Yodeller

My "musician" hobby has taken another step forward as I finished my latest project today. For a while I have been working on a full album which has required a lot more work than just doing singles. It also led me to yet another rabbit hole doing investigation for the background of the songs. And if that wouldn't have been enough I have also been wiring a backstory to give even more depth to the whole story of the album.

In addition to just having a message I also wanted to tell a story. Of course the story bits that ended up to actual lyrics is a fraction of what all I actually drafted up for the greater context.

There is still some work to be done before it's ready for release, but I'm already thinking of the next project. I need to be careful not to get carried away with that one and do the boring work still to get the whole thing actually finished.

In software development most of the work is thinking. I'm used to the concept that I don't need to seemingly be always doing something actively to it being counted at work. You just can't do that kind of work efficiently.

When I moved towards management this kind of work decreased. I felt like the job was more about sitting in meetings or talking with people. Not something you can do just by thinking. Of course there is a lot of thinking before and after those discussions as much as during them, but it still didn't feel the same as thinking about solving a hard technical problem.

Now my role is again different, and the job itself too. No more managing people, but still plenty of meetings. But my main job again is to think. To come up with new ways of working, new products and solutions. That's much harder than focusing on a single, well defined problem. That also takes a lot of time. This is something I need to start devoting more time - just to think. It feels a bit backwards, but after realizing this now it feels like filling my days with meetings and other things tht kept me busy was more pretending to work than clearing my calendar for "doing nothing".

One downside of living alone is that I'm now responsible for all the household expenses. They were already the biggest expense when we were living together, but now they are in total over half of my monthly income.

While I would say the apartment is quite comfortable it luckily is quite affordable as well. The utility expenses aren't that high and the mortgage is also at the bearable level despite the current high interest rates. So luckily I can still afford to live here alone. It's not actually that much more expensive than living on a lease on a much smaller, more appropriate to a single living apartment.

While I can still pay all the bills and live comfortably this new situation does leave me with substantially less money to put into my hobbies and investments. I could look for cheaper options, but getting back to the same level of living expenses compared to sharing those expenses with somebody really isn't possible even if I would be fine living really modestly.

Artificial intelligence can be classified in three levels: artificial narrow intelligence (ANI), artificial general intelligence (AGI) and artificial super intelligence (ASI). While the models of the current A I. graze can be debated to be real artificial intelligences the GPT style language models can be classified in similar manner. They might not be real intelligences, but they can mimic the human knowledge in convincing extend.

There are many smaller, more focused models that fall into the narrow category. They are specialized in single domain and can produce meaningful answers related to that knowledge, but can't really do much for more generic topics. As the more capable models still require substantial amount of computing power these smaller models are great way to bring the more limited knowledge to less powerful computers.

Most of the current state-of-the-art models fall into the generic category. They can discuss about almost any topic but the power requirements keep them out from anything but centralized cloud services.

While the advances in the field have been fast, there isn't yet a model available that could surpass human "intelligence" to be categorized as super.

Usually in tabletop role-playing games the game continues between sessions as a campaign and players assume the role of their character over and over again. This allows epic story arcs and deep character development. Usually the players get quite involved and attached to their characters.

But role-playing can be done different way as well. A oneshot is s game where the goal is to play just one session and either complete a single scenario or just see how far the characters get. Usually the characters are also premade to allow quick jump to the fame itself. So there isn't that deep connection to the character either.

All roleplaying is improvisation, but with repeating sessions the characters become familiar and it's easier to jump into their mindscape. In oneshot there isn't that much time to think about the character, so everything needs to be improvisized. It's more challenging, but can also be a lot of fun.

Maybe the biggest difference between long running campaign and oneshot is the players attachment to the character. In campaign every action can have a long lasting consequences while in oneshot it doesn't really matter what happens to the character after the session (or even during it).