Notes for May 22-28

I can blame Zelda (and books) for not having achieved much outside work this week, but I did manage to get a few things done.

• After a few encouraging tests, began retrobrighting an old, yellowed A1243 104(?)-key wired keyboard. Of course it started raining after the first batch of keys was left outside to soak in UV, and cleaning the key pits is a fiddly affair requiring tweezers and pins to scrape out gunk, but it is the kind of relaxing, precision manual work I can do piecemeal throughout the day.
• Toyed with a few console emulators with a mind towards building a gaming equivalent of my Data for the Ages project (and yes, Nintendo, I’m looking at you–I would very much like to play some games many years into the future). I seem to have decided to re-play Breath of the Wild again from scratch, so at this pace I should be done with both Switch games by… 2030.

OpenAI meets reality day, with a heavy dose of contrasting hype.

• Watched the Build keynotes past dinner. Little of it was actually a surprise, but I find the commentary fascinating.
• Spent a fair amount of time trying to get gpt-3.5-turbo to do my bidding. Whatever people say, using LLMs to accomplish anything deterministically is a pain. Chaining calls makes it ungodly slow, the context window is too small for most interesting problems, and they just plain can’t code properly.

Mostly work, even off-hours.

• Watched a few more Build keynotes. Missed one or two that I ended up watching on-demand, of which I recommend:
• State of GPT for factual information,
• Scott and Mark learn to code for fun,
• and this one for realistic expectations towards GitHub Copilot.

Took another stab at the yawning vastness of my Unsorted folder.

Was rummaging about in it when I found this hilariously intense little GIF that I think needs preserving, because apparently the original meme is 20 years old:

Updated my AI page with a bunch of things I’ve been toying with.

Mostly offline/TV watching weekend.

• Revisited my Phoenix setup, which surprisingly works OK with StageManager (it’s just weird that the window hints float mid-screen in the position windows would otherwise be).
• Looking at the new features from recent releases, I intend to tweak it a bit further (it’s that time of the year, I guess). Right now I wish it could do type-ahead search for windows and bind Caps Lock (the first seems doable with the most recent release, but the second still requires a separate app).
• Updated my Linux sandboxes and did a little general housekeeping. Using libheif to view HEIC images still seems to require some finagling.
• Tried to figure out why my Lenovo started freezing (I suspect recent Fedora updates are to blame).