Productivity
😬
I brushed up on my techniques for efficient programming. It was crunch time at work again, another chance to ponder the age-old question, how do you manage risk under uncertainty? Namely, how do you manage the risk of blowing the deadline while making a digital mess under the uncertainty of how long it’ll take to solve the chain of problems you’ll progressively uncover? I settled on taking the most direct route I could easily think of and then consulting with my boss as soon as I hit a major snag. That worked out pretty well.
AI
😃
The chatbots both inspired and humbled me with their fictional weeknotes. On a whim during a walk I asked a few LLMs for a blog post each to see what ideas I could pick up on format and content. I was not prepared for their charm. Enjoy these entries from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and OLMo. Maybe once I have my blogging schedule under control, I can put more effort into style.
Literature
😎
I warmed up to poetry with Norton’s expansive anthology World Poetry. Inspired by the childhood reading habits of Katharine S. White, I picked up this anthology I’d bought over Christmas. (I’d started listening to White’s biography the week before, The World She Edited by Amy Reading. The ECPA conference had inspired picking up that one.) To make my way through the poetry I followed the pattern of my Bible reading plan and divided the book into seven sections, and each day I read about five pages of that day’s section. I’ve never been a big fan of poetry, but I found myself looking forward to the readings. A lot of it was just readable enough that making sense of the language was a fun puzzle, and the readings had an interesting variety of styles and subjects and moods.
Movies
🧐
Memento showcased a clever technique for representing short term memory loss. Inspired by looking into Saporta’s Composition No. 1, I decided to watch this nonlinear movie that, like most things, had been on my list for decades. It struck a nice balance between experiment and understandability, and it left enough mystery that fans are still discussing it.
