Archive: March 14, 2023

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Iditarod day nine (heading Nome!)

Tuesday,  03/14/23  10:54 AM

Welcome to day nine of the 2023 Iditarod; today we will have a winner, and unless something weird happens, it will be Ryan Redington, with 6 dogs left in his team!  (the others have been left at checkpoints for the "sprint" to the finish...)

Congrats to him, that move to keep going right through Elim paid off.  He's now through Safety and just a few hours from Nome:


note: predict times enabled, and sorted by predicted finish

I'm proud of the predict algorithm; it's had Ryan finishing in first at about 1:00PM today for several days.  Looks like Peter Kaiser will outsprint Riche Diehl for 2nd.  Matt Hall is solidly in 4th.  And Kelly Maixner has pulled ahead of Jessie Holmes for 5th.  Mille Porsild is in 8th right now, finishing her "8" in White Mountain, and the tracker predicts she will finish 7th, just ahead of Eddie Burke, who will be top rookie.  The tracker predicts Jessie Holmes will finish 9th despite being the 7th to leave White Mountain.  (Based on average speed and run/rest times.)  And rookie Hunter Keefe with round out the top ten.  This all will be fun to watch, early tomorrow morning...

Ryan Redington and team, in the Nome stretch

Heh ... from the Iditarod Outsider

 

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?  :) 

 

interestingness

Tuesday,  03/14/23  10:09 PM

Do you have a stock "question you like to ask"?  I do (but that's not it :); mine is "what's interesting?"

I've managed a lot of people over the years, and conducted a lot of one-on-one meetings, and it's good to have a way to get the conversation started ... :)

I asked DALL-E "create an image which illustrates the concept of interesting-ness; this is the result :)

I claim interestingness comes from surprise.  We find things interesting if they contradict or modify our preconceptions, if they fill in the blanks between our defaults, if they expand our understanding, if they are unexpected.  We are curious creatures and curiosity is that desire for interesting-ness.

Conversely, things which confirm what we already know are uninteresting.  The expected is not compelling.

A related concept is attention.  We give our attention to things we find interesting.  Attention can be thought of as how we choose to spend time: We invest our time in interesting things.

For this reason, being interesting is a matter of communicating unexpected or contradictory things.  This has to do with the audience; what do they know and expect.  When you meet someone you don't know much about them and you have few expectations, so almost everything about them is interesting.  As you get to know them better, their degree of ongoing interesting-ness will be related to their capacity to surprise you :)

I find the whole concept of interestingness to be quite interesting!

 
 

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