A fallen down tree in the Jura

On Being Told Not to Fear AI

Byrichard
Reading Time: 3 minutes

They love to say “Don’t fear AI”. They all say “AI is meant to help people with their work”, “AI is meant to be a personal assistant” and more. It’s not AI we fear. It is stakeholders, governing boards and accountants. They are the people we fear. Throw in Inhuman resources for good measure. We “fear” AI because they, all the groups mentioned above, want to use AI as an excuse to fire human beings because computers are theoretically, and only theoretically, cheaper. 

AI Isn’t Cheap

It turns out that AI requires a lot of computing power, and computing power requires buildings, passive cooling, solar panels and more. It also requires network resources and a trainer, to teach the AI to do what it’s meant to do. I listened to a podcast about an AI Dungeons and Dragons that requires enormous amounts of computing power. AI Dungeons and Dragons requires a lot more than a top spec personal computer. It requires an array of computers. Is that progress?

Learning Prompt Engineering

When I was experimenting with building apps with AI I saw the limitations of AI. AI is great, but learning the art of “prompt engineering” is key. What is prompt engineering? It’s the art of learning to give instructions to an AI system so that it gives you the results you desire, at the quality you desire. It’s about iterating through prompts, until you get the AI to do precisely what you want. 

Keeping Things Simple

A huge effort is being made to get AI to respond to humans as if it was intelligent, but that intelligence, to some degree is an illusion, because it has to learn from millions of documents, over a period of time, and people continually have to give it feedback, to improve it. 

Reinforcement Learning

This is an interesting video about how AI learns. 

And Finally

As a media asset manager you learn to organise information so that it is easy to find. To a large degree that’s what AI does. It gathers a huge amount of data, and then, over time, we teach it to give us the results we expect when we ask one question or another. 

What this means is that we can spend billions on teaching AI to give us useful information, or we could spend time on writing more useful documentation, where the answers we seek are easier to find. We don’t need AI to replace humans. We need humans to organise information more intuitively. There’s a reason you come across Google Fu as a term. 

As I invest time in learning Hugo I sometimes find myself asking chatGPT questions, when I get stuck, because I can’t find the documentation I want. Sometimes I get useful answers, but at other times it is unproductive. 

The Real Value of AI

For me the real value of AI is not in helping us ask questions and get answers, it is in automating tasks that require humans a lot of time. Transcription is a useful feature of AI because it can automatically transcribe text, and then a human can double check that it is correct. AI can then automatically translate the transcription, and a human can go over the translation, and tweak it, and those tweaks can be fed back into the AI. 

With Media Asset Management AI is useful too. DV video tapes were 63 minutes long, and 63 minutes takes a long time for a human to watch, keyframe, keyword and more. AI could do the same thing within minutes, and then a human can qualify the result and tweak it where needed. 

AI should also be used for proofreading, rather than writing. AI can be taught all grammatical rules, and ensure that what is written makes sense. It could even be trained to recognise where people reading from a teleprompter would stumble, and other suggestions to make the text flow. 

Conclusion

In a rational world AI is just a tool that people can use to streamline their workflow, catch errors, speed up tasks like transcription and more. The drawback is that it gives an excuse for accountants, governing boards, stockholders and others an excuse to say “cut out the humans, let AI do the work.” Plenty of tech companies have done just that. It’s not that people fear AI, but that people don’t trust those in charge of budgets not to make immoral and irrational decisions, by firing the humans, that generate value in the first place. 

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Estimated Delivery Date 03 Jul 2007

Byrichard

If that’s true then my MBP is waiting for me in Switzerland but I’m stuck in London for another week before i can go back and get it. Tonight I’ll find out whether a note was left by the delivery company and soon I’ll start up the computer for the first time.

I’m looking forward to that. Once it’s home it’s home and the suspense is no longer there.

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PHP from the Command Line

Byrichard

Recently I learned that PHP has a built in server. You don’t need xampp or any of the other solutions. All you need is terminal open, have the current directory be the one with the PHP files you want to serve and type: “php -S localhost:8000”


This might sound obvious to some but it took years for me to come across this. When you have to install xampp or other solutions you need to dedicate HD space, run the servers and more.


With just one line in terminal we can start the server and start experimenting with and learning PHP. With this you can be up and running within seconds or minutes, rather than hours, and it is flexible.


I’m sharing this with you now because I wish that at least once course had mentioned it. This is the simplest and most elegant solution I have found. Best of all it’s free.


For more info: https://www.php.net/manual/en/features.commandline.webserver.php

On Being Asked Why I Wear Two Watches
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On Being Asked Why I Wear Two Watches

Byrichard

During the Via Ferrata I did on Sunday I was asked why I wear two watches and I answered with a joke before giving the serious answer that I wear two watches at once because I want the data from both watches. I was asked why I need the data from both watches and that’s where there is a change that is happening at the moment.

