Coding matters: What’s in my chocolate?

Photo of Bengal cat lying on top of a keyboard and mouse.

You may have heard the parable of the two wolves. The story is about two wolves fighting. One wolf represents good or positive behaviour. The other wolf represents evil or negative behaviour. The one that wins is the one you feed.

What's on the menu?

I like this parable as it applies to perspective.

If we focus on negative stuff, our perspective on life becomes negative. That's why I read only a few news headlines a day. It is repetitive and depressing and it affects us. We think we are objective and intelligent, but we all have a skewed view of reality. (I shared this thought in I'll take the purple pair.)

Instead of two wolves, I like the idea of a single shape-changing wolf. Depending on what you feed it, it turns into a vicious, violent creature, or a soothing, angelic something. (I've been reading too much urban fantasy again.)

This week, I'm feeding the wolf something light and entertaining.

AI and chocolate

The current and future impact of AI on our lives can be terrifying. Despite all the true stories of errors and AI hallucinations, the technology is becoming ubiquitous.

Janelle Shane writes about AI and the weird ways that machine learning algorithms get things wrong. Her blog is at aiweirdness.com.

I discovered this when Charles sent me a link to her recent blog post. She asked Dall-E to generate an image of a chocolate with the layers labelled. The results look delicious, but the labels are peculiar. AI included imaginary ingredients like "Lotceate" and "Skinct" and "Dolding".

I've started reading her book "You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It's Making the World a Weirder Place". So far, it's easy to read, informative and entertaining.

The feline perils of working from home

I love remote working and virtual training and not having to worry about traffic. Remote working doesn't have to mean more distractions. But it does mean different distractions.

This week I came up with a new acronym: NMFCOK - Not my fault, cat on keyboard. For me, one of the perils of working from home is a very demanding cat. When my Bengal cat wants attention, he sits where my attention is - on my screen, keyboard and mouse. You can see this in the photo.

As he drapes himself over my equipment, he also presses various keys on my keyboard. One day I am going to accidentally send out a really weird message. For when that happens, I need to be able to say: NMFCOK.

Lewis sent me a photo of his rescue cat lying on the notes he was using. I told him it was our version of the excuse: "the dog ate my homework".

I hope this fed your happy wolf for a few minutes. I’d love to hear your comments.

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