=============================
 Recently hyped technologies
=============================

Currently GPT 4 is all over the Hacker News main page, and I keep
peeking into the threads, just to find that there is nothing actually
informative there (while the linked articles are dull, and seem to be
there primarily to serve as a subject for chatter), though there are
many excited people. Some suggest that GPT 4 is intelligent and
capable of reasoning now, while GPT 3 was simply regurgitating things,
but still providing no evidence. Though not a long time ago, when GPT
3 was released, people were almost panicking that it is too good to
release, that it will distort the coverage of reality in the news
(more than people do, apparently). I guess major changes/advancements
like that do happen sometimes, but much more often there is just this
annoying hype. To add to the annoyance, perhaps the major "AI"
application people run into these days are broken chat bots serving as
a moat on the way to get help from human operators (which is needed
when other, less sophisticated stuff malfunctions). And perhaps video
surveillance (though that likely depends on the jurisdiction).

Recently those NFTs and Bitcoin-style cryptocurrencies were in every
other linked post on tech news/link aggregators. Along with
containerization-related stuff. Including Kubernetes, which shouldn't
be needed that commonly. Similar to "big data" before that: at some
point it seemed like almost everyone is working on "big data", even
though its definition implies that it is about exceptionally large
data volumes (and IIRC people occasionally called regular databases
measured in gigabytes "big data"). Though ML submissions were popular
back then as well; I guess it's just an interesting topic that pops up
regularly, and I was excited about that a while ago, too. Before that,
there was all the "cloud"/services business (online services in
general are useful, of course, it just seemed like an annoying angle
to me, and an odd thing to present as something new). Microservice
architectures were discussed surprisingly commonly relatively
recently, too.

While the flooding of news with currently-hyped things can be
annoying, I find it helpful to recall the past ones: then it is
apparent that they not only keep coming, but also keep going.


===============
 Assorted news
===============

In other news, I tried making burritos with a filling based on
store-bought ground beef (which turned out fine this time, while often
those have notable hard bits of cartilage or other connective
tissue). Along with similarly store-bought tomato puree, cheese,
canned beans. Those are fairly quick and easy to make, and suitable
for re-heating in a microwave; looks like a good meal preparation
item. I plan to investigate more practical cooking (that goes under
"meal preparation") better.

I started trying stretching routines, some of those are surprisingly
relaxing. Also trying mindfulness meditation (which is something I was
curious about for a while; though same goes for stretching) lately;
haven't quite made my mind about it yet, but it does feel like yet
another mini-game, and perhaps like a mini-nap. Likely will keep
practicing.

Finally reading Tanenbaum's "Computer Networks" more thoroughly (not
just skimming parts as before), currently halfway through (though
maybe will skip the last chapter, on security, since have read books
focused more on it, unlike the individual network layers). His books
tend to be nice for filling in some gaps, adding more connections, or
looking at familiar things from a new perspective: they go reasonably
deep, but provide a wide coverage and context as well. Actually I want
to play with those things now, to connect some computers into
networks. But even the reading by itself is enjoyable.

Updated personal backups yesterday. Considering using an USB stick as
an additional backup storage device: flash memory is not great for
long-term storage, but being solid-state, it is safe for transfer, for
an off-site or mobile backup.

Oh, and I stopped (or quit) smoking 3 weeks ago. Reduced cigarette
consumption in a few steps since 2020 (smoking halves at first,
spacing in time, and just a drag or two at a time, twice a day in the
end), then at some point just didn't feel like starting another
cigarette, and wasn't worried about possible cravings or the body
being used to nicotine. After a week or two without smoking, cleaned
up and stashed away the ashtray. I guess the most notable changes are
that I don't have to think about smoking (and whether enough time has
passed since the last cigarette) anymore, and there's a bit more space
on the table. No smoke in the room anymore, either, which is nice.

And there is regular work stuff going on, by which I was distracted
during the composition of this post. Helping with some reports for the
website there while the web backend developer is overloaded with
migration to a new server (which is going on for more than 2 months
now), for which I use SQL and PL/pgSQL. Not great languages, but they
work fine for basic reports, and are rather appropriate for the task
in this case. A problem with using those is that reports keep growing
larger and larger, with more complicated business logic, and I guess
at this rate it may require a different language. Though so far trying
to manage the complexity, and staying under 500 line of SQL (though
some of it is done by cutting some corners and producing less precise
data for the sake of a simpler query, which feels a bit awkward and
wrong; OTOH, it is partially mitigated by a couple of inherent sources
of imprecision there, so it doesn't make the overall result much
worse).


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:Date: 2023-04-10
