The battle rages on here at my home front as I’ve just lost connection to the information superhighway. Absolute chaos has erupted - I’ve scrambled to deploy my personal hotspot reserves but even they can only offer up a trickle of bandwidth.
Rations are being put in place - I’ve had to limit who else in the household can piggyback off my mobile connection at a given time. Streaming anything heavier than mere tweets appears to be out of the question for now.
Moral is low amongst the ranks. We’re all tired of staring at the dreaded buffering symbols that mock us endlessly. I’ve logged an urgent message with our ISP chatbot but so far their support has been insufficient.
What began as chaos has descended into full blown crisis…particularly for the younger recruits who have never known life without a steady internet stream.
The Millenial and Gen Z troops are flailing without the online world they’re so accustomed to. Endless refreshes and buffering frustration has taken its toll on morale.
Making matters worse, many have never had to endure these kinds of communications blackouts before. It’s all they’ve ever known. Now they’re scrambling to learn archaic skills like entertaining themselves without screens or getting homework done via mobile hotspots with data limitations.
I’m fighting to keep a steady leadership presence but it’s not easy wrangling troops so used to constant connectivity. Rations remain tight and options few. Unless the cavalry arrives soon with repairs, I fear a full meltdown may be imminent amongst the digitally dependent ranks.
For now all I can do is pray the older generations can keep the younger ones from losing it completely until reinforcements liberate us from this internet Iron Dome. Wish us luck out here on the dark network front! Updates to follow if we can keep it together.
Options are running thin fast. I’m seriously contemplating having to retreat to the office just to get some decent work done. Already non-essential and bandwidth-limiting programs, like VPN, have been cut off.
A Brigade of Personal Hotspots to the Rescue
I managed to scrape together just enough data to transmit this rough photo giving a glimpse of the tense atmosphere (seen above). Even falling back to being “that guy” who turns off his video during our next Zoom meeting is being quietly mulled as a potential last resort.
As night falls with no repairs in sight, the fight to regain control of my internet access continues. I’ll keep transmitting updates from the digital warzone as events allow, but for now all any of us can do is keep our fingers crossed that reinforcements arrive soon to liberate our stopped up information lines. Wish us luck!
This post is about the attentional leverage of searching through AI, specifically with the Poe Web Search bot. Sometimes the AI gives me the answer in the summary, sometimes it gives me the link where I need to dig deeper, sometimes it doesn’t find anything good. Regardless…there is no attentional rabbit hole.
What are my figures of merit?
Time to a good answer — the time cost or opportunity cost.
# of tabs opened to get to a good answer — the cost of attention-switching, which I’m really trying to avoid.
One of the traps of a traditional search engine is that it really feels like you’re doing important work. You are on a detective case. You are weeding out the nonsense. You are finding the hidden gems. If you truly enjoy searching and browsing for the sake of searching and browsing, then more power to you and please don’t let me ruin your pastime.
But I ain’t got time for that ish. More importantly, I ain’t got attention for that ish. I want the answer now, even if it’s just to know that there isn’t a good answer on the web. If I can’t have it now, then I want the answer with as little attention switching as possible.
In my experience, Poe Web Search is “smarter” than Bing. In other words - better results and no ads. What’s even cooler is that once I get the answer, I can quickly input that into one of many very useful Poe bots: Claude 2, GPT-4, Code Llama, 6 Hats Helper, etc. Poe is kind of like Inspector Gadget - there is a chat bot for every job.
pSai is trained on all of polySpectra’s technical product information. We’re now using it as an AI-augmented search function, for the entire polySpectra.com website. I wrote about my initial experience building pSai here.
Resina is a much more challenging project. Our goal is to train it on all of resin 3D printing. This will be pretty hard. Resina is accessible at resin3D.ai.
Only a couple hours after emailing our list, we already have a volume of un-answered (or poorly-answered) questions that would be pretty overwhelming for a lowly human to try to respond to on their own. I’m excited by the challenge to figure out a scalable system from the start.
We’re refining a setup where Resina learns a bit more every night. So, even if it can’t answer a certain question today, the hope is that it’ll know the answer by tomorrow. There are still a lot of humans-in-the-loop, but we’re trying to make the system as automated as possible. (With humans as curators/editors of the AI’s knowledge base.)
We’re aiming for something like this:
Rough Diagram of the Resina AI Workflow
A few fun experiences from today:
We must be doing something right, because we already have a few really angry dialogs with people who appear to be major haters of polySpectra (and maybe AI too?)
I’ve been having a lot of fun with the combination of GitHub CoPilot and Cursor.sh. CoPilot quickly tries to autocomplete while Cursor can really do the full-context heavy lifting. These tools are designed for developers (and I am not a developer), but I’m finding them to be really useful for content creation. (See yesterday’s post: ) It’s surprisingly good at coming up with new questions to ask Resina.
Very early exploration with the possibility of giving Resina a voice. ElevenLabs is super impressive.