A Waning in Garmin Watches

By wearing the F-91 for a few days and wearing the Garmin watch less and less I find that my desire for heart rate, steps, recovery and other things to be recoreded is declining over time. I wore the Garmin for the Via Ferrata because I wanted the data. In the end I just looked at the temperature data and not much else.

Over a period of weeks I think I have weaned myself off of the desire to quantify everything I do, to several different services. I’m wearing a casio on my left wrist, as the primary watch, and the Apple watch as a secondary watch on the right wrist. For weeks, or even months, I have been keeping data from walks but I don’t feel the need to check that data at the end of walks, runs or other sports. I’m happy just to do things.

Dependencies

Both Garmin, and Apple, made such a huge effort to get us to wear them twenty four hours a day, and work towards challenges, that they have turned me off of wearing them. They “punish” us for not walking, they “punish” us for not keeping a never-ending streak. According to the Apple watch I walked three hours out of five so far. It feels like we’re filling an addiction rather than getting interesting data.

Not the Only One

Funnilly I was not the only one wearing two fitness trackers. Someone else had a fitbit and a Garmin watch but because one was a band and the other was a watch it was less obvious. I suspect that it may become more common for geeks to wear two watches in the near future.

And Finally

If we want to we can use hand held gps devices and we can use our phones as GPS trackers. In my experience relying on phones as GPS trackers is likely to result in incomplete data. If you put a phone into battery saver mode while tracking you may lose the GPS track, including with Sports tracker, among other apps.

During the pandemic I could wear two watches without it being a problem. Now that I am slowly going back into normal society I have to choose whether to wear two watches or not, whether to be normal, or not.

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I’m A Martial Artist Typist.

Byrichard

Sometimes you hear about writers and how they fall in love with their machines. I think I’ve begun to love my laptop. I’ve just spent an extraordinary amount of time writing so many words over such a period that the laptop has use marks.

If you look at the trackpad you see that the right side is smoother. If you look at the keys they’re also smooth with use. The space bar has smoothed out where I always press with my thumb. There’s a dark mark where I rest both my hands when I’m typing. The monitor shows signs of degradation.

The repetitive motion of the fingers has developed muscle reflexes that mean that as I sit in one place from which I see people walk by I can observe people and continue writing at the same time. In effect I’ve been touch typing for a year and every computer develops a certain amount of time for the reflex to be perfect. I’m a martial artist at the art of typing 😉

Laptops are great because they become such a big part of your life. You use them every day, from the bad times to the good times, from nice locations to some of the worst. They’re there whatever the weather. They’ve got all your music, all your photographs, possibly some of your video projects and more.

They’ve also got all the software you need from day to day work practices. They’re reflective of the person that uses them.

Apple and Dongles

Apple and Dongles

Byrichard

Several years ago I broke my most important rule. Never take a laptop with you that you are not willing to carry at all times. I had a Mac Book Pro stolen and this was extremely frustrating. The reason for which it was frustrating is that this Mac Book from still had normal USB ports, an SD card reader and more. New Mac Book Pros have four USB-3/Thunderbolt 3 connectors.

Thunderbolt 3 Nuissance

Some people love this, because it’s smaller, lighter, and faster but I hated the move because it meant that all my hard drives needed a dongle to work. All my charging cables for watches, cameras and more needed a dongle to work. You need a dongle for a wired connection and you simply always need a dongle. What’s worse is that you don’t need one dongle. You need two or three, or more.

Easier to Lose

You need to keep track of the dongles. Sometimes they’re in one room, or drawer, and if you use them every few days or weeks they like to vanish so that instead of just plugging in a device you need to find the dongle, plug the USB cable to the dongle and the dongle to the laptop.

Fast Drives but Slow Dongles

Yesterday I plugged in a USB C drive to one port, and a USB C flat adaptor drive to the apple dongle with the other. The transfer speed was much faster but I didn’t test whether the difference was due to the dongle I was using, the Apple dedicated USB dongle or the other third party option for most drives.

I should do a read/write speed test with both dongles to see if there is a difference between dongles, or I’m using slow, old drives. As I write this I’m transferring 900 gigabytes from one drive to another and it will take “about 4 hours”.

Bring Pi

Linux reads Mac OS Journaled and APFS drives when configured. Instead of blocking a mac in time and space ato run for hours it makes sense for a Pi to do this chore. A Pi is not fast. It doesn’t matter if you’re moving files from an APFS volume to an ExFat or Ext4 drive.

