The personal blog of Tom, from London
It’s increasingly clear to me that the lunch of ChatGPT by OpenAI in 2023 was Google’s “Kodak moment”. Google, whose mission is to “organise the world’s information and make it universally useful”, somehow managed to fumble the opportunity to launch the most significant product in that space for perhaps all of history, despite their own researchers writing the seminal paper which underlies ChatGPT…
I enjoyed Ashlee Vance’s article about students building weird and possibly dangerous stuff like fusors using AI. It actually made me recall a time as a teenager when I discovered a website with seemingly complete instructions on how to build a nuclear bomb.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Disclaimer – This post was poorly researched and most of the historical ‘facts’ are pieced together from my own recollection, books I’ve been reading and Wikipedia searches. Despite the lack of rigorous scholarship (or perhaps because of it) I expect the conclusion to be 100% correct.
On 31/05/2020 16:25, [redacted] Shengwei wrote:
Alex and I are sitting in Seoul airport waiting for our connecting flight home, tired after getting less than five hours sleep last night thanks to a night out in Tokyo’s entertainment district, Shinjuku, and a 5am start this morning to catch our first flight. For the sake of completeness, I’m going to squeeze Kyoto, Tokyo and Kawaguchiko (one of the Five Lakes with views of Mount Fuji) into a…
If you’re after the delights of any well-sized city, Osaka doesn’t beat around the bush. It helps, though, if you know where to look. Alex and I spent our first night being turned away from bars, with the owners citing “last orders” and seeing us off with large bows, but they, along with their entirely Japanese clientelle, were still there and in no shortage of booze when we walked past them on…
Alex flew in to Kansai Airport on Friday and we stayed that night in Osaka. (Although Osaka deserves a post of its own, I’m skipping it for now and will sum up our two non-consecuitive nights there later on.) On Saturday we went to Koyasan, an UNESCO World Heritage site 800 metres above sea level in the Kii mountains south-west of Osaka, reached by way of a suburbun railway which winds its way…
I didn’t think I’d be doing another post so soon on what is supposed to be a work trip, but there turned out to be little to do today besides collecting my conference badge. And anyway, Japan is just so effortlessly interesting and bizarre that I probably have enough material for three more posts just covering the last twelve hours or so. I hope you’ll be satisfied with an executive summary.
Arrived today in Kobe by way of Kansai Airport (near Osaka), Seoul Incheon Airport and Heathrow. There was no evidence that Kansai Airport, which sits on an artificial island in Osaka bay, had been forced to close entirely last month after it was battered by Typhoon Jebi, during which the only road link to the mainland was destroyed.