My little space in the interwebs.
Today I noticed that Gmail will help with composing an email, or edit/rewrite an email after it is written. I tried the rewrite feature and it wasn’t terrible. The AI preferred “reach out” to my preference of “contact” (e.g., I’m contacting you regarding…) in typical business correspondence. It also added some enthusiasm that I didn’t…
This video explains one aspect of AI (generative AI mostly) that keeps me from worrying too much that the “robots will take our jobs”. The contrast the Dickerson draws is between knowing and understanding: AI will never understand anything. In statistics, an AI tool could someday perform a thorough data analysis. Maybe even perform it…
(A follow up to this post. ) The development of AI tools for performing statistical analysis and training machine learning models is concerning to me. Will the tools hit a point where a user can simply state an analysis (like a prompt in a LLM), provide some data, and the AI will take over? Can…
I was sent a mathematical formula for the estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) by a colleague (the medical/biological details and background of the formula are unnecessary). He copied the formula from an AI summary from a search engine (Google I think). A screen shot is below. The formula he sent is related to a formula…
Now on Bluesky.
This paper made the news a few years ago, suggesting that purchasing experiences provides greater in the moment happiness over purchasing a material possession. I found papers on this topic going back many years. Here is one (the link to the pdf is here) from 2009 supporting this hypothesis. As with many things in human…
In the summer of 2005 I became the owner of black lab mix from a coworker. Or she took ownership of me. Either way the dog was free. Her name was Lucy and she was a great dog. A very good girl. The kind of dog that makes it hard to get another, since no…
I’m currently reading the book On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction by William Zinsser. As someone who is remediating his writing after a lifetime of neglect it is an amazing book. Even if you just read the first few chapters you’ll learn much. To start: strive for simplicity. I am a wordy…
My latest favorite podcast is Navel Gazing by John Dickerson. I would recommend listening from the beginning, but I found this episode about todo lists like I was connecting with a long lost twin. I never thought I would hear a reference to the AlphaSmart word processor in a podcast, let alone 43 folders and…