Legacy Devices

Over the years I have had USB A, B and C devices with various adapters. I have also had Firewire 400 and 800 drives, as well as Thunderbolt 2. The firewire drives and Thunderbolt two drives become unusable due to the move away from one standard to another. Luckily drives often come with two or three standards, and the aim should be to migrate from old drives to new drives every few years. Old drives can be backups, and new drives can be the working, drives, until they are retired to backup status in turn.

 And Finally

In the good old days I would plug my drives straight into the computer and move data between drives. Now that I need to go from drive, to USB-C cable to dongle, to computer, between two or more drives I find that transfer speeds are very slow and I suspect that it’s the third party USB-C dongle that is slowing things down. Tomorrow I can recover my second dongle and test to see whether my suspicion is correct or not.

Experimenting with an Electric Foot Scooter

Experimenting with an Electric Foot Scooter

Byrichard

Decades ago, by now, someone decided that they needed to make something like a scooter that could stand by itself, and that people could ride. they created the segway and for several thousand francs you could buy one. Some people did, but many did not. Several decades later someone else decided “Let’s put the wheels one behind the other like with a foot scooter. From then on the human being on the scooter would balance it.

Segways were a brilliant idea, but they provided a solution that was more expensive than it needed to be. The idea of electric foot scooters is an excellent one because it reduces the price and the barrier to entry. It’s also to take on public transport.

The one I have has a range of about 20km and a weight of about 13kg according to the instructions. It’s heavy to carry but in theory you lift it onto a train, and once you’re in a train station you put it down and push it beside you. It is not allowed to ride scooters in train stations.

Speed

Scooters are limited to 20km/h in Switzerland. That’s as fast as you’re allowed to go, so getting one that goes faster is moot. Electric scooters don’t start when you push the throttle. You need to be going at 2-3km/h before the motor kicks in and accelerates to 20 kilometres per hour.

Once you get to twenty kilometres per hour cruise control kicks in and it stays at 20km/h. If you go down a slope it stops pushing so hard, and if you start to climb it will detect that the speed has decreased and give more thrust, until it is at 20 km/h uphill.

Comfort

The electric scooter is a platform you stand on. I tend to find that my legs get tired because I tend to favour one leg more than the other. It also feels quite slow when you’re going on flat terrain. It’s slower than a bike so in theory a bike would be more interesting than an electric scooter, especially for people that can reach 30km/h and keep that speed.

The Niche

The niche of the electric scooter is to provide people with an alternative to the car for short journeys. Instead of walking at 5km/h you can take the scooter at 20km/h for a quick shopping trip two kilometres away. It is also easy to take onto trains and fold, and place as luggage, rather than as a bike so you can save on cost. A bike costs half the price of a human on public transport.

It is also practical when you visit people, or when you commute to work. You can take it from home to the train station, without waiting for buses, and from the train station to the office, without waiting for a tram. You save time, and money.

A Petrol Scooter Replacement

I was really tempted to get an electric scooter that could be sat on, until I saw the range, and the price, and then I changed my mind. I believe that the electric foot scooter is a great compromise because it gives a lot of flexibility for short trips, but also offers ease of use for taking on trains, buses, or trams.

Range

Although advertised of having a range of 20 kilometres I believe they can do more, especially if the landscape allows. In switzerland you’re either going uphill or downhill so for part of the journey the motor will not be needed. I have tried to trips and neither used more than one or two bars of charge.

Not Replaced

It does not replace the daily walk. This can still be an integral part of our day. The electric scooter is meant to get us from A to B for errands, or work, and at lunch time, or in the evening, we can leave the scooter at home, or in the office, while we go for a walk.

Limitations

I used the scooter to go to an outdoor workout location yesterday and it felt fine, except when I saw clumps of dirt or branches, pinecones and other objects on the road. I made sure to avoid those.

Another limitation is that it has no indicators so it is hard to indicate where you are going. Removing a hand from the handle bars feels dangerous and unstable for indicating.

On the journey back I went along a road that was in poor condition and here too I felt the limitations of the scooter. Because it has no, or minimal shock absorbers I was worried that if I take such surfaces too often I will shake the wheel connections to bits, like I did with a manual foot scooter.

You can get scooters with shock absorbers and more but they cost two to four times the cost of the one I got.

Opportunities.

It can be used for shopping, especially if you go every two to three days, but also for recycling if you go regularly. Instead of waiting for a car to be full you can fill a backpack, go to recycle, and then head home without taking up much space on the road.In this context I would use agricultural roads when possible.

And Finally

Walking is the cheapest form of tranport but it takes time. Electric bikes are great but they cost money. Electric foot scooters fill the gap between both forms of transport. They are small and light enough to transport in cars or on trains, but with the range to go twenty or more kilometres on a single charge. If the battery runs out then walking and scooting are still options, by foot.

I bought one of the cheapest models to see whether I liked using a scooter or not. I spent about 240 CHF.

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