The Weekend Wind-Down #29 - September 15, 2024

I had a busy week back to the norm, catching up on work and getting settled back at home, here's this week's list!

Big news in AI this week

OpenAI has released the newest ChatGPT model . I used it for a couple of tasks this weekend and I did find the responses were more organized and concise than previously. The biggest improvements are around the areas of math and coding, which I don't generally use it for. From what I can gather, the end goal isn't to get it to be perfect at doing math, but rather math is a good way to gauge its critical thinking and reasoning abilities, which should cause fewer hallucinations and in the long run, a more human-like AI.

Game I've been playing this weekend

I was originally really excited about No Man's Sky when it was released about 9 years ago. But besides not having a machine that could run it, the game got poor reviews and was said not to live up to its hype. Well, it is on sale on Steam, and with cloud gaming I can run it on a very old iMac, so I finally picked it up. The game's main selling point is that it uses procedural generation to create a gigantic unique universe with around 2 quadrillion planets to explore. I've played for several hours and have only landed on 3 planets and explored a very small area of each, so it is pretty safe to say, I will never run out of planets to explore. Overall it has been a great game so far, it is beautiful and fairly relaxing, even though there are survival elements to keep track of.

Biggest lesson from my daughter this week

On Monday, our last day in Taiwan, we celebrated my daughter's second birthday. We went to the Taipei Children's Amusement Park for a few hours and then had a nice dinner at the AirBnB. She was a bit too young to enjoy a lot of the park rides as they have a height requirement, but she had a blast anyway. The amazing thing to me is that she had just as much fun on the carousel and bumper boats as she did sitting in the coin-operated kiddie rides even without them running! I realized she doesn't know what is supposed to be cool or fun, so she can enjoy everything. Another example of this is her obsession with climbing stairs, if she sees any stairs she always wants to climb them herself and she loves doing it. I hope I can learn to have some of her joy and excitement doing things that aren't supposed to be that fun.

Successful work event this week

One thing I've worked on a lot and think have gotten pretty good at over my last two roles is negotiating with vendors. For example last week I sponsored an event in Singapore that I wasn't too sure about to start with. The format included a lot of 1:1 meetings during the event, which sounds great in theory, but I've had trouble with in the past with other organizations. So I was able to work out a pilot sponsorship with the organizers for a much smaller investment, but allowed us to test the event and track the results. I believe it was a win-win for both parties, as having participated in the event this year makes it much more likely I will do it again if it is successful, and we get on-the-ground feedback on the quality of the event and participants. It's a great area to be creative with and think outside-the-box that doesn't come immediately to mind when thinking about marketing.

Have a great end of your weekend and even better week ahead!