Thought Bricks

I just finished 1688 - The First Modern Revolution by Steve Pincus. I picked it up on a lark in a cool used book store in Fredricksburg last month. Prior to reading this book, I knew basically nothing about The Glorious Revolution that turfed James II out and replaced him with William and Mary. The take of this book is that The Glorious Revolution was a bigger impact than commonly thought and was a pivotal moment in the creation of the modern state in England.

I’ve been using cmus to play music on my Ubuntu system. It’s worked out well. I don’t have muscle memory on the commands yet, but I like the simplicity. I’ve got a decent sized collection of music that I ripped from CDs in the 1990s and 2000s so most of the music I’ve been listening is what I was listening to then. Chemical Brothers, Cypress Hill, Daft Punk, Death Cab for Cutie, The Decemberists, etc.

I recently took the Google Generative AI Leader certification test as part of a job requirement to up skill in AI. I’m not sure of my score yet as it takes up to a week to get your results, but I felt very confident during the test. One of the reasons I felt good about the test is that I used AI to study for it. I uploaded all of the course documents, the test objectives, and the study guide to a Google NotebookLM.

Last time I was writing a post, I was facing all sorts of weird issues with the console. Lines would break in the middle of the screen, entering commands would sometimes leave me without a prompt, etc. Weird stuff. Today, I figured out what I had probably forgotten since I was last doing this. Don’t use the incus console <instance> command if you want to interact with the system. It just does weird stuff like what I described above.

It’s been about nine months since I’ve written any posts. With that long a layoff, I’m not surprised that I couldn’t remember how Hugo works. Especially in the context of the Incus container that I’m running it in. First things first, I ran a apt update && apt upgrade on the container. Then, did a git pull to retrieve any updates I’d made on a different system. Those things are pretty simple.

On my winter break reading list, I had Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI by Ethan Mollick. If I were really following the advice of the book, I would have AI take a first cut at this review which I could then finalize. That would be a pretty good way to do it. As Mr. Mollick points out, current LLMs are excellent at creating summaries. However, as befits the logo at the bottom of this page, I’ll do it the old fashioned way.

I completed my 2024 goal of 3600 miles of combined running and cycling today. I’ll probably get a few more miles in, but the target has been reached. I envisioned doing about 500 miles of running plus 3100 of cycling but some injuries slowed me down on the running part and ended up with 347 miles of running and 3256 of riding as of today. You can really tell when I got hurt as my running miles plummeted in August.

I migrated most of my internet search to DuckDuckGo years ago when I switched to Firefox as my main browser and only rarely use Google search so I haven’t noticed the steady decline in utility reported by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols in The Register. DuckDuckGo works well for me, but I was intrigued by Mr. Vaughan-Nichols description of Perplexity so I thought I’d give it a try and see if AI is really a killer app for search.

I’ve been reading a few heady books recently. One of those books is Playing with Reality: How Games Shape Our World. by Kelly Clancy. The Economist has a comprehensive review of the book with a lot of details. Playing with Reality was very interesting and I learned great deal. Initially, I had thought it was going to be about the history of games and how they had impacted thought. That is definitely in there, but there is so much more to it than that.

I’ve usually had good luck with the books from the best books list on The Economist. This year is no exception. I’ve recently read two of the books on the list: Playing with Reality and Slow Productivity and have started another, Co-Intelligence. So far, I’ve not been disappointed. I’ll start with Slow Productivity by Cal Newport and cover the others in future posts. I found it to be quite interesting. I see so much silly faux productivity out there; meetings just for sake of meetings, people answering IMs and emails at all hours but adding little clarity or insight to the discussion at hand, lack of time and space for focused effort, etc.