The finger-wagger is usually just me finger-wagging at myself

Two exhausted parents with screaming kids in the background and kids up to hijinks like dumping out Lego putting a bowl of spaghetti on their head and chasing other kids around

Jan 28, 2023

A reminder that having fun is possible

It’s hard finding fun - and especially joy - in life. Family is frequently just about getting through the every day grind and fighting to have some time to “hear myself thinking.” Even getting together with friends can seem like planning an all hands meeting.

I have this picture on my desk to remind me that fun is possible, with family and friends.

In one reading, this is a moralizing picture condemning what’s going in there - it’s not like it’s all virtuous behavior. You have to be careful with some of the Dutch Master on that, though: it’s not always clear what they think. And it’s even less clear if we should give a shit after all these centuries. Indeed, when it comes to the grind and chaos of a family of five, Beware of Luxury is also a reminder that things can be in absolute chaos and you can choose to embrace and enjoy it, smiling through-it instead of being an uptight finger-wagger and getting all upset about the life you chose and the life that chose you. The finger-wagger is usually just me finger-wagging at myself!

This one that we have hung above our kitchen table is a little less “licentious” and has less “improper behavior.” Its message (printed on that sheet of paper) is even a little more inspiring: As the Old Sing, So shall the Young Pipe. Again, we see a chaotic house (are they using a rug for a table cloth? How’d that pan get on the floor?). But the parents are happy, there’s singing and music. The kids see this, and they follow along, hopefully not even realizing they’re sitting in such chaos nor stressed out about the daily grind of making sure the cookware is clean and put away.

Whatever. They both look like a better life than all the work and self-finger-wagging that goes into having everything orderly.

Midjourney: two exhausted parents with screaming kids in the background and kids up to hijinks like dumping out Lego putting a bowl of spaghetti on their head and chasing other kids around

How many programmers do you reckon you need for that?

Part of the get the AI to write a digital transformation strategy yesterday was estimating the time and budget it’d take for various software projects.Here is a sort of interesting benchmark for staffing a software strategy: “That year, Visa developed a tokenization service that secured cards on devices by replacing the 16-digit primary account number traditionally printed on the card with a proxy card number that would be of little use in the hands of a fraudster. By driving higher authorisation and lower fraud rates, it has proven to be a very useful innovation. The development effort required over 1,000 developers, consuming the company’s development capacity for almost a year.”

Wastebook

“Asleep with tiredness or asleep through inebriation?” Here.
Catching up on old London Ear streams, and they have some Christmas music in the Dec 15th, 2022 one. No matter what time of year, Christmas music starts to calm me down, thinking about that big nothing of time between mid December and after Jan 1st. (Also, good opening song selections in that one.)

Relevant to your interests

It’s an “AI corner” this episode:

Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts - “It seems like there’s almost no limit to how good GPT could get at this.” // Actual programming instead of just promoting. // Also with some rough ROI calculation: “This is the same process that a junior analyst would use to arrive at the answer, in this case it takes 15 seconds and costs $1 in credits vs $50 and 1 hour for the analyst. You have a LOT of leeway there to use even more crazy prompt pipelines before the ROI gets bad.” // As alluded to at the end there, the other take away is that you have $49 more to spend to make it even better.
CNET’s AI Journalist Appears to Have Committed Extensive Plagiarism - Google really needs to figure out how to just dump crap content. It must be hard. // “CNET and Red Ventures deployed the AI system and started blasting its articles out to the site’s colossal audience without ever really scrutinizing its output. It wasn’t just that the architects of the program missed obvious factual errors, but that they appear never to have checked whether the system’s work might have been poached. And to be fair, why would they? As The Verge reported in a fascinating deep dive last week, the company’s primary strategy is to post massive quantities of content, carefully engineered to rank highly in Google, and loaded with lucrative affiliate links.”
Meanwhile, What are the ethics of casual-content creation?: BuzzFeed Announces Plans to Use OpenAI to Churn Out Content - ‘Peretti said that OpenAI’s text-generation software will be used to enhance the company’s infamous millennial-bait quizzes, which have such pithy headlines as “Pick a trope for your rom-com,” or “Tell us an endearing flaw you have.” The AI’s role would be to create personalized responses that users would want to share on social media, according to the memo reviewed by the WSJ.’

Logoff

Writing these newsletters has been a great source of joy this year. It’s also fun to see the little upward trickle of subscribers:

Hopefully it’ll get to 500 pretty soon.

Anyhow, I hope you’re having fun too.