Thursday, March 6, 2025
Last Saturday I visited the Computer History Museum in Mountain View for the first time in years. I came away with a new appreciation for the quality of the curation at that museum. See my post about my visit.
Meanwhile, uncertainty continues with the administration imposing tariffs on some of our most important trading partners. Financial markets hate uncertainty so – no surprise – they have declined.
In other news, an interview of Tyler Cowen by David Perell was great to watch. Progress in AI continues apace. Qwen, the latest thinking model from Alibaba, was just upgraded again. Impressive.
Saturday, March 1, 2025
On my morning walk this morning I listened to this Training Data podcast interview with two of the principals at OpenAI responsible for Deep Research. It was like seeing into the future! Highly recommend!
Thursday, February 27, 2025
Playing with voice mode in Gemini and Grok 3. Fascinating how well these AI bots can be conversational! All of this is happening on my iPhone.
Also, I keep thinking I need to write up my thinking about using a Mac has become much less important to me as I’m spending much of my online day on my iPhone instead.
Meanwhile there’s a LOT of uncertainty in the macro environment which is dramatically affecting the stock market. We had a brief honeymoon with the new administration but that’s history and we’re off into uncharted waters!
Monday, February 24, 2025
I’ve been playing more with chatbots. This morning I had a fun chat with Grok 3 asking it to tell me more of what it finds I’m best at and shared the result.
Saturday, February 22, 2025
I’ve been taking some time learning about Groq and its founder Jonathan Ross. I think I first heard about Groq when Chamath talked about it a while ago on one of the All-In podcasts. That opened my eyes to the separation between train time compute and inference (or test time) compute. This morning I’ve listened to a couple of interviews of Ross and have enjoyed hearing much of the history of Groq, his earlier work on TPUs at Google, his role in the Go challenge that blew everyone’s minds, etc. Great conversations!
“Large language models are the telescope of the mind. They give us this view of an intelligence that is quickly becoming larger and more vast than any single human being or even civilization itself.”
Tuesday, February 18, 2025
Wow, this page has been ignored for almost four years! It was a good idea at the time – sort of an interstitial journal of highlights that got buried during the time of COVID!
Since 2021 so much has happened that I’ve shared in many posts elsewhere on my blog sharing my thoughts along the way. A few important things come to mind: the loss of our daughter Tracy being the most profound.
Friday, May 14, 2021
Yesterday the CDC changed their guidance for vaccinated individuals: masks no longer required! I wrote about it here: Re-Emergence II
I also updated Scott’s Kitchen with a recipe we’ve used frequently during the pandemic: Easy New York Steak on the Stove
Saturday, April 24, 2021
For the first time in over a year I was able to re-enter on of our local libraries. Re-emergence!
Sunday, March 14, 2021
Just noticed that one year ago today – March 14, 2020 – was the last time we had dinner at a local restaurant. A few days later our Covid-19 lockdown began and the world changed dramatically.
Sunday, March 14, 2021
Over the last three weeks I joined an online photography course offered by Santa Fe Workshops – The Language of Black and White taught by Cira Crowell. I had taken the in-person version of this course the first time Cira taught in back in 2019 and wanted a refresher from this great teacher. I wrote about some of my learnings (re-learnings?) in this blog post I shared on Friday. Cira’s planning to teach the in-person version of this course in July assuming Covid-19 moderates appropriately by then.
Saturday, March 13, 2021
Just finished reading Radigan by Louis L’Amour – the first book by this famous western writer that I’ve read. It was highly recommended by writer Gil Adamson here where she writes “a great, great short read about a man who owns a ranch, and these very, very vicious people come in, and they’ve decided they want his land. But he’s not going to give it to them—he’s far cleverer than they could ever imagine.” A great read!
February 2, 2021
Reading the Chronology in the new Library of America volume Hemingway brought back to my mind the walk up he and his wife at the time moved into in Paris in 1922. I was first introduced to it on my first photo walk in Paris with Valerie Jardin and have since walked past it many times as it’s near where I usually stay in Paris. Fond memories!
I’m looking forward to the upcoming PBS special on Hemingway produced by Ken Burns airing in early April.
February 1, 2021
What am I doing now? I recently added a /now page to my site: sjl.us/now
After reading Craig Mod’s tweet about Microsoft Edge, I decided to download and try Edge on one of my Macs. He’s right – it’s impressive. Years ago I guess I’d written off any browser effort by Microsoft – but they’re really up to something good here.
How about you? What are you doing now? Please drop me a note and share!
Scroll down to see my recent Twitter activity.