KFCblog - May 2024

Life

I had a great weekend with some long-time friends a couple of weekends ago in Vancouver. Great weather, great friends, great times. The trip included an interesting experience at Burnaby mall food court that could have been in downtown Shanghai. I'm not sure all of what I ate, but some of it squirted across the table onto Miker's shirt.

Sports World

My friend Yash Sanga had his heart broken again by Liverpool with a late season collapse in Premier League which will come down to Arsenal or Man City (led by my man crush, Erling Haaland). Real Madrid won La Liga. Champions League final is next month in London.

The Bears drafted Caleb Williams with the first pick of the 2024 draft (as expected). Many are excited about their second pick, WR Rome Odunze who is a legitimate deep threat. Speaking of drafts, at the sold out WNBA draft (btw, they never even sold tickets before this year), the Indiana Fever took Caitlin Clark at #1.

A month down into the baseball season and both the Cubs and Mets would be in the wild card if the season ended today. Unfortunately, the season ends in October.

82 Days to Paris 2024 Opening Ceremonies.

Hello, World

In April I got to spend a little time with our team in Madrid. Madrid is the host to a brand-new Deloitte office - the Sports Innovation Hub. Here we house deep technology and sport specific expertise to help us in our partnership with the Olympics. The Hub is a key location for a process called Sport Homologation that takes place prior to each Olympic Games - Homologation Testing is a very robust version of User Acceptance Testing that we hold with each International Sporting Federation (such as the International Ski and Snowboard Federation or World Athletics). The goal of this test is to carry data from the field of play all the way through to scoreboards, broadcasters and websites and ensure it is accurate, extremely high speed and provides a good user experience. We are NOT performing the Homologation Testing for Paris 2024; that work is being done by the current provider but we are deep into the core development for Milano Cortina 2026 (which is only ~640 days away, as you can see on their newly launched website).

Lastly, a callout of thanks to Rob Engel at Major League Baseball, who took some time out of the day to explain the architectural approach from MLB's Gameday product as there is clearly things we can learn for delivering Olympic data from MLB.

Caught My Eye

OK, I'm leading off with my most mind-blowing discovery this past month. I haven't been this impressed since the first time I played with ChatGPT. Check out Udio - a full AI song generator. Give it a topic, a style, have Udio write words or give it your own. If you play with one thing this month, this is the one!

And with that, I share with you.... The KFCblog Theme Song!

Do you want a simple shoelace knot that doesn't come untied easily yet is easy to tie? Try Ian's Secure Shoelace Knot. This site shows lots of other ways to tie your shoes here, also.

It's been fun for me to see space travel see a resurgence in the mainstream. Here's the first cool link - the current place and track of the International Space Station - along with a live view from its camera point back at Earth.

The second link is super simple: How many people are in space right now? (and who are they?)

It's hard to keep track of all the new AI based apps that launch. If you're looking for something AI-oriented, try TheresanAIforthat.com

The story of why Domino's pizza delivery no longer has a 30-minute guarantee. I remember eating frequently for free in college with a competitor in Boston called Pizza Ring ("You ring, we bring"). Order the largest pizza, lots of toppings, ask for it well done. We had a 33% success rate.

Super simple computer to computer file sharing - no cloud needed. FilePizza.

Are you as unskilled at drawing as I am? Autodraw watches you and tries to guess and help with whatever you are drawing.

Finlete is a company that let's you invest in upcoming professional baseball players in exchange for a piece of their future earnings. They just announced their first athlete available, Texas Rangers prospect Echedry Vargas.

Are you still playing Wordle? Here's a strategy for winning very quickly (although it does not minimize guesses). It's particularly useful if you like Quordle or Octordle or even Sedecordle.

You've certainly heard of the Large Language Models that power today's Generative AI. Here is an interesting explainer about the challenges of building these models on the topic of large image models. The tone of the article is a bit chicken-little for my tastes, but it does lay out the challenges of doing this well. Models All The Way Down.

I Bought This: I'm always in search of the perfect charger (laptop, phone, etc).

Closing Quote

“Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and life to everything" - Plato