Categories
Life Hacking Life Lessons

The Unseen Light Show: An Ordinary Night’s Extraordinary Discovery

I’ve always been impressed by professionals who can transform light into art. Think of photographers turning car tail lights into long, beautiful streaks, or laser shows that make simple lines look captivating. These always seemed like expert skills, far from my everyday life. But recently, I stumbled upon a way to experience something similar, using nothing but my eyes during a car ride at night.

Last night, as I settled into the passenger seat for a brief nap, I found myself witnessing a magical light show. The headlights and taillights on the highway, which usually pass by unnoticed, began to transform before my eyes. It was like a scene from Fantasia or a planetarium’s laser show. The lights danced and morphed into stunning shapes against the dark backdrop of the night. They resembled beautiful, ever-changing sine curves, weaving an intricate dance on an invisible stage.

Categories
Adventures

The Paradox of Luxury Adventure

Over the MLK weekend, I found myself in the middle of a gorgeous forest, hurtling down the mountain and conquering nature. Then I realized I was participating in a weird bourgeois endeavor: luxury adventure. There I was, savoring the exhilaration and conquest typical of adventurers, yet insulated from any real risk. I realized that skiing is part of a larger luxury adventure movement, epitomized by the commercialized expeditions to Mount Everest’s summit, where ventures have shifted from pioneering exploration to a form of commodified conquest.

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ChatGPT

ChatGPT: Echoing the Human Mind Through Digital Intelligence

As OpenAI developed GPT-4, the engine behind ChatGPT Plus, both the team and the wider AI community encountered something unexpected. GPT-4 went beyond its impressive language abilities and started showing behaviors eerily reminiscent of human thought patterns. This shift was perplexing; after all, they had only fed the system more data. Why would simply more information lead to such a profound change? It was a question that defied the expectations of a mere data upgrade, suggesting a deeper, more complex relationship between data quantity and AI behavior.

Categories
Books / Audiobooks

A Hackers Mind

When most people hear the word ‘hacking,’ their minds go to a scary place of spies trying to break into computers and steal their credit cards. However, in A Hacker’s Mind, security expert Bruce Schneier points out that hacking is really something else. He defines hacking as “Something that a system allows but which is unintended and unanticipated by its designers.” Using this definition, Schneier looks at hacking as a method of creative problem-solving and critical thinking, challenging how one can extend a system’s capabilities beyond its designers’ original expectations.

Categories
ChatGPT

Crafting the Future: Building My AI Writing Partner with ChatGPT

Starting a New Writing Adventure

I’ve started on a fun new project: using ChatGPT to help with my writing. It should be able to help me with my writing by making suggestions and helping with the boring parts of writing. Essentially, it’ll help me get into the flow of writing more easily to get things done, improve my writing speed, and make writing more fun.

This is a blog post about how I’m creating that writing partner. It’s a bit meta because I’m writing a post about creating my writing partner. This is self-documenting code in a way so that you can build your own prompt of a writing partner. Also, it’ll help me as I iterate this model in the future.

Categories
Life Lessons

Reframing Perspectives: The True Distance Between First and Second Place

One of my favorite quotes if from Arron Sorkin’s “Sports Night”:

Dan: The distance is always 100 miles between first place and second place. You know, Jackie Robinson had a brother, and he ran the 200 meters. At the Olympics, he ran it faster than anyone had ever run it before, and he still came in second.

ABBY: I didn’t know Jackie Robinson had a brother.

DAN: That’s because it was the 1936 Olympics, and the guy who came in first was Jesse Owens.

Robinson’s exceptional performance, just a fraction of a second behind Jesse Owens, relegated him to a historical footnote. Because they get so much attention, we assume that the first-place finisher is fundamentally better than the second. This pattern isn’t limited to sports but is prevalent across our culture. Consider, for instance, that pinnacle of invention. The most brilliant inventor, Thomas Edison, and his most famous invention, the light bulb.

Categories
Product Management

Taking Control of My Goals

As we start the new year, I’d like to try something new. I’d like to try the empowered team thing. Instead of worrying about the details of the corporate goal-setting process, I want to own my strategy for the year at work, full stop. I’ll integrate the goals of seniors and needs of clients. Then, I’ll take the most important things and focus on that. Then, instead of dealing with all the individual corporate management processes individually, I’m going to use them as lenses to display and present my strategy.

Categories
ChatGPT

Meet Your New Intern! 5 Tips to Manage ChatGPT

Congratulations! You’re about to get a new intern! She may be named Microsoft Copilot, OpenAI, ChatGPT, or Google Bard. Whatever her name, she’s a large language model that can make you more efficient and creative.

Rather than thinking of this new assistant as just another tool, I’ve found it useful to think of her as a virtual intern. She’s a Large Language Model (LLM) built from neural networks that simulate the human brain. This makes her very different from other virtual assistants like Siri or Alexa. Rather than just providing you with the answers to questions, she can collaborate with you and help you develop your ideas.

Categories
ChatGPT Life Lessons

Improvising a Great Conversation

Navigating conversations can often be a bit of a tightrope walk for me. Sometimes, despite my best efforts, they don’t always go as smoothly as I’d like. Like a few weeks ago, I found myself deep in a chat with a new acquittance over lunch. We how public schools to tailor their teaching to individual students. It’s a topic I’m quite passionate about. Yet, somehow, right in the midst of this important discussion, things took an unexpected turn.

Categories
Judaism

Our Visit to Israel

We went to Israel in Passover of 2023. I wrote up my notes as we travelled but didn’t get to publish this until the atrocities of October 7th.

As I got off the overnight flight from Tel Aviv, I see a man standing at the end of the jetway with a sign that says, “Bennett, Naftali”. I know I’ve heard that name before, and I think he’s a member of the Knesset. But it can’t be that Naftali Bennett, can it?

The problem is, before this trip to Israel, I didn’t know much about the country. It’s like when I Ari, as a first grader, asked me, “Can you tell me about Andrew Cuomo.”

And I said, “Well… he’s the governor of New York… he’s a Democrat… and his dad Mario was also governor. People liked his dad a lot.”

Ari then shot back, “Tell me more. Like if you had to write a first-grade book report about Andrew Cuomo, what would you say?”

“Oh,” I said, “I don’t know enough about Andrew Cuomo to do that.”