Jay Sandhaus

Back in the 1990s, I evangelized to low-income communities in Boston and other places to get on board with the then-new Internet so they could be on par with everyone else. I feel that they almost wholly missed the boat, to the point that today that even many of the most well-known operations in our communities have digital operations pretty much on par with what many of us were doing in the late 90s. Today, I view the nexus of mobile technologies, speech recognition and Generative AI as another game-changing opportunity for non-technical individuals to leverage technology effectively, so I am working on an AI Workshop series I call 'AI 4 Good' for local public sector political support teams, community organization and small businesses to have hands-on experiences using Gen AI to supercharge their efforts. I just sent this concept paper to the head of the Brooklyn Business Center in my neighborhood: https://lnkd.in/eiCf9j-j Also, as the real-world demonstration of how this all works, this 20 minute video shows, in real time, how I created the initial document (later edited to 1 page) and a draft of a presentation deck for the workshop by talking into my phone, dropping the transcript into ChatGPT and then dropping the ChatGPT document into Beautiful dot ai. This is how I am using Gen AI all day / every day for many things I do, and I am going to show the folks working to make my community better how to leverage this new stuff as much as I can. https://lnkd.in/eEQ4q3VW

22

1 Comment

Some straight talk about why #platformengineering initiatives fail and how to make sure that doesn’t happen on your watch. Check out the latest from The New Stack and Jennifer Riggins. #DevEx #DevOps

2

AI systems routinely outperform humans, affirms the Stanford AI Index Report 2024; Should we be worried? There's hardly a day that goes by without someone speculating if AI systems like GPT-4, Gemini 1.5 Pro, Claude 3, and now LLaMA 3 are becoming sentient, the fear being that AI's intelligence, what we better know as artificial general intelligence (AGI) or artificial super intelligence (ASI), will exceed that of the most intelligent humans, making it a sort of Alpha Intelligence that may eventually even enslave humans. While #Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang proposed that AGI would emerge within five years, and Ben Goertzel foresees it happening in just three years, Elon Musk predicts that by the end of 2025 or early 2026, AI will be smarter than any single human, and probably smarter than all humans combined by 2029. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, too, has announced that his company is entering the race to make an AGI but did not provide any timeline. These are all credible voices and we must pay attention. But one also needs to pay heed to equally-accomplished voices like those of Yann LeCun, Andrew Ng, and Gary Marcus, who have begged to differ and have consistently tempered expectations in the context of AGI. Early this month, even Stanford University's seventh edition of the AI Index report weighed in on the same topic, insisting that AI systems like GPT-4, Gemini, and Claude 3 are "impressively multimodal" and "routinely exceed human performance on standard benchmarks". The report, however, qualifies that current AI technology continues to have limitations and cannot reliably deal with facts, perform complex reasoning, or explain its conclusions. What do you think? LiveMint https://lnkd.in/g8VmStwv

28

Missumuch.com, Unveils BackyardPartings: A Revolutionary Virtual Platform Merging Gaming Technology with Memorial Services August 15, 2024 — Missumuch.com, LLC, a leader in innovative bereavement services, proudly announces the launch of BackyardPartings, a groundbreaking virtual platform that seamlessly integrates gaming technology with personalized memorial services. This unique platform offers an immersive and meaningful way to honor loved ones within virtual environments, bringing a new dimension to both the memorial and gaming industries. The Future of Memorial Services: Where Gaming Meets Healing BackyardPartings is set to redefine how people experience and participate in memorial services by leveraging advanced gaming technologies to create interactive, emotionally resonant virtual spaces. This vision came to light with the creation of The Loid Engine, beautifully built in Argentina by a team from Line Break, a group that Missumuch.com, LLC merged with one year ago. The platform allows users to craft personalized memorials in stunning, customizable environments—whether it’s a serene garden, a tranquil forest, or a beautiful beach, all within the digital realm. “BackyardPartings is about transforming the traditional memorial experience into something that is deeply personal and accessible to everyone, no matter where they are in the world,” said Christine Dziedzic, “By harnessing the power of gaming technology, we are creating spaces where memories can live on in a way that is both meaningful and innovative.” Key Features of BackyardPartings: • Immersive Memorial Environments: Users can select from a variety of themed virtual environments to hold memorial services, each designed to evoke peace and reflection. • Interactive Experiences: The platform offers features such as virtual tribute walls, digital keepsakes, and live-streamed memorial events, allowing family and friends to connect and commemorate together in real-time. • Customization and Accessibility: With extensive customization options, users can tailor every aspect of the virtual space to reflect the unique personality and preferences of their loved one. • Global Reach: BackyardPartings provides a way for people across the globe to participate in memorials without the constraints of physical location, making it an inclusive and accessible. BackyardPartings presents a unique opportunity for the gaming industry to partner in this innovative venture. Game developers, virtual reality creators, and technology companies are invited to collaborate, bringing their technical expertise to enhance the platform’s capabilities and broaden its reach. “We see tremendous potential in the collaboration between the gaming industry and the bereavement space,” added Milind Kuri, Global Sales Director for Missumuch.com, LLC, based in India and Malaysia. “Together, we can create experiences that not only honor loved ones but also push the boundaries of what virtual environments can offer.

