Five classes today on the Artificial Intelligence topic. It’s a fun one, which is good. The kids generally have quite a lot to say about this topic, as many of them are familiar with ChatGPT or other AI tools, having used them themselves.
In between I squeezed in some comic writing and making a simple pasta dinner. And now, with the last class ending at 10pm… it’s time to relax and wind down before bed so I can go to sleep.
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As per title. I made a few comics in the morning to fill out this week, then I had to prepare for the university Data Engineering lecture. I dropped Scully off at doggie daycare then caught a train into the city and had some quick sushi for lunch before the lecture began at midday.
It was a longer lecture today – 2.5 hours with the tutorial breaks. About designing experiments and how to deal with control and independent and confounding variables and stuff like that. Then I caught the train home and picked up Scully from my wife’s work, as she’d picked her up from the daycare place after a few hours.
I made Thai red curry vegetables and rice for dinner, before getting stuck into three ethics classes in a row, on this weeks’ new topic of Artificial Intelligence. The first class has three kids who are, shall I say, a bit playful. I showed them some brief examples of ChatGPT in action to set context for questions, including some examples of how easy it is to get it to produce false information. This produced much mirth and the class sort of devolved into the kids requesting me to type in more and more ridiculous prompts to see what ChatGPT would do. I squeezed some serious questions in there, but everyone was having fun, and one of them said at the end that this was the best class ever.
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I forgot to mention yesterday that our new neighbours from South Africa finally got their furniture delivered. They moved in in mid-January and shipped their furniture over from South Africa, but it was held up in customs and strikes and so on, and only released last week. So all day yesterday there were movers bringing things in, and causing Scully to growl at the noises in the hallway.
I kind of wondered why they’d go to all the expense of shipping furniture internationally, rather than just sell it and buy new furniture here. From what I saw, I think a lot of it must be antique, so I guess they were attached to it.
Today I wrote my next ethics class; this week it will on the topic of Artificial Intelligence. I had too much to talk about – there are more questions than I can possibly ask in most of the class groups. But that’s better than not having enough material!
I did some comics stuff. And I took Scully for a walk at lunch and got myself a Ridiculously Delicious™ cherry and coconut peanut butter chocolate bar at the grocery store.
I tried this brand some time ago and found they were indeed ridiculously delicious as claimed on the wrapping. They come in three flavours: orignal crunch, salted caramel, and cherry coconut. I think last time I had the original crunch one, which was fantastic, and today’s cherry one was too. They’re not too sweet, and have a very adult blend of flavours, which is better than the overly sweet taste of most chocolate bars.
Oh, and I had a weird dream last night. I was playing some sort of 500-like card game with people. I got dealt a hand and it was like 40 cards or something – so many I couldn’t sensibly hold them and see them all of them in my hand at once. I had a lot of hearts, so I started confidently bidding hearts, and I guess my partner thought I had high hearts so joined in, and we ended up in some huge hearts bid.
Then when we started playing, a few tricks went by, and then suddenly an opponent played something like a 14 of hearts. I was surprised, not expecting to see anything different to a normal deck, since all my hearts were in the range 2-10. And then they explained it was like a 6-handed deck with numbers that go up to 13, except this deck went all the way from 2 up to 25 before the face cards and ace.
I told this dream to my friends on our Discord and two of them immediately said that it couldn’t have been a hand of 40 cards – it must have been 28. Nerds. 🙄
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Monday, and it was a lot cooler today and not so humid, which was a nice change. It felt like a preview of autumn, although warmer weather is coming again later in the week.
I went to the post office to mail a Magic: the Gathering card which I’d sold to someone online. A fairly old and valuable one, a few hundred dollars. I’ve decided to start selling some more of my old cards again, so this is hopefully just the start of getting the ball rolling on that.
After getting back from the post office I photographed the next batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips. I did six weeks of strips in two hours! Then I had to make tonight’s strip and get it ready for publication. Cutting it close to the bone – but I managed it. Tomorrow I’ll probably get the rest of this week completed and uploaded, and then add the next five weeks over the next week or so.
For dinner tonight I made pizza, and decided we should try something different. So I made a spicy satay sauce and used that instead of a tomato sauce base. And then the topping was broccoli and cashews. I think satay sauce is ideal with chicken, but also great with broccoli, and since my wife doesn’t eat chicken we went with the latter. It turned out pretty good, I thought, though the peanut-based sauce is a bit richer than a tomato sauce, so probably not something we’d want to do too often.
But while I was cooking, Scully needed to go outside for a toilet again. She’s been getting into this habit lately. I think this is now four times in the last eight days (it was three in the past week yesterday). And since I’m cooking, my wife has to take Scully out, and comes back several minutes after dinner is hot on the table. So she’s been having to eat lukewarm dinner several times in the past week. Hopefully it’s just a coincidence and not a conspiracy by Scully!
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Not too much of interest to report today – it was mostly a melange of usual activities. I did a 5k run in the morning, which was cooler and easier than yesterday, thank goodness. Made a sourdough loaf for use for lunch sandwiches tomorrow. I did a new Darths & Droids comic strip. Three ethics classes in the evening.
The most interesting thing was that I played another game of Root with my wife this afternoon. This time instead of using the robotic Marquisate (cats) to provide a third faction, we went with the robotic Eyrie (birds), and I played the cats. I raced to a quick lead as the cats are wont to do, but flagged late in the game and my wife’s Woodland Alliance caught up and passed me to within 3 points of victory. But I managed to scrape together 4 points on my next turn and beat the Alliance by one single turn. The robotic Eyrie was a big chaotic and didn’t do very much, so again I think the default difficulty level is a bit too easy (like the robotic Marquisate). Next time we’ll add some of the options to make it a tougher opponent.
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Friday was the first day of autumn, and thank goodness we have some cooler weather to look forward to soon. Friday was actually cooler than Thursday, but still plenty warm and very humid. I had four ethics classes during the day and I took Scully on a couple of short walks.
The Confession topic with the older kids is very interesting. It’s mostly about confession for things like crimes, breaking parental rules, or embarrassing secrets. But I touch on Catholic confession as a ritual of the church, describe it, and ask the kids what they think of it. The first two classes I had with this topic the kids all agreed that it is a useful thing to confess your misdeeds/sins and then have to show repentance and think about them, as it makes you more mindful of doing bad things and can make you a better person. But in Friday’s class I asked the same question and both of the kids in the class said it was rubbish, that it’s basically a get-out-of-jail-free card with God, you just get forgiven and go do bad things again without consequence.
Friday evening was online games night with my friends. We played a bunch of the usual suspect board games. My wife went out for dinner with some of her friends, so I had leftover fried rice from the night before, and I went up with Scully to the fish & chip shop to buy some fresh prawns to add to it.
Friday night was oppressive. The overnight minimum temperature was about 25°C, with humidity in the 90s, and a “feels like” temperature close to 30°C. By the time I got up and went for my 5k run, it was basically the same, and it was awful to run in – breathing felt like inhaling hot soup.
Today I stayed inside with the air conditioning and worked on writing a new batch of Irregular Webcomic! scripts. I managed to get that done, but will have to photograph it tomorrow or Monday.
For dinner we all went out for a short drive to Lane Cove shops and found a Mexican place there. The food was good, but a bit expensive. We were sitting next to a grassy area where lots of kids were playing, and there was a DJ playing music on a small stage. It was kind of fun, but a little noisy with everything happening.
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