141 posts tagged with "in-English"

The answer to the question “should I use an LLM for that?” is increasingly “hell yeah!”, for almost any given “that”.

In the last three or four weeks, as resolutions for the new year were slowly taking shape in my head, it hadn't even crossed my mind to draw inspiration from a source other than my own ideas (and from a few friends, like Fidel). To be honest, I wasn't excited about the resolutions I was coming up with: they felt narrow and a direct continuation of last year's. Then, three days ago, in the middle of the night, I suddenly realised that I am so present on the interwebs, and I have shared so much information over the years about interests, hobbies, accomplishments and failures of mine, that a chatbot should be able to “think” about me and expand my boring set of 2026 goals with some personalised suggestions that I could use!

This is my eval of the resolutions I made for 2025 plus a recap of the year through some apps I use.

I had high expectations for Pluribus because I loved Breaking Bad (and I liked Better Call Saul, although I got bored and gave up around season three). But after five episodes I'm disappointed. I was already disappointed after the first two or three, really.

It's too slow. Not much happens.

There are very few characters. Why isn't Carol interested at all in what happened to her relatives and friends? That is not believable. The plot seems completely lineal: no parallel stories, no hint of what's to come, no interesting connections across time or space. So far, there are just two conflicts: that between Carol and the body snatchers, and the one between Carol and the other immune people. That's it. Compare that with the rich cast of characters in Breaking Bad, their varied interests, and all the clashes and twists in their relationships.

On top of that, Carol is arrogant, capricious and short-tempered. And it irritates me that she seems so short on ideas.

I want to share two stories of embarrassing ignorance about computers and the internet. Of my own ignorance, specifically. In retrospect, I think these vignettes paint a revealing picture of: a) how far we've come in software in thirty years or so; and b) what it looks like to be clueless as a goldfish about some subject.

At high school, around the mid-90's, some of us were discovering the internet — in particular the web, IRC, and electronic mail. (It's weird to think of it that way now, but the internet comprises, or enables, a set of such services; such as Usenet, FTP, Gopher, or the World Wide Web.) In those days I would go to an internet café, or visit a schoolmate who had a dial-up modem at home, and use mIRC to explore random Freenode channels, or fire up Internet Explorer to visit the handful of web sites I knew about. I didn't even have a mail account yet, but was starting to get acquainted with that too.

We bought our electric car in April 2022. It's a Škoda Enyaq iV 80. Its battery has 77 KWh of usable capacity, and its range varies from less than 300 km (at 125 km/h on the highway, fully loaded, on the coldest day of the winter) to 500 km or more (driving alone in the city with mild weather). (Yes, it changes that much.)

I reckon we paid a premium of around €10,000 over a comparable small SUV with a combustion engine. My back-of-the-envelope calculation back then suggested that cheaper fuel, simpler maintenance, free parking in (and free access to) many city centres (definitely Madrid), and lower ownership taxes would cancel out the extra cost after seven years or so. Perhaps that was still an optimistic estimate because it ignored the higher depreciation of electric vehicles in the second-hand market (batteries, which are the critical component and the most expensive one, degrade significantly over time).

Importantly, this is our only car. (I still think that is one car too many, but with two adults working and two small kids, it seems impossible not to own one.)

I love simplicity when it comes to software, and for web development I try to get rid of servers whenever possible. For all APIs, libraries or frameworks I use, I want to have a minimalistic HTML page that instantiates and sets up the bare minimum for that tool to work, and that I can load from localhost — no web server required. Those files I use as boilerplate and reference, cloning them for whatever experiment I want to do. Of course, web servers and build steps are great for all sorts of reasons, but sometimes you just want to play around or develop a quick proof of concept.

(More than) half of the year is over already, and I thought I should update you on my new year's resolutions for 2025.

Put some pressure on me!

⭐⭐⭐

I am a bit embarrassed to notice that this may be the first “biography” I've ever read. It probably is. I'm not sure.

Perhaps due to that lack of experience on my part, I was expecting something a bit different from this book. I had decided I wanted to read it for one simple reason: to (try to) understand what it's like to be really, really intelligent. I had heard all kind of stories about John von Neumann and about his feats. I wanted to delve into that, try to understand how exactly his brain was so different from a normal one. What it meant for him to be so much smarter than almost everyone around him. How he thought, what “extremely intelligent” actually means.

“As a child, von Neumann absorbed Ancient Greek and Latin, and spoke French, German and English as well as his native Hungarian. He devoured a forty-five-volume History of the world and was able to recite whole chapters verbatim decades later.”

Two years ago I realised for the first time that I end up making the “right” moves in life, but often I make those changes later than the average of my peers.

Owning a house, investing money, getting married, having kids… It's not that I fail at those projects, or shun those life decisions: it's just that sometimes I get to those places a few years later than would be desirable — judging with the benefit (and the bias) of hindsight.

That was stating the obvious, I guess. Of course you want to start earning money earlier rather than later. Of course you want to travel soon, so that you'll have more time to visit more places in your life. You'll probably end up marrying and having kids (like most people do), so why postpone it unnecessarily? And yet, for me, strangely, that was a novel realisation.

Armed with that silly “insight”, in 2023 I noted that

“now that I've spotted a trend in my life trajectory, it should be ‘easy’ for me to course-correct. […] That means making an effort to identify the next life goals, and acting quicker to get there. And so I have been wondering:
What are people my age starting to do now?
What will they be doing in a few years' time?”

Thinkers​

I asked Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini and Grok:

“What are the ten most influential thinkers in human history? What ten individuals made the most important contributions to philosophy? They should all be real people who actually existed, about whom we have enough information, who were original in their ideas, and who continue to be discussed and appreciated. Consider philosophers, theologians, social scientists, authors, and any other kind of intellectual.”

Results:

• Five mentions: Aristotle, Confucius, Immanuel Kant and Karl Marx.
• Four mentions: Plato.
• Three mentions: René Descartes and Jesus.
• Two mentions: Thomas Aquinas, Augustine of Hippo, Avicenna, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche and Socrates.
• One mention (discarded): Buddha, Laozi, John Locke, Muhammad, John Stuart Mill and Mary Wollstonecraft.