4

Looked into how much AI slop is on Medium. I'm not sure what surprised me more—the sheer volume (between 40-48% of recent posts, according to two different analyses) or Medium's response (that it doesn't really matter as long as most of it goes unread). Unlike platforms like LinkedIn or Meta, Medium has taken a stand against AI pablum and tries to elevate human writing/ limit the reach of AI and other spam. It hasn't stopped this flood—but I do think CEO Tony Stubblebine makes some persuasive points about how what matters most might be surfacing/boosting good human work rather than trying to detect every piece of AI spam. Thank you to Pangram Labs and Originality ai for taking the time to run platform-level analyses at my request, as well Reality Defender for spot-checking articles and NewsGuard for sharing its own experiences. Read here: https://lnkd.in/gmcWnDiv

161

24 Comments

We always hear about the importance of continuous learning, so it's nice to actually see it in action from senior leadership. This inspired me to make my first pull request in #Rust to add #Markdown support for the CLI. As someone who spent a long time working in tech docs, there's a special place in my heart for markup that's easy to read and write without any button clicks. Full disclaimer, I'm new to Rust, and got a lot of help from Amazon Q and Claude 3 Sonnet. So if you know a better way to do this, make another pull request to improve it. You won't hurt my feelings. I'm here for iterative improvement. https://lnkd.in/gHvZaA42

13

2 Comments

I've been doing a lot of "playing around" (really, programming) with Tabnine's chat copilots plus Vercel's v0.dev and Replit's Agents... I'll be putting my thoughts down into a long form piece. But one thing I've found to be the most effective- even when the AI suggests things and writes code 10x faster than you/I ever would, you need to do a lot of restating, suggesting, referencing, and re-affirming to get code that looks the way you need it to for a cohesive whole. At some point it may not matter that you understand what it's doing... I just wouldn't trust any business or personal critical data, functionality, or product to code that wasn't fully understood and could drift/break/bloat because it lacked the abstracted architect to hold the whole picture together. I find myself often mentally referring to projects or code or concepts I read in a thousand other places, but that are relevant to this exact request, and while having "workspace context" plus "all of scraped GitHub context" is nice, there are a few extra layers of context that I have a really hard time imagining how to provide the models. And that's what we're here for. Providing that context so the models can be much more effective and efficient. Anywho, more thoughts to come. Just what I've been ruminating on these past few weeks of more intense use. If you haven't tried these models out for yourself, go play around. v0.dev may be the best thing to try, or claude, because you can see the immediate result in a clicking user interface.

6

New and improved podcast transcripts just went live, courtesy of Substack. Every episode includes high-quality transcripts which you can now expand to be full-screen, easily search for keywords, and click any segment to listen to the audio inline. To find these transcripts, go to any episode page (e.g. https://lnkd.in/gs38r9jR), and click the little hamburger menu above the episode cover art.

45

7 Comments

It's important to evaluate the performance of your audio/video applications periodically as the applications and the world around them changes. Here's how Zoom worked with TestDevLab to do just that, and see what they found! 💡

8

Thanks for attending, especially Gregory Burd and Kresten Krab Thorup, the original authors of HanoiDB! We'll be back next week for more. Follow me on YouTube to get notified or catch up on past streams: https://lnkd.in/ea4rXxEx #RustLang #Databases #Erlang

5

"Who wants an AI-written fan letter?" ⬅ Exactly this. I have no problem using AI for research or summarizing a meeting, but Google promoting its AI assistant, Gemini, as a way for a little girl to write a fan letter that's "just right" is icky. AI can't speak from the heart, it can only offer perfect, cookie-cutter prose. And that's a cheap imitation of messy, honest writing by an actual human. Good writing is all about connecting with your audience; most of us don't want to connect with a machine.

9

1 Comment

AI has a huge amount of unintended consequences. In my latest Substack article, I share AI stories from this week's news... then take two years of studio learnings... and translate them into three actionable insights for everyone. tl;dr: don't let AI make you lazy. https://lnkd.in/dGdtj_d3

16

1 Comment

"One of the things we don’t want to happen when we take a biometric test is we don’t want there to be any intermediary because the data can be stolen, so we rely on only browsers with end-to-end encryption. In Africa, because people are data-conscious, they use a lot of browsers that have proxies. The browser sends a user's site to another server which compresses and sends it back to the user as a light page.  The problem with that is that you can’t do end-to-end encryption. There are a lot of browsers like this which are good for saving data but not for running verification processes." Insightful conversation with Sylvia Brune of pawaPass https://lnkd.in/eCXMpqDD

16

A post about some of the ways I try to meet the needs of a browser DevRel team that need to share information about new things, with those of developers who need to know what actually works now. If you write or speak about the web, perhaps some of these ideas will help you too.

15

I will be talking at #DrupalConBarcelona 2024! It's a BoF with the title "How I shoe-horned Drupal and PHP into Reykjavik University's curriculum". Please join me for a short presentation on how I actually did that and how I structure my course and then the discussion on how we can advance a course like this into other universities and support even more Drupal and PHP development! https://lnkd.in/eyEDeZji #drupal #php

13

Another day, another new, faster #LLM. Meet Claude 3.5 Sonnet from #Anthropic. "Claude 3.5 Sonnet operates at twice the speed of Claude 3 Opus. This performance boost, combined with cost-effective pricing, makes Claude 3.5 Sonnet ideal for complex tasks such as context-sensitive customer support and orchestrating multi-step workflows." https://lnkd.in/ecXUMhKE #AI #genAI #CX #AIorchestration

7

I had a great time diving into the technical weeds of design system engineering on the Syntax.fm podcast with Wes Bos and Scott Tolinski. We cover a lot of ground here! https://lnkd.in/eJjnNZZ6 “What’s in a design system figma library isn’t as much of a spec for developers to build it out. What this figma library is a promise of what is in code. It is a representation of what exists in the coded design system.” #designsystems #frontend #ui #design #development

148

5 Comments