Weeknotes: week 10, 2023
✱ I’ve been reading a lot — and creating a long reading queue — about AI these days. Part of it is because of professional reasons, and part of it is out of my sole, genuine interest. I’ve been trying to take notes to help make sense of everything I’ve discovered about the subject, but, for me , taking notes has proven to be more difficult than what I’d like to admit. I’m using Obsidian to help me, the same way I’m using it to write my blog posts, such as this very own hebdomadary post, but I have accumulated lots of unfinished texts to resume reading and notes that I’ve taken and excerpts that I’ve highlighted but haven’t changed into notes yet. Still, I need to say that I can’t help but consider AI a very interesting topic, starting from the fact that the term, in itself, is extremely commercial and filled with hype. Behind it, actually, there’s computer science and a lot of research areas such as large language modeling, deep learning, neural networks, robotics and natural language processing, just to name a few. All these topics are interesting in themselves, so I’m probably getting busy with it quite some time yet.
✱ This week I had the opportunity to visit one of Google’s offices in São Paulo. My work mates and I went to watch a series of dedicated keynotes on GCP, artificial intelligence, innovation and other subjects. I’m still to know someone who works with anything technology-related who doesn’t want to know Google’s offices. This was my turn to do it, as I hadn’t come across a chance until then. It was a fantastic opportunity and, as such, I journaled about it in private.
✱ I’ve been reading two books at a time this week. Haven’t finished them yet but I’m enjoying both of them. The first is Why Fish Don’t Exist, by Lulu Miller. It’s a book I came across very recently, which tells the true story of David Starr Jordan, a very obsessive taxonomist, possessed with the sim of bringing order to the chaos of the natural world. I wasn’t going to start reading it right away, but, as it happens to me more times than I’d like to admit, after skimming through the first pages of the book, I was hooked. So, here I am. At practically 40% of pages read. The other book is Outlander, the Fiery Cross, by Diana Gabaldon. This is a book I had stopped reading and just recently resumed. I’ve been reading the Outlander series with interest due to the storytelling. Like I’ve stated before, I love long, well narrated books that makes me feel the story is endless. Man, are there so many chapters on each volume of Outlander, or what?
✱ While waiting for the last episode of the series to air this coming Sunday, I read somewhere that the first season covers the first game and its Left Behind DLC, and the second — and already confirmed by HBO Max — season will cover the second game, currently the lastest to have been released, in 2020. From what I read, it’s not clear whether HBO will split the second game in two seasons (as it looks like the story follows two characters and intertwines) or not, but the producers have made it clear that if no new game is produced by Naughty Dog, nor will further series development. I find it fine. The series has been awesome, but I tend to agree to the producers in saying that some works just are not made to span through 5, 6 or 7 seasons in a row. And for me, it’s ok.