I’ve been exploring Cursor, an AI-first code editor that’s making waves in the developer community. It’s being used by engineers at big names like Shopify, Samsung, OpenAI, and Facebook, to name a few. But what’s all the fuss about?
Well, Cursor is packed with features that are designed to make coding faster and more efficient. For starters, it lets you chat with your project. No more wasting time hunting for the right place to start a change or the correct method to call. It’s like having a knowledgeable coding buddy right there with you.
But that’s not all. Cursor also allows you to browse documentation directly and refer to code definitions and files. It’s like having a coding reference library at your fingertips.
One feature that really stands out is Cursor’s ability to make code changes. It’s like having an AI assistant that can write low-level logic for you. Need to change an entire method or class? Just give it a prompt. Want to generate code from scratch? Just give it a simple instruction. It’s a game-changer.
And let’s not forget about debugging. Cursor can scan your code for bugs and help you fix them quickly. It’s like having a personal bug detective that automatically investigates linter errors and stack traces to figure out the root cause of your bug.
I’ve been using Cursor every single day (since yesterday 😜), and it’s become an integral part of my coding routine (today). It’s not just the advanced features that make it stand out, but also the ease of use and the efficiency it brings to my workflow. It’s more than just an editor, it’s a tool that truly understands the needs of a developer.
So, is Cursor worth the hype? Well, it’s loved by developers all over the world and has helped tens of thousands of them be more productive. It’s not just an editor; it’s a game-changer in the world of coding. And I’m excited to see where it goes from here.
For the last four or five months, I have been on the hunt for the best voice to text transcription tool. This is a really important part of my workflow and helps me to be able to work while I am walking or driving. (I use the Yealink BH71 Pro headset, which has amazing noise cancelling (for the microphone) and is still small enough to wear while active.)
In my quest for the perfect transcription tool, I’ve tried and tested numerous options. Here, I present a detailed comparison of three of the many tools I’ve explored: Otter, WhisperBoard, and HappyScribe:
In summary, Otter is best for quick rough transcription on mobile, WhisperBoard is best for full privacy but you get what you pay for it, and HappyScribe has the highest accuracy but is designed for desktop. The price difference between HappyScribe and Otter is only $0.01/month. They each have tradeoffs between accuracy, mobility, privacy and cost.
Right now I’m still in the final phases of what will likely be a decision to go all-in on HappyScribe. I’m recording in Otter, then exporting the audio, re-importing to HappyScribe, and comparing the difference. If I were working at Otter, I would put some focus and attention on transcription accuracy. If I were working at HappyScribe, I would build a mobile app.
Honorable mention goes to the built-in iOS voice-to-text, which was used to dictate much of this post. (And in case you are curious, here was my process of dictating to Claude-instant-100k, to get most of this post written without using my hands => https://poe.com/rawworks/1512928000195140 )
Last month I was whining about “handwriting OCR”, a technology that has mysteriously and simultaneously existed in a quantum superposition between |in use every day at the USPS⟩ and |doesn’t actually work⟩ since at least 1998. (See Why Does Handwriting OCR Suck in 2023?)
GPT-4 with Vision (GPT-4V) is now available to ChatGPT Plus users (somehow Microsoft didn’t release this one first). I figured I’d take a break from my ranting and put it to the test:
GPT-4V transcribes my notebook into Markdown.
It didn’t nail the indentation of the bullet points, but I think this is getting pretty close to useful. If anyone can think of a way to fine-tune GPT-4V (I think we may need to wait for the API) - please let me know. Maybe I’ll finally be able to digitize my handwritten notebooks this decade.
Shout out to “All About AI” for showing the example that inspired me to revisit this. At 00:32 - he draws an outline of a program in his notebook and asks GPT4 to write the corresponding code. Full video below:
In the same way that every company needed to become an “Internet company”, and then have a social media presence — now every company is going to need to become an “AI company”.
Expertise in the market niche: “Meet Resina - Your Resin 3D Printing AI Agent” https://resin3d.ai/
Convert
For polySpectra’s engineering audience, AI answering questions about the documentation is arguably an important part of conversion, closing, and delighting customers. Here’s our support bot in action: https://docs.polyspectra.com/
Similarly, one of my goals with Resina is to freely educate people as much as possible about resin 3D printing. polySpectra was founded to solve the founding technical debt of stereolithography 3D printing (shitty materials) - so the faster people learn about the “gotchas” of resin printing, the faster they’ll realize that they need materials they can actually trust.
Close
This stage warrants extra precaution. Depending on the type of interaction that you are having, AI could be a surefire way to destroy any trust that you’ve built with the prospect. I’m not sure I have good advice for a true sales close, other than perhaps using AI to help word emails. I think the best approach is using AI to be so helpful and so informative (in the other stages) that the customer closes themselves.
Delight
Speed. I’m hooked on same-day shipping. I can’t wait 5 seconds for ChatGPT to respond, I need Claude-Instant instead. AI can help delight customers by accelerating customer engagement and customer support 100-1000x.
