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π day

Tuesday,  03/14/23  09:34 PM

Happy π day!  Although it was not a happy day for me, bad things happened, and I feel bad about them.  Sigh.

It's also Albert Einstein's birthday, quite a happy coincidence (what are the odds?  1 in 365 :), so we might call it e=mc2 day, too.

Looking back through old blog posts, this was an eventful date for me in many years.  Beware the ides of March! 

Wired: Pi is hiding everywhere.  It does show up in a surprising number of places, in math of course, but also physics. 

I like the picture - and it does contain a circle - but what does it have to do with pi hiding?  Anyway.

Jason Kottke: kottke.org is 25 years old today and I'm going to write about it.  "When I tell people about the first time I saw the Web, I sheepishly describe it as love at first sight. Logging on that first time, using an early version of NCSA Mosaic with a network login borrowed from my physics advisor, was the only time in my life I have ever seen something so clearly, been sure of anything so completely."  Jason was one of the original bloggers - a co-founder of the blogger service, with his then-girlfriend and later-wife Meg Hourihan - and continues to be a great one. 

I had a similar epiphany 'round about 1998, when I joined Digital Insight.  It's hard to express today how different it was in that world, with dial-up modems etc., to be able to communicate world-wide simply by sitting at a keyboard.  It's not hype to say the Internet has been the single most world-changing technology ever. 

Retweet fatigue: Robert Scoble is an interesting guy, a former blogger (he used to work at Microsoft, and used to give those outside of Microsoft great insight into what was happening there), sometime vlogger (he was early and big into video), and now a prolific tweeter.  But he's also a too-prolific re-tweeter.  Following him is like drinking from a fire house.  It would be so much better if he selected the most interesting tenth of all that stuff... 

This is one of the great things about Jason, he blogs only occasionally, but when he does, it is invariably interesting

Well: Open AI released Chat GPT 4.  How interesting that their description of this incremental advance is "safer and more useful.  Safer.  So apparently there was some feedback that Chat GPT 3 was somehow un-safe. 

Time and experiments will tell if they've deprogrammed some of the political correctness that was so grating in the previous version.

Harsh Makadia: I did GPT-3 vs GPT-4 side-by-side comparisons

How long before someone asks GPT-4 to do the comparison?  :) 

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