Weeknote for 8/13/2023

Art

😐

I learned Blender’s basic interface from the first few chapters of Blender for Dummies. That’s as far as I could get in a week. I maybe could’ve gotten into some modeling with Learning Blender’s more tutorial approach, but I felt a little more at home in the other book. While I may not have created any art, I did benefit from the thoughts Blender sparked on how I could design my information modeling software. But I do want to come back to 3D modeling before too long.

Writing

:thinking:

The Science of Storytelling felt like a kindred spirit. Will Storr took all the ideas about psychology that have accumulated in my mind over the years and used them to explain the shape of stories we find compelling. And it got me to ask questions like, what’s my sacred flaw that could be challenged if I were a character in a story—my fundamental strategy for maintaining control of my life?

Life maintenance

😐

This week and the next are for my seasonal housekeeping, the time when I catch up on my maintenance. But this week is really for taking a break and hopefully fixing my sleep schedule.

AI

😎

Simon Willison’s talk “Catching up on the weird world of LLMs” is a good explainer on ChatGPT and similar bots (video, annotated transcript). In an engaging, accessible manner he outlines the history of the technology, its issues, and things you can do with it. Simon’s blog is one of the sources I follow for AI updates and commentary.