I went down to the UPS Store and had my fingerprints taken. It was an odd experience, both psychically and physically. They have a presumably high tech scanning system that was repeatedly foiled by its inability to present a reasonable UI to the worker, the legal requirement that they, not I, place my own fingers awkwardly on a sheet of glass, and the need to take an oddly large number of scans. And then doing so at a place where most people drudge to ship packages or check PO Boxes, like some secret alternate existence of the same liminal location, a dual place like The City and The City. Some privatized privacy pryer. Records collected for you wholesale.
Anyhow, weird experience, and only the first two of the seven labors of Callimachus. Next up: traipsing to an unmarked door in the first 45 minute window in the first week of the new year where I can prove an absence through historical reckoning. Bureaucracy is a sort of magic spell. A recipe of labors. Let’s keep cookin’.
Inputs
1: On the ocean of recommendations, I watched Saltburn. Which I’m very glad was via streaming, alone, and not among others or in a public viewing.
I have a significant level of empathic twinge to me, so watching awkward takes a lot of effort. I must have paused the movie two dozen times, screwing up the nerve to delve further into the experience. Mostly that’s Barry Keoghan, who is insanely talented and yet makes me uncomfortable to watch, just from his sheer force of presence. Add to that Richard Grant, who in my mind only ever plays someone on the verge of or actively experiencing a manic episode, plus the weight of posh judgment throughout and the aural distance of the accents, and it was beautiful, uncomfortable, and an experience to behold. Also, as everyone recommends, go in cold.
2: Caught the latest edition of Why Is This Interesting, which covers AI and Chain Of Thought Prompting vs Standard Prompting, in which an AI is given a more thorough instruction set to follow through rather than asked an open prompt, leading to it showing its work and more accurately arriving at an answer.
WITI looks at it through the lens of Japanese hospitality and the culture of “omotenashi”, which involves “(B)ringing your full, authentic self to serve a guest and doing so in a humble, non-ostentatious way. It is about a lack of pretense and showing no expectation of reciprocity.” The article points to a Nikkei article about the practice and how it can inform AI.
I tend to think of it more along the lines of being asked, as in educational settings, to show one’s work. While that instruction in school can feel like an imposition, an extra weight of baggage around providing an answer to a problem, what it actually does is flense open the work of arriving at that answer, so that logical or mechanical inconsistency can be seen in situ rather than obfuscated beyond the veil of the result.
Beyond this, it focuses the attention on what is often the more important result in many situations, understanding how to draw a conclusion from inference, logical reasoning, and specific effort to find a result, rather than the sheer value of the result itself.
Regardless, that AI models drawing from neuronal connection and trained on human outputs find benefit from human tasks of stepping through problems is a curious insight.
3: Bowl Week continues apace, so watched a bunch of background football with no rooting interest nor emotional attachment besides the general ennui of watching the denouement of another season of college football. It’s the end of a number of eras, the ellipsis to close out the year, and the victory lap before the victors take their lap. Here’s to college football. May we enjoy what remains before the curtains fall and the band plays us out.
Projects In Progress
Webapp: Still poking at headless CMS systems, seeing if I can make ’em bark.
