Week 167: Cryptic

A week of new years, being back at work, AI anti-hype, garden walks, being rained on, actors, skylines, a lack of TV, and a complete crossword.

Posted on 07 January 2024 by Rowan Manning .
Tagged with Work, Social, Walking, Games, Books, AI, Crosswords

1 responses

Happy New Year! We rang in the new year in a Simmons, it was the right level of disappointing – long bar queues and too-loud music. We managed to not be hung over 🎉
Back to work! I’m actually quite sickeningly pleased to be back. I feel refreshed and some of the stuff we have planned for this quarter is exciting. I’ve got a small hit-list of new things to delete and I’m very excited to do it. #DeleteMore2024
A lot of skeptical writing about AI keeps cropping up in my various feeds which I’m pleased to see 👍 The New York Times suing OpenAI is music to my ears, and there have been some really great papers on the dangers of AI-driven code generation:
- Lost in Translation: A Study of Bugs Introduced by Large Language Models while Translating Code has a couple of very quote-worthy paragraphs.
  On real-world projects, the LLMs were largely ineffective, with success rates of 8.1% for GPT-4 and 0% for the rest of the models.
- Do Users Write More Insecure Code with AI Assistants? is also great, the also-very-quoteworthy TL;DR being:
  Overall, we find that participants who had access to an AI assistant wrote significantly less secure code than those without access to an assistant. Participants with access to an AI assistant were also more likely to believe they wrote secure code, suggesting that such tools may lead users to be overconfident about security flaws in their code
On a very rainy Thursday, we got soaked to the skin looking at the lights around Kew Gardens. It was a Christmas gift and I really enjoyed it despite hating wearing wet jeans.
The weekend was fun, we went to Phantom Peak with Tammy and Marcus. As usual, it takes a bit of time to feel comfortable chatting to the actors but, by the end, it felt a lot more natural. It’s our second time and it was fresh because they change all the trails seasonally.
The week has been littered with more Cities: Skylines II sessions. I’m a little bit obsessed and have managed to rack up 58 hours in the past month 😳 it’s relaxing.
I’ve been playing over NVIDIA GeForce Now, a game streaming service, it’s pricey but considerably cheaper than building a gaming PC. It’s been super reliable and it’s nice to not hear my laptop fans screaming when I boot up a game. Thanks for the recommendation, Gallal!
We’ve instituted a “no TV unless you know what you want to watch” rule, which is really excellent and has resulted in there being no TV this week. Why’s it excellent? Firstly we’ve removed the frustrating endless scrolling through various streaming services. Secondly, we’re finding other ways to occupy our time. I’ve started reading The Starless Sea which I’m enjoying a lot so far. We also completed our first full cryptic crossword, not a difficult one but a nice achievement anyway!