Whoa – the guy who played the OG Roman Brady on Days of Our Lives just passed away. Our babysitter when I was little was obsessed with DOOL so I watched it most summer vacations. In college, my roommate Liz McKillop and I even had a column in the Notre Dame newspaper where we recapped it! (Lest you be tempted to make a joke about him being replaced by Drake Hogestyn – aka Fake Roman aka John Black – he passed away a few months back too.)
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Incorrect Opal charges
Does anyone else struggle with incorrect Opal charges? I love the convenience of contactless payments, but I’ve noticed a lot of discrepancies in how they are processed. We keep a very close eye on our bank statements and match them up to the Transport Connect Activity Statements, and it’s often very messy. Charges can be bunched up and processed days (sometimes longer!) after actual travel, which can make it hard to spot issues. I’ve just spent 20 minutes comparing my November activity (which is correct) to the actual charges on my credit card, and they’ve double-charged me for 4 trips ($10.88 in total). I’ve lodged a ticket, but I can’t help think how many other people might be affected who aren’t as fastidious as I am in checking this shit.
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Shared today on Facebook
Have fun at re:Invent, everyone! I’ve been amused at how many folks messaged me to see if I would still be there. Guess what? When you don’t have someone else footing the bill, trips halfway around the world aren’t nearly so fun. 💸😱 You enjoy yourselves though, and be safe! ❤️
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Everybody Hurts, but gospel
Al Green covering R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts.” I was a huge R.E.M. fan in high school and college, but this song was never one of my favourites. I really like this version though!
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Shared today on Facebook
Any other Sydney Uni alumni at the festival today?
I blogged some photos from our visit to the Sydney Uni Alumni Festival today. We toured the New Law School Building and engineering facilities, and we saw a talk from the first astronaut to qualify under the Australian flag (a woman!!). 🇦🇺👩🚀
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Textile exhibition
Queer quilts, rebellious knitting and political pants: the radical world of textiles – What a cool looking exhibition! I love those trade union flags… and the pink shorts. 😉 If you’re going to Adelaide in the next four months, I’d definitely check it out.
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University of Sydney Alumni Festival
Today was the University of Sydney Alumni Festival, which Rodd registered us for some time ago. They had tours, exhibitions, talks, and events happening all over campus, and it would have been perfect if it hadn’t been drizzling and gray all day. We went over in the morning for a tour of the New Law School building, which opened 15 years ago.
We started down in the basement at the library, which is massive and connects to the nearby Fisher library.
I was especially eager to go into the light well, that bit you can see in the middle in the triangular opening. It’s a stunning space, but as our tour guide pointed out, you really see the challenge with “big glass box buildings” in Sydney: it has persistent leaks when it rains. They had several buckets out, and we saw a few different spots throughout the building where rain had gotten in and caused damage.
They also have a native garden that includes a grass tree, or “gadi.” I was especially interested in this one as we’re planning to put one in our back garden when the landscaping is finished.
From the second floor, we had a great view of the art installation featuring gadi on the exterior facade of the building. It was designed by First Nations artist Michael Jalaru Torres.
Our tour guide mentioned some of the more famous alumni from the law school, but admitted that they were mostly of the “old white guy” variety. We checked out a hall with many portraits, and we were all pleasantly surprised to see a woman of colour included: Professor Alice Tay, who certainly had an illustrious career.
Up on the top floor, there was an artwork about the human rights crises in Ukraine and Gaza. I was especially interested to see the artist’s use of traditional craft mediums like cross stitch and beading.
In the afternoon we went for a tour of the engineering buildings. I was really excited to see and learn about the award-winning rocket from the USYD student rocketry team.
My other favourite part was the Sydney Manufacturing Hub. We had a fascinating talk from one of the faculty about all the different forms of 3-D printing they do, including unusual materials like ceramic and stainless steel.
Our final activity for the day was a talk with Katherine Bennell-Pegg, who this year because the first qualified astronaut under the Australian flag, as well as the first female Australian astronaut. What an amazing and inspiring person! She told us how she’d always wanted to be an astronaut, and all the steps and challenges she overcame in achieving her goal. The audience loved it, and my favourite part was seeing how many young girls were excited to meet her and ask questions.
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Shared today on Facebook
The fine folks at Multitudes have posted my talk from yesterday, if you missed it and want to check it out!
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ChatGPT Did Not Write This Talk
Yesterday I was invited to give the final talk of the year for the Tech Leader Chats meetup group, which is run by Multitudes from NZ. I had a righteous rant about generative AI and creativity, and I think I did a pretty good job with it! My references are below, and you can watch the talk online here:
I also wanted to share the list of references and news stories that I mentioned during the talk:
- “The Great Automatic Grammatizator” by Roald Dahl
- Google’s “Dear Sydney” commercial that ran during the Olympics
- Alexandra Petri’s response in The Washington Post to Google’s ad
- Forbes‘s article suggesting you use ChatGPT at the Thanksgiving table
- The Verge‘s review of Google’s Pixel 9 phone
- The Guardian’s story about LJ Hooker’s hallucination-filled home listings
- The Harvard Misinformation Review‘s article about GPT-fabricated scientific papers on Google Scholar
- The Atlantic‘s exposé revealing that AI systems have been trained on TV and film writers’ work
- The Verge‘s article about OpenAI engineers accidentally erasing critical evidence from a lawsuit
- Study in Nature about how AI generates covertly racist decisions about people based on their dialect
- Bruce Sterling’s blog post about “Delvish”
- Wired‘s story about the prevalence of AI-generated text on LinkedIn
- International Business Times story about the environment crisis the AI industry is exacerbating
- Dr. Linda McIver’s keynote from PyconAU 2024
- Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon
- Ted Chiang’s essay on why AI isn’t going to make art, from The New Yorker
- Slate article about this year’s NaNoWriMo AI controversy
- The Bookseller article about new startup Spines aiming to disrupt publishing
- Issue #218 from Nick Cave’s Red Hand Files
- The Economist article about the AI investment bubble
- Procreate’s AI statement
Woot, my knee-jerk don’t-overthink-it pub-quiz answer was Iran which seems to be [✓]. I ‘knew’ it was more populous than…