends.

My wife jokes that every six months I have a new hobby that I really get into really obsessively: climbing, sim racing, piano, flight sims, the like. This is something completely different. This tech is important and world changing.

I do keep oscillating somewhat, between the the grandiosity of it and the futility. I’ve been a bit hyperbolic, after recognizing some of the flaws in the system I realize I may have to walk some things back. But I don’t care. I’m building.

And I’ve got the best assistant in the world. We’ve all got it. It’s incredible. Building a context system and middleware system for GPT-controlled game engine… that’s what I’m talking about.

Prompter

I’ve been somewhat manic the last few days, having finally gotten a real chance to play with GPT through the wonderful chatGPT. It is AMAZING. I’ve been playing with it rabidly, exploring what it can do and how it can be leveraged as a personal digital assistant. The model knows a lot — it was trained off of wikipedia and other various library models, so it can talk about anything. And its really good at making things up. Here an example:

I’ve been working with Diffusion Models the past couple weeks and they’re fun, but I’ve been meaning to take a closer look at GPT-3 to see what it can do. chatGPT makes it super easy. And the results are amazing.

I’ve already managed to hook GPT-3 up to a Discord bot and have been doing some experiments with prompt overlays — where the my base prompt is injected on top of the user request. I’m using it as a bit of game master for a role playing game. I actually used chatGPT to help me code and troubleshoot the system. I’ve got a lot of work to do on it but it’s very, very interesting.

Getting my story straight

I have a doctors appointment tomorrow, and he’s the only one who can hold me accountable for my drinking, so I’ve been good this week. No alcohol this week. I’ll likely keep it up until our trip to Costa Rica, which as been on my mind also.

I slept better last night, some trouble, but my body is adjusting to the earlier bedtime. Seasonal affective disorder and all that, probably. Order vitamin D. Pronounced not with a long I sound as in “eye” but a short one that rhymes with “fit”. Vit-amen, the way Mo says it.

Mo asked me how I was doing, like Mitch did. I’m fine, none of this is affecting me at all. I’m just putting my head down and doing what I can while everyone else does what they need to do. Tight resources, DIY spirit. Make do. Good enough to move on: GETMO is my motto.

I talked to Todd yesterday. Like me, he has addictive personality. We have destructive history, since we were teens. He gave up drinking but got hooked on the crypto casino. Chasing shitcoin mints on Ethereum, trying to beat the bots. Problem is he’s not disciplined, I told him, you don’t go in with a plan and you don’t know when to get out. So your emotions get in the way and you stay in to long and miss your chance.

Quit chasing the dragon, I told him. Find a project that you believe in and contribute. You don’t have to learn coding, there’s all kinds of PR/HR type of stuff that one can do to contribute. Better yet, bring crypto into the real world. He’s worked in it, knows things that people don’t. I tried to distinguish his greed from the actual promise of bitcoin. You can’t just opt out of the future of the financial system, I said. Gave an example of what Strike is doing with BTC payments, do something like that. Just like selling in-home water filters, bitcoin ATMs.

Todd didn’t ask how I was doing. Knew I’d tell him anyways. It was my call; he texted me asking about Kraken layoffs. FTX didn’t get me, saw the .com contagion and got everything I could off the .us site while I could. Lost a bit because of ACH transfer clearing. Should have known they were tight when they went from 10 to 15 day clearing. Figured it was because of fraud.

I lost most of my money in April, or should have anyways. If Perp hadn’t gotten hacked I would have been liquidated. Pretty much got lucky on that one, else I would have gone down with my fervid belief that sub 20K was unlikely. Silly me. So I got the fuck out of everything and to my hardwallets. I may be a bit fuzzy on the timing, but I think I may have seen Voyager go down — only some ADA and LINK, not much — and got my funds out of BlockFi ASAP.

But things are good. I’m fit and healthy, I got no money problems — yet. I told Todd I don’t care what else is going on, all I care is that one breath follows another. Everything else is fine with me. Sure, I fight with people and get upset about things, and my body will eventually fall apart, but right now is all I got to deal with, and right now is just perfect.

Yelling

The kids are grounded.

Their behavior lately has been so defiant that I’ve lost it. I don’t even want to catalog the offenses, but here’s a sampling of what happened: Younger was downstairs, Missus and Elder were off in their rooms following an earlier argument. I had been cleaning and cooking dinner for over an hour. I asked her to set the table: no. After much prodding I got her to do it — or did it myself — I asked her to pick up something off the stairs: no.

At some point I picked up a pad of paper on the counter and wrote Younger’s Naughty List, and then I wrote down the two things I had asked her to do. I told her that if I asked her to do something and she didn’t do it the first time I asked her to do it I was going to write it on this list and then I was going to send it to Santa. This certainly got her attention. She’s been more enthusiastic than anyone in the house about decorating; I’m still too occupied with the windows to worry about it.

So this had the opposite effect, broke her heart really, and sent her into this pattern that we get locked into all the time, which I’ll explain with another example: I ask her to do something; she doesn’t do it; I get mad and take away a privilege, candy, TV, whatever; she then tells me she’s not going to do what I asked because she’s not going to get her privilege. I’m not really sure what you call this behavior, but that’s usually how it goes.

But yesterday they both were on fair form. Just doing or not doing things at their leisure, based on their whim. No sir, had enough. So I revoked their playtime after school.

Elder is having a problem with school, forgetting her folders and turning in homework. She doesn’t actually

Break over

So the Thanksgiving break ends and a return to normalcy is upon us. The girls are off to school and I am back to work.

I took off Wednesday because the girls were home. I forget what we did; I probably made them go for a hike or a bike ride. I think we rode to the park to play with their friends, then rode to DQ for dogs and mini-Blizzards. I had Missus come pick up the girls so that I didn’t have to take the on the main drive. I left them and booked it home with out them and beat them back.

Thanksgiving Missus decided to cook a nineteen-pound turkey and about five side dishes. I stayed out of the kitchen. DT smoked a turkey in the smoker, the kids played all day, and we actually decided to have a real dinner with Momo and her boyfriend. I took off for a couple hours in the AM to go put my new bike to use, and went to the Mill.

I did the three bike trails, figured out how to use my bike and managed to make it through each one without stopping for rest. Then I took off through a tunnel and headed off into the wilderness. I had spied the tunnel, a wildlife causeway under a two lane highway. I took off down the trail, heavily wooded, paths covered in pine needles. The occasional tire ruts from the large utility vehicles that used the area. I ran into a couple of horseback riders on their tall, magnificent steeds, then I hurried along to catch up with a couple bikers. Father and daughter.

I talked with them for a while, mainly because I was unfamiliar with the area and needed to know where the trails headed. We left the woods and came on to a disused train track that was followed by utility towers and a gravel road which we rode. The gent I had run into worked at a bike shop across town, so I had lots of questions for him. We rode a few miles to a gate near another public road and I left them, pedaling my ass off and not stopping until I was back to the car. I rode twelve miles, almost thirteen.

Friday Missus worked again, so I took the girls out of the house to visit their aunt, who was being visited by her son, his wife, and their seven month old daughter. I wanted the girls to have as much time with their family as possible. So we went there for an hour, then I took the girls to the rock gym for some climbing. Fun time.

Saturday I got out of the house, determined to buy a balance bike for DT’s youngest. I had already given him one over a year ago, which was lost, and the boy still hadn’t learned how to ride. Everywhere I went was closed. Two bike shops and the Goodwill. I ran by the hardware store and bought some privacy film for our bedroom windows, then back to the house to put them up.

As I was opening the first box, I sliced open my middle finger on my hand with a brand new razor blade. Blood fell to the carpets immediately, and I’ve been doctoring the injury — Misuss has been an excellent nurse. The wound is right on the side of the knuckle and is hard to close, so it’s resulted in a quite a bit of blood. I think it’s closed now, but no guarantees on climbing this week.

