PicoBlog

We’re nearly at the end of 2021. Another deeply odd year, to put it mildly. If 2020 was a year on pause, 2021 has been a year of janky buffering, playing a few seconds before getting stuck again on the loading wheel of doom. I hope everyone reading this is getting whatever support they need to keep on going through these strange times. Today I’m writing about themes. As a young writer, back when I was still in high school, it took me a long while to figure out why my stories never really felt as engaging as I expected.

A framework that helps team leaders understand the possibilities of working with AI by challenging the distinction between people and tools. ChatGPT was the breakout star of 2022. Released by OpenAI at the end of November, the text generation chatbot quickly became a global phenomenon. After an initial flurry of playful experimentation, serious applications started to emerge, and haven’t stopped since. On 23 January, Microsoft announced a rumoured $10 billion investment in OpenAI—a declaration of faith in AI and its central place in the future of work.

I’m no stranger to the idea of writing books quickly. My Covid Economics book (the first version) was written in just two weeks. I don’t recommend it. It’s not a fun exercise. Back in 2020, there was no AI of note to help me undertake that task. Today, there is the great data scientist/economist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, who wanted to see just how much AI could help him in the book-writing process.

Pressure canning can be intimidating, especially for beginners.  I remember the first time I turned on my big stovetop pressure canner;  I was on pins and needles the whole time it was running, worried it might blow up. Now that I’ve been canning for more than a decade, I’m familiar with every step of the process, and it’s down to a quick routine.  Still, it took a long time for it to get that way, and I often forgot steps along the way.

ELT Pros Linkedin | Videos | Blog | Printables | ELT News | TpTs | YouTube Even now, this late in the day, a blank sheet of paper holds the greatest excitement there is for me — more promising than a silver cloud, and prettier than a red wagon. – E.B. White Today, I’d like to highlight a valuable and “old-style” lesson material - the blank piece of paper. Please read below, many ideas for instant lessons using only a blank piece of paper.

A few weeks ago, Later published an article about the best Instagram caption length for 2021. The article shared research showing that the average caption length has increased every year since 2016, and predicted that the average length for 2020 will be 405 characters (which is what they recommend as the optional caption length to use in 2021). Moreover, the research showed that engagement jumped significantly on posts with long-form captions - from 5.

Note: This AI is literally just a linear regression, but on stereoids. For this post, we’ll be using a library called DeepCreamPy (DCP), to de-censor some anime girls. After reading this post, you too will learn how to become a man of culture. @Deeppomf was the original creator of DCP. As of right now there are several forks of it on GitHub. We’ll be using the fork made by gguilt.

Summary: Design firm IDEO cut half its staff since 2020, with most layoffs in 2023 | Happy World Usability Day Nov. 9 | OpenAI Keynote livestreamed over the Internet today | Prompting Dall-E to retain characters through seed reuse | AI Is First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years UX Roundup for November 6. Bird by Leonardo. Well-reported article in Fast Company and interesting LinkedIn discussion on a post by article writer Mark Wilson about the severe downsizing of design firm IDEO:

It is difficult to say why it was that the cover art caught my eye in the early 2000s, when I was scanning through some manga titles. I was a curious child, one who liked some superhero stories, but always, always there was towards the middle years of adolescence a growing obsession with mythology, history and fairy-stories. I had started with those sorts of stories, felt I had outgrown them, moved on to my father’s approval to the EU of Star Wars then to his disappointment moved to the more expensive (to his mind) books of myths & fantasy though he was pleased when I did still foray into SW, or Japanese stuff or BD.