“Mass customization”. This is a term thrown around a lot in 3D printing. LLMs can be fine-tuned so quickly now (see How To Train ChatGPT On A Book In 5 Minutes) that you could imagine customizing the AI to be specific to an individual customer. I’m excited to explore this idea further.
Make it fun. As we start to build more and more AI tools at polySpectra, I’m trying to have fun with it. I’m also trying to build tools that I would legitimately want to use.
Over the years, I have had lot of “good” ideas that just clearly weren’t worth my time. Now that AI can accelerate some of these ideas by 100x or maybe even 1000x - does that make them worth pursuing? Certainly for some of them.
The super-doing capabilities of AI require super-discernment capabilities for humans.
The possibilities are completely overwhelming to me, every day I find myself paralyzed by the sheer scale of potential permutations. I feel something like this:
The first time that I met Roland Griffiths, he was setting up someone else’s tent at Burning Man. This small act of generosity - setting up someone else’s tent - might not sound like a big deal, but it turned out to be a really big deal for me. (I happen to now be married to that someone.)
Roland was a truly inspiring friend and mentor to me. He had incredible discipline in all areas of his life - his work ethic, his self-care routines, his meditation practice. From the moment I met him, I could tell immediately that he had a very clear sense of purpose, a real mission, perhaps best conveyed by his favorite question: “Are you aware that you are aware?”
You can likely sense Roland’s child-like curiosity in this question. His curiosity wasn’t just about ideas, Roland was simply one of the most loving and compassionate people that I have ever met. I am incredibly grateful for the time I had with him over the last decade or so.
Roland Griffiths teaching me how to meditate, as a wedding gift.
Professionally, Roland was a rockstar. He was one of the world’s foremost experts in seemingly disparate subjects: caffeine, mystical experiences, and psilocybin. In “How to Change Your Mind”, Roland is described as “the investigator beyond reproach”. Roland was among the last of a generation of researchers to use self-experimentation as a mode of scientific investigation. Once regarded as the gold standard, this is now considered to be too conflicted and biased to be used in modern research (which currently favors double-blind controlled studies). For example, one of Roland’s academic contributions that involved self-experimentation was towards quantifying the minimum detectable dose of caffeine. (This was at a time when caffeine was not considered to be addictive, and not treated as “a drug”.)
Roland was truly at the cutting edge of research in consciousness. He was incredibly curious about probing the line between science and spirituality. With the utmost respect for my dear friend, many of the questions he was seeking to explore in his research were beyond science. Roland was not afraid to look over that edge.
What do I mean by beyond science? To me, science stops when we can’t propose a means for others to reproduce the experiment. So many of the questions about consciousness (not just Roland’s) are fundamentally irreproducible. It’s not that they aren’t interesting questions - it’s that these are philosophical questions, these are spiritual questions, these are mystical questions. In my view they cannot be answered with the tools of physical science. (But hey, I’m just a lowly chemist.)
I am forever grateful to Roland for these debates. I don’t know exactly where to draw the line between science and spirituality, but my conversations with him helped me to start sketching a rough topology. Without getting too heady, let me explain what I mean with a short example:
Roland Griffiths taught Michael Phelps how to swim.
We can test this statement with scientific investigation. We might never be able to prove without a doubt that Roland did or did not teach Michael how to swim (it takes a village), but if we asked enough people at the pool we could probably get a good scientific sense of the degree to which Roland influenced Michael’s swimming abilities.
Roland Griffiths and Michael Phelps have the same conscious experience while swimming.
This one gets tricky. Some people would argue that we just don’t have sharp enough scientific tools to probe that question. To me, this question is beyond science. From a scientific perspective - it is unknowable, even while from a psychological perspective Roland and Michael both intimately know the experience of swimming. My view is that no matter how many words, sounds, EEGs, fMRIs, or nerve clamps that we use - science alone can’t compare their direct conscious experience. (And the beauty of it is that Michael turned out to be a decent swimmer, even though we’ll never be sure if Roland’s experience of swimming even remotely resembled Michael’s.)
That’s enough philosophy of mind for today (see the footnotes for some of my favorite books on this topic). Let’s get back to remembering my buddy Roland.
Roland was unbelievably upbeat and cheerful after receiving the news of his terminal cancer diagnosis. “What a gift”, he would say. “What a tremendous opportunity to really think about my priorities.” While I can’t imagine myself responding to a similar situation with even a fraction of his equanimity - I don’t doubt that he meant it. I certainly don’t have the words for it now, but I feel that I have learned a tremendous amount from Roland recently, observing how he has courageously and compassionately navigated his final months on earth.
Towards the end of his life, Roland was very curious about the possibility of communicating after death. Since I heard the news of his passing yesterday, I’ve been quietly investigating this possibility.
I can’t prove it scientifically, Roland, but I feel your presence. I feel your love. Thank you.