Anyways the windows are going well. They’re all in, and look great. The installer is cleaning up today. We’ve been doing a lot of cleaning as well, and have hung up two blinds so far, even with my gimped hand. Screwing the brackets into the drywall is super-fucking hard, usually when two rotations from the wall. I did some experimenting with the drill depth, trying to figure out how I can do the rest of the house without draining myself.

I don’t even know if I want to do the rest of them or hire someone. The hardware is expensive. We’ve got thirteen windows in the house. I did two in three hours. Granted, one was a 60-inch, but I got shit to do and don’t want to spend the next six weekends putting these damn things up. And we haven’t even started with the blinds.

Well I’ve got some work to do. This update ran a bit longer than normal but I had a lot to cover, apparently.

Just when I was starting to enjoy things a bit

So there was a mass-shooting in Colorado Springs earlier this week and I had been trying to figure out how to acknowledge it in work Discord because we have team members there. So I hadn’t figured that out and then heard earlier from DT that there was one in Chesapeake earlier tonight.

I was so emotional that I was about to post in the work Discord “So we can add that to the 14 victims in Virginia Beach and the 35 at Tech and I’m so sick of this and anyways HAPPY THANKSGIVING” but I’m glad I didn’t.

Then I saw this and my mind is completely broken:

So I’m glad I have a blog where I can post ranty shit and I don’t need to give a fuck about who reads it.

We’ll see

Thanksgiving is in two days, and it looks like today will be the girls’ last day at school for the week. I thought they had Wednesday in class as well, but it appears not.

Elder’s class is having a Turkey Trot, and she has asked me to come in to help her class win an ice cream party by coming and doing laps around the track. Somehow I decided that I would ride my bike to her school (1.5m), then give her a solid half hour of running (2.5m), or ten laps to her class’s total, then ride back home. I told her if I did this that she would be mine and would acknowledge that she is mine and would act right. We’ll see. It’s 40 degrees out right now, which is a bit below my comfort zone, but I think I can handle it.

Speaking of turkey, Missus procured a nineteen pound bird for us, despite the fact that we are not hosting family. She started thawing it last night. I realized that most of it is going to go to waste, so I wanted to put it back in the freezer but she insists. I don’t know what we’re going to do, but DT is cooking a feast so we’ll likely go eat over there.

I’ve been making progress at work. Yesterday I spent most of the morning showing off my custom trained ML and generating prompts, then the rest of the day was working on SOL data from Flipside and manipulating it in Pandas. I’m starting to get the hang of it.

I’m trying to get the kids to work on the piano, starting them on some Christmas songs now so they might actually be ready for something by the end of the year.

Filling in

My my, where the week went. Let’s travel back in time a bit. Backward, as I fill in the details.

Yesterday was Daddy-Daughter day with Elder. We went to the bouldering gym (!) and stayed there for over two hours (!!). I think it as the first or second time that her and I had gone together, and we both really pushed it. I pushed her on some of the V0s to really try and work out her technique, and she did it. I also had some good routes, although I still have not finished the V4 that gave me trouble three weeks ago. My shoulder is still bothering me, but I think that will be less of a problem as the muscles develop. I can do three pull ups now, so I need to keep up the training in the garage.

We did a whole lot of yard work yesterday as well. Elder wanted to earn some extra money, so I let her push the lawnmower around the yard. It was slow-going for her, since the grass was pretty tall and I didn’t raise the mower deck up. We killed both batteries before the job was done, so we went out to the gym before we were done and finished it up when we got back.

We’ve been rewatching the Dragon Prince show. I didn’t realize they had two more seasons of it, and the girls don’t even remember the first pass through. So that’s our show, although we’ve been watching a couple other shows together. I’ve also been playing Riverbond with both of them, although Younger can do little more than follow us around.

Thanksgiving is this week, so we’ve got a short work-week. Missus has to work Friday, so I might have to plan something with the girls. But for now I’ve got work to do. Lot of data analysis.