(morning writing, f&f, watching notes, work)

So non sto. I already wrote about the weekend, but look, i recap again:

Saturday - So humid. Ended in buckets of rain when we went out to get shrimp po'boys at the trying-hard-to-be-a-destination location in town, then stopped at my nibling's high school art show. (Charges admission, which, i guess, the sports teams do it why not the art show?)

Sunday - brunch at my sister's to visit with my brother's son who had arrived after a long delayed flight and who is staying with my dad while being forced off campus until next term and his summer job start.

Monday was a normalish work day, i worked a little late taking a mandated AI training course, then mowed the orchard plus whatever until the battery died, then weed whacked up at the road a little bit. Can't kill all the invasive (rank 3) daisies but can discourage reproduction. I'm a little sad i was so successful with the Queen Anne's lace (also rank 3). There were no daisies by the roadside when i was growing up, but Queen Anne's lace features in nostalgic memories of summer, including early in my marriage to Christine. I think i must have picked roadside Queen Anne's lace and daylilies driving down the DelMarVA peninsula to be with her for weekends when i was in grad school and she was in Edenton on the radio.  We had received two lovely art glass pitcher/vases as wedding gifts and the cobalt blue one, with daylilies and Queen Anne's lace, sitting on the kitchen table in late afternoon light is a bright glowing memory ....

Tuesday and Wednesday were both full of context switching and long strings of meetings. I got a little experience with AI using the prompt training from Monday. It does seem to help to tell chatgpt that it is an expert with thirty years of experience in [area] who also is an award winning educator, writing clear  articles, and that it should [do thing] for another expert in the area who is familiar with the terminology. Telling it to be an expert and a clear writer seems to improve, but telling it it's also writing for another expert helps bring the content up to a potentially more useful level. I am not spending so much time rolling my eyes saying "i knew that" and "that's what i asked" and feeling like it's merely parroting my prompt.

I see the potential, and -- like getting help from humans  -- it's frequently not useful  or satisfying until you spend time getting familiar with each other. I wonder if agents are as inevitable as remote controls for everything, mobile phones, smart phones. I don't know if the current costs will really be worth it. I think about the switch from typewriters to word processing and the level of fuss that then was possible. One typed some thing out, yeah yeah, get the margins right and the line spacing right.  I don't think bold and italics were possible? And if you needed math or formulae you wrote them in? And then experts in formatting would take over, whether the publisher or the admin who had become a LaTeX expert. But once everyone had a word processor at hand everyone was fiddling with markups and styles. What had been an expert skill was democratized yes, but not everyone was skillful and the time sink for people who were experts in something else.

AI minutes of the Zoom meeting we had yesterday were ... meh with "where did it get that from" and "that was a minor aside" .. and while no one needs to volunteer for  collaborative scribing in Google Docs, everyone reviewing the "minutes" will need to put more work in.

Tuesday night was in the car getting my nephew from my Dad's, meeting up with C at home, going to a restaurant, getting Christine home to care for Edward, taking Z to a drug store for allergy meds because cat hair. (I shared how i found i was allergic to cats in college,  he muttered something that indicates he might be discovering the same thing.) Then to Dad's and back. I don't drive enough and ground gears once shifting. Bleh i need to insist on being the driver more.

Groceries last night then watching the Wednesday sci fi. Currently Halo, which is oddly better than Stargate Universe. We've tried watching that Stargate twice, but i always get very turned off by the not one trusts anyone plot threads.

Friday i go to New Bern with Dad and nephew Z, which should be an all day thing.

Anyhow,....