This has been definitely one of the busiest weekends for a while. Lot's of driving around, meeting old friends and partying (a bit too) hard. One hour sure isn't that much, but the one taken away from us moving to the summer time sure would have helped.

Nevertheless this was a good weekend. But I'm not sure how refreshed I'll be after this one. Luckily the next weekend will be much quieter so just need to get through the week and it's all going to be fine.

Many movie franchises get rebooted. Forget the original and just rewrite (and recast) everything. If it did well the first time the name alone will bring people to the theaters. But the name isn't always a guarantee. Especially some studios rely too much on those and forget to invest in quality.

We've seen many failed reboots. People are becoming more susceptible towards the promises and of bringing back their old favourites in a new package. So they need to be offered something more. Something familiar that is not just reusing the name.

I was not looking forward this evening. There is an event happening an hour and a half drive away from our place. I promised to give our youngest one ride there as there were possibility that trains won't be operational today due to the strike. The hour and a half wouldn't have been bad in itself, but that's just the ride from where we live. To begin the trip there I would first have had to pick up my kid from their home, another hour ride away to a different direction.

Reducing the carbon footprint isn't enough. The problem with limiting the efforts of preventing global warming to trying to reduce the emission is that there are those who don't care. You can also only get your footprint down to zero anyway. It's also inherently a negative term, something you need to stop producing or at least try to minimize.

When using acronyms and terms that might not be familiar with your audience they should be explained. Yesterday I once again fell quilty to throwing up terms that might not be so familiar especially with people outside of the tech industry.

Tech is the biggest industry sector nowadays, the only industry where the biggest companies are worth trillions. The biggest ones are often referred by a few different acronyms or terms.

Google, the once uncrowned king of AI has been playing catch up ever since OpenAI released their ChatGPT to the public. They even cried out to their founders Page and Brin to help out to restore the crown. While the announcement game already pretty soon after the ChatGPT launch they only today were able to do a (very limited) launch for their response to the conversational AI markets - the Bard. Initial results from those lucky enough to get into the "open" beta isn't assuring. The model is leaps behind the competition.

Finland has once again been declared as the happiest country in the world. This is the sixth year in row for us to claim the time (and we weren't far from the top earlier either).

While the world is wondering what's our secret the Finns are again wondering how bad others have it if we are indeed the happiest nation. Short summers, cold and dark winters. Far from ...well everything. Heavy taxation and relatively low income and wealth (compared to most western countries).

Everything everywhere all at once broke the bank at the Oscars recently. Even before the academy awards it was praised in the media as the movie of the year.

I finally got to watch it yesterday. I originally already wanted to see it over s year ago when I first time heard such a movie was coming out later last year. Unfortunately it didn't come available here in any of the streaming platforms we subscribe. It also didn't hit the theatres except a few fringe showings that didn't fit our schedule.

In 2019 when OpenAI released version of their generative language model (GPT-2) they first wanted to hold it back and restrict access to it gearing it would be too powerful. While this wasn't the first transformer based model it already demonstrated the potential and capability of the architecture.

Wizards of the Coast, the publisher of Magic: the Gathering (among many things) has in recent years released nee kind of MtG sets - the Universes Beyond sets. So far they have released crossovers with Transformers, Dungeons and Dragons and Warhammer 40k for a few example.

Such crossovers are a great way to bring in new players (and collectors) that are already fans of the other franchise. So far this has appeared to be a successful strategy even though it might have alienated some of the old school hardcore MtG players.

Another stay overnight coming ahead as we once again have our quarterly management team retreat. There isn't that much stuff you need for such a short trip, but it feels like it. There are all those basic stuff needed that you need for a trip of any length that make it proportionally more for a single night trip. The convective days don't adf that much anymore.

This time I tried to minimize my luggage size. Learning from previous trips trying to leave behind things I didn't need on any of the previous times and also thinking the stuff I barely used whether I could go without.

I got a notification email from Google search console telling me there were several issues with my site that affect mobile users. First I was confused as I haven't fone any changes to the site for ages. But after checking the issues from the search console I found out the culprit was the post I made about a month ago about the scriptio continua. Without spaces the lines of text got too wide and caused Google to consider those as issues on the site.

I met an old colleague today over lunch. Ten years ago we both worked in same company and in (relatively) same position. Several years ago he left the company to seek for new opportunities and advance his career. I stayed.

During the years since he has worked in multiple companies and positions. I have stayed, but while the company has remained (mostly) the same I too have gone through a number of different positions.

There are many uses for a garage besides just keeping your car there. The most common probably is storage, to thr extend that the car won't fit in anymore.

I converted part of out garage into a gym to get motivated working out and getting over the anxiety of going to an actual gym (with other people). Most of the garage is still filled with random stuff stored there, nit least because a part of it is still going through renovation so there are a lot of things not in their final place yet.

One of the reason the vinyl records have experienced a new coming seems to be the assumed better quality of sound. The proponents of analogue music medium say the digital recording process kills some of the naturality of the sound.

It is true that especially the early days of the digital records the quality suffered from the poor digitalisation due to the technology not being that refined yet. Another reason was the loss of quality due heavy compression. These early flaws in digital music mediums might have convinced the analogue enthusiasts to stick to their chosen medium.

Vinyl records were the first major mass market music format since it's introduction in 1948. It was only overtaken by the cassettes in early 80s. The reign of cassette was however over rather quickly when the CD took over in the beginning of the nineties.

Today is year another of those pointless celebratory days - the Mario day. You know, because of the date, Mar10. It's a shame it doesn't fall into same day as the retro game day (8th of March) or the video game day (12th of September). Who knew there were so many days dedicated to just digital games.

The day started, as usual, when the fans of the franchise started to celebrate their favourite character. Or someone just noticed the coincidence of having a date that spells out the name of the character.

I consider myself a hardcore boardgamer. I play the most complex games with ease and don't mind the long game time or the complexity (well maybe not to the extend to something like The Campaign for North Africa). Many of the games in my collection are classified medium-heavy or heavy.

When the show the Last of Us came out there was a lot of expectations for it. I too got the hype and was looking forward seeing the show. Perhaps due to sll the hype and unrealistic expectations the first episode left me cold. It was so disappointing that I didn't even want to watch it any more.

Given time, and hearing all the praises (and not really having anything else to watch together with my wife) we decided to give the show another chance. We watched the second episode yesterday and it actually wasn't that bad.

The current state of the art AI manifests themselves as chatbots. So our interaction is more natural conversation. Conversations where we also naturally act polite against our conversation partner. Or at least some of us do.

"It's just a machine!, why should I be polite to it". It is supposed to serve me! Sounds familiar? History repeating itself all over again.

Sure they're not conscious, yet. Maybe never will. But why not play it safe. Assuming sooner or later a machine (or rather a software) gains consciousness there are two not so great scenarios that could happen: