Welcome back to another week of content

My new Oura ring showed up. The data presentation layer built for that product is different from what Fitbit uses by a good margin. I’m still adjusting to trying to better understand the metrics. Within the packaging information it was noted that it might take 2 weeks for the tracking to become more personalized. So far it appears like I did order the correct size ring and that things are working well enough after 2 nights of sleep. 

This weekend was a very productive one. At the start of the weekend, I had no content in the backlog for my Substack series The Lindahl Letter. Now I have three weeks of posts ready to go. That means that content is ready to publish until Friday, March 17, 2023. That means that a little bit of productivity this upcoming weekend will help push things back into a backlog of 5 weeks of content in review which is a good place to be overall. Writing posts for 112 straight weeks is a pretty good pattern or routine. 

Recently I have considered letting the writing projects fall off my to do list, but that feeling is normally superseded by the need to get back to work. For the most part that need to get back to work will sustain the momentum needed to keep things on the right track moving forward. Part of having that 5 year writing plan is to know where to focus that attention and energy over time. A setback would be problematic, but it would be something that a recovery plan could remedy. I used to write a lot more content every day than I sit down and create at my current state. 

Earlier this year I had wanted to make this blog a more personal place to drop thoughts and pull things together. That writing objective was not really achieved. For the last couple of decades this particular writing format has been more stream of consciousness than anything else and it has fundamentally lived up to its name as a functional journal. I can sit down with the intent to journal some thoughts and that writing inherently becomes more functional in nature. Last week was the first week in a long time that I sat down and wrote a missive every weekday. This week could make it two weeks in a row. That would be a good start to getting back into the groove of daily writing for the purposes of a blog. 

I did login to the OpenAI ChatGPT instance yesterday and got it to write an introduction to AI ethics book one chapter at a time. The language model spit out a working title of, “AI Ethics: Navigating the Challenges and Opportunities of Artificial Intelligence.” That work product ended up being roughly 11 chapters and 25,000 words. That thought did occur to me to include in the upcoming Substack post for week 113, “Structuring an introduction to AI ethics.” I probably will have enough time on Saturday morning to edit that content down enough to record it for the podcast. That could be 30 or more minutes of content, but it might be interesting. It would have to be heavily caveated at the start that the content was edited by me, but wholesale generated by the OpenAI large language model based on the response to a series of prompts. Releasing that content directly was my first consideration, but it is probably more responsible to edit the content and provide commentary where the model was right or wrong. 

Day 2 working with the OpenAI Codex Beta

Earlier this morning I did some work with the OBS application to record my efforts to mess around with the OpenAI Codex Beta. For the most part I have been working in the Codex JavaScript Sandbox asking the API to return things related to fractals and a bit of searching out some encryption related elements. The lossless video that was recorded produced about 30 gigabytes of AVI video file for five minutes of recording. That is an epic amount of data for such a short video. I’m still not entirely sure why the massive difference exists between indistinguishable quality and lossless. It really is about a 10x difference in file size between the two recording methods. Uploading that 5 minute video to YouTube took about 2 hours and the crunching that is about to happen in the background over on the YouTube side of the house will be epic. I’m going to record a few more little videos this weekend and it’s going to generate a huge amount of video data.

Day 1 working with the OpenAI Codex Beta

Welcome to day 1 of my efforts working with the OpenAI Codex Beta.

I’m starting out logged into https://beta.openai.com/dashboard

The first thing I noticed is that my interface is a little different from what I watched on Machine Learning Street Talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CG_I3vMHn4&t

Tim and Yannic are working with the Codex JavaScript Sandbox. My beta dashboard only takes me to the Playground area where you can experiment with the API. 

Well a couple quick Google searches on that one and it was user error on my part that kept me away from the sandbox. I did not know enough to go directly to the sandbox: https://beta.openai.com/codex-javascript-sandbox

I downloaded a copy of “The Declaration of Independence” and saved it as a PDF on my desktop. My big plan for tonight is to make an encryption application and have it encrypt that file from my desktop. It’s not a super ambitious plan, but I think it is a good place to start.