Beyond Frozen
We had a cold spell last weekend. When I woke up, it was 7 degrees fahrenheit (-14 C) outside. When the outside temperature dips into the teens, our heater isn’t keeping up. It was 59F in our bedroom. I had thought our house’s insulation was great, but maybe it isn’t. Or maybe the pipes are losing heat while in transit (the radiators don’t feel as hot as normal). When the temperature came back to the 20s during the week, everything returned to normal again.
So, maybe it’s just that our heater is lame.
- N
Incompetence and Sass
La Professeure had adjusted our Google Home’s settings last month and accidentally turned it to use Gemini AI, rather than the Google Assistant. Apparently, once you make the switch, Google doesn’t let you turn it back. You’d have to reset the home device and re-establish all the configurations. I think AI is supposed to be able to respond to a wider range of queries, but it certainly does not do existing ones as well: it loses the ability to recognise multiple languages, takes 10 times longer to respond to requests and stops responding to simple queries such as “when will it stop raining?” It is definitely a step back.
One “improvement” is that it is giving me sass now. If I had said, “turn off… I mean, turn on the lights,” before the switch, she would just turn the lights on. But now she’d say “I can’t turn the light on and off at the same time. What would you like me to do?” You know damn well what I want you to do, stupid AI.
Snark is used to mask incompetence. AI learned that.
The AI push is annoying, and I can’t wait for it to either actually catch up to the hype or get dropped.
- S
17 years
Our paper at work has been accepted at SigMOD, so that’s exciting. I’d never published at SigMOD, since I was in high performance computing in grad school. The conference is in Bagaluru though, so I’ll probably not be going. There are twenty other authors on the paper (everyone who works on the product, even the managers, got paper credit, not just the actual writers), but it’s still a pub, so I’m happy about it. The last paper I published was in 2009. La Professeure is very amused that I’ll have more publications than her this year.
Now we have to address the reviewers’ comments. The acceptance was not conditioned though, so technically we can do whatever we want, including ignoring the reviewers’ comments. Some of the comments went directly against management (especially having to do with performance numbers, since they can be considered industry secrets), so I’m sure it’ll get ignored. When I was writing my part of the paper, I also had to remove some stuff I’d put in, because management doesn’t like having concrete performance data, or talk about features that are only available to internal teams.
With this paper out, there’s talk of working on follow-up papers, and some of my coworkers are talking about it. So the paper I have in mind from the project I did last year (which I had planned to write during Thanksgiving and Christmas but didn’t, because we needed to spend time with my father-in-law), may not be dead.
Academic publishing in a for-profit organisation is a special beast, I’m surprised how many companies manage to do it.
- D
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