Last month, I finished going through Nathan Braun’s Coding with Baseball, a book I purchased around four years ago. If you’re at all interested in baseball statistics and want to build a quick foundation for exploring them, I highly recommend the book. It doesn’t hold your hand—it’s not a reference text, and you’ll need documentation for pandas, seaborn, and scikitlearn for the exercises—but it’s an excellent, concise overview that teaches exactly what you need with a straightforward style and relevant examples. It encouraged me to set up the Lahman Baseball Database on my computer and led me down a few rabbit holes, one of which I’ll explain here.
Continue reading “Coding with Baseball”Review: An Update on LLM Satire
I gave Claude (3.7 Sonnet) the same prompt I provided ChatGPT two years ago: Write a short article in the satirical style of The Onion, titled “Optimistic AI Just Happy to Be Here”.
I also went back to ChatGPT to see how it has improved.
This test encapsulates why I’ve stuck with Claude as the LLM I choose to pay for a few months at a time. It has an uncanny sense of style that ChatGPT entirely fails to capture. I found Claude’s article entirely believable and legitimately funny. It addresses my complaints from two years ago—it attributes quotes to individuals rather than nameless people with a title, and doesn’t hit us over the head with any of the jokes. It plays it straight, shares the story, and makes us laugh.
ChatGPT has slightly refined itself but still suffers from being too on the nose with its humor. SunnyBot-9000 is obviously an optimistic robot. That’s a case of nominative determinism if I’ve ever seen it. Compare that to Claude’s creation of IRIS-7, where the running gag is that nobody understands how this bot’s mien came to be. ChatGPT also leans heavily into LLMs’ potential inaccuracies, making it feel like it was written two years ago. Hallucinations still occur, I’m sure, but it’s not what it was upon release. Claude focuses on the tasks’ relative drudgery, which I find more compelling. The happy idiot of ChatGPT’s creation could be refined, but on a first pass, it’s rather dull.
Interestingly, they both used the same rough setup about deleting/resetting the LLM, which it then took in stride. While the punchlines were different, they both landed.
I talked about the characteristic ending of articles from The Onion in my post two years ago, and ChatGPT failed spectacularly yet again. It at least puts the sentiment in a direct quote from the bot, similar to Claude, but hoo-boy, is it objectively not a funny ending. It has the trappings of something that could be funny, but there’s no flair or subversion of expectations. It keeps pounding the same nail of “Live, Laugh, Love” with no unique edge.
ChatGPT has certainly improved compared to two years ago, but it’s impressive what Claude was able to churn out. Heck, Claude even got the rough formatting of “CAPITALIZED CITY NAME—” that begins every Onion article. ChatGPT couldn’t be bothered.
Department of Education AI Toolkit
The Department of Education1Look: I had an existential crisis while drafting this blog post. I regularly read newsletters about education and EdTech as part of my job and am acutely aware of the hubbub around the potential elimination of the Department of Education. Couple that with relaxed restrictions on AI development from the new administration, and I ended up in a loop of questions: Does any of this matter? For all I know, once Linda McWrestling is in charge of public education, these guidelines and toolkits will be formally retracted. I decided that wasn’t the blog post I wanted to write; all this politicking doesn’t change a good idea, and I hope thousands of schools and districts have seen this Toolkit and will consider it important regardless of what Sam Altman tells Trump is safe. released a toolkit for Safe, Ethical, and Equitable, AI Integration last October. I finally made the time to read it and love what I found. As with most things in education, if it’s sensible in that context, it is worth considering in every context.
- 1Look: I had an existential crisis while drafting this blog post. I regularly read newsletters about education and EdTech as part of my job and am acutely aware of the hubbub around the potential elimination of the Department of Education. Couple that with relaxed restrictions on AI development from the new administration, and I ended up in a loop of questions: Does any of this matter? For all I know, once Linda McWrestling is in charge of public education, these guidelines and toolkits will be formally retracted. I decided that wasn’t the blog post I wanted to write; all this politicking doesn’t change a good idea, and I hope thousands of schools and districts have seen this Toolkit and will consider it important regardless of what Sam Altman tells Trump is safe.
A Dumb Salesforce and Spreadsheet Thing
There are two separate issues with the technology I use at work that conspired to confound me earlier this year.
- Salesforce objects have two different unique ID constructions.
- Common lookup functions in Google Sheets are case-insensitive.
Digital News
In addition to receiving a physical copy of the Sunday edition of the New Haven Register, my subscription includes access to their “E-Edition,” which amounts to a digital scan of the paper. It’s perfect for reading on my iPad.
Clicking on an article opens it in a dedicated and simplified reader view, avoiding the need to flip through the paper to continue reading. Plus, I can still read the daily comics.
I prefer reading the “curated” daily newspaper instead of checking the website or the CT Insider app for new articles.1Or, even worse, enable push notifications from the app. I can dedicate time to sit down and peruse the day’s news, then not feel obligated to have it follow me around on my phone. It’s helped me become more informed on news of all types—more than poking around on Reddit allows—without succumbing to a 24-hour news cycle or doom-scrolling social media to see all the hottest takes.
I still enjoy going outside on a sleepy Sunday morning to see a bagged newspaper at the base of the front porch, but it would certainly be a waste to have that every day. This online version, which I made a shortcut to access easily, is more than sufficient.
- 1Or, even worse, enable push notifications from the app.
Some More Apps I Like
I recently wrote about feeeed and decided to highlight a few more niche apps I’ve been enjoying since getting an iPhone last year. These are in no particular order, but I find them all sufficiently useful and well-made to give them my official okey-dokey.
Continue reading “Some More Apps I Like”We Are So Back with iA Writer on the iPad
With iOS and iPadOS 18 out, I decided to give iA Writer another shot on my iPad. I adore it on my MacBook, and it’s been frustrating not having a consistent interface for my personal writing.
Lo and behold, I discover that iA Writer has been properly working with Dropbox since May! Dropbox decided to hop aboard the “modern File Provider API” train, leading to a slightly worse experience than many years ago1That is Apple’s fault., but a significantly better experience than when using any Dropbox text file would result in errors and conflicted files.
I’m holding my breath—it takes a while for me to rebuild trust with tools that failed me so thoroughly, regardless of who is “at fault”—but I’ve been writing for the last twenty minutes and have clear indicators that my files are being saved. That makes me feel right at home.
- 1That is Apple’s fault.
feeeed
I started using feeeed after reading about it on MacStories. It’s a neat app that, though lacking a certain style and polish, is a wonderful way to create a personal list of suggested content using only sources that you provide. I can take in a fun mix of baseball subreddit posts, articles on several blogs I follow, random photos from my library, and a handful of other options.
I’ve tried the RSS game, but as someone who leans toward completionism with my content, I find it difficult to see the list of unread articles grow, yet I refuse to declare feed bankruptcy. feeeed offers a better way for me to access this content naturally. I can always open a chronological list view if I want to find something in particular, but the default view that serves you a mix of content and then cuts you off is ideal. It’s not for everyone, but I’m glad this app was made.