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Ron Lancaster

Thoughts on tech and leadership

Quick posts of interest. Subscribe at the link above.

  • I saw this logic problem on Twitter:

    Here we have a toothpick, a bowl of pudding, a full glass of water, and a marshmallow. Please tell me how to stack them onto each other in a stable manner.

    And GPT4 fails to solve it on the first pass, as it wants to put the bowl of pudding on the bottom of the stack. Which would work, but of course, would make a big mess.

    So, I used a Swarm in Oner to first use Wolfram-Alpha to get characteristics of the four objects to stack, then asked it to provide a plan, followed by a verifier of the plan.

    With a Swarm, the AI correctly solved the problem.

  • Introducing Oner Swarms - one or more AI agents that can cooperate to accomplish a set of tasks.

  • I’m personally finding OpenAI tools to be quite useful in a variety of cases. Here’s a simple one from this morning, where I wanted to quote a PDF for a work topic, and found that the spaces were not carried over correctly. A quick prompt update in GPT-3 resolved it. Soon, if it’s not already, this will be built-in to our word processing tools.

  • New variants of SARS-CoV-2 are rapidly spreading through the U.S. These coronavirus variants are being studied because they may be more transmissible, cause more severe disease, or reduce the efficacy of current vaccines. Our live tracker keeps you updated with the key information you need to know.

    https://www.axios.com/variants-tracker

  • Once again, I was about to subscribe to The New York Times, but stopped because of their horrible policy of requiring a phone call to cancel. If it’s easy to subscribe digitally, it should be equally easy to unsubscribe digitally.

    Except in the case of certain promotions, you can change or cancel your digital subscription at any time by calling Customer Care at (866)-273-3612.

    https://help.nytimes.com/hc/en-us/articles/115014893968-Terms-of-sale#canceldigi

  • The end of the Omicron wave is in sight 

    “It really does feel like the building blocks of a conversion from pandemic to endemic are all there,” Wachter said. But, he said, “over the past two years, if we’ve learned nothing else, it’s that this virus surprises us and there are always the possibility of new factors and curveballs.”

  • Went shopping with Drew today for stocking stuffers. Fun hanging out. We bought a 500 piece impossible puzzle where the picture is printed on both sides, with one side rotated 90 degrees. I do think it’s going to be very tough, if not impossible!

  • Every time I head north to Roseville, I’m reminded how much the town must hate pedestrians and cyclists. On the other hand, cars are very happy.

  • It seems to me, that the executives at Apple know full well, that developers and Apple fans would see glasses on these memojis as a reference to future Apple Glasses.

  • I recently finished (and very much enjoyed!) Nod, by Adrian Barnes. The story explores a world where humanity can no longer sleep - with the exception of a few - and the quick slide into madness of the world. The writing is enjoyable; though the premise is both tense and dark. If you are a reader of post-apocalyptic fiction, this is one to add to your list.

  • U.S. COVID response could have avoided hundreds of thousands of deaths: research

    That is the conclusion of a group of research papers released at a Brookings Institution conference this week, offering an early and broad start to what will likely be an intense effort in coming years to assess the response to the worst pandemic in a century.

    U.S. COVID-19 fatalities could have stayed under 300,000, versus a death toll of 540,000 and rising, if by last May the country had adopted widespread mask, social distancing, and testing protocols while awaiting a vaccine, estimated Andrew Atkeson, economics professor at University of California, Los Angeles.

    Source: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-economy-idUSKBN2BH1DK

  • Where are all the containers? The global shortage explained - “Many are in inland depots. Others are piled up in cargo ports, and the rest are onboard vessels, especially on transpacific lines.”

    North America currently faces a 40% imbalance; which means that for every 100 containers that arrive only 40 are exported. 60 out of every 100 containers continue to accumulate, which is a staggering figure considering the China to USA trade route sustains on average 900,000 TEUs per month.

    And the punchline: “capacity likely won’t normalize until Q2 2021.“