fort mckay (1/12)
⚙️ Fort McKay is located about 500 miles north of Calgary.
🤖 Fort McKay is a small community in northern Alberta, located about 54 kilometers north of Fort McMurray along the Athabasca River. It has historical roots as a Hudson’s Bay Company trading post and is now situated in the heart of Alberta's oil sands region. The local economy benefits significantly from nearby oil sands development, with businesses and partnerships tied to the industry, though environmental concerns remain a key consideration. Surrounded by boreal forest, the area is rich in natural beauty, and traditional activities such as hunting and fishing are still part of the community’s lifestyle. Fort McKay offers essential services, including a school, health center, and recreational facilities, while more specialized services are accessed in Fort McMurray.
goals for the week, "professional":
- new personal website (with resume/portfolio; and also with photographs and "list of hobbies")
- Atacama / LLM integrations
- Atacama print-view tuning
- Atacama "small feature" list: database re-structuring will be at the top of the list
goals for the week, "personal":
- social events on Monday and Thursday
- get haircut 💡( not today, not Sunday; the barber shops in central Iowa are closed or overcrowded on Sundays)
- additional withheld from public view
There are some directional choices to be made about Atacama. Will I be importing content from other platforms? Is it going to support multiple users and/or multiple installations?
Some of the answers will be based around how the LLM features work. And look.
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5066601-senate-democrats-consider-rfk-jr/
Some Democrats said to be open to backing RFK Jr.
💡 I mostly agree with the take. RFK Jr is controversial in different ways than most of the other controversial nominees of the next administration.
Over the past 2 months, the stock for Rigetti Computing (NASDAQ:RGTI) has gone from 1.12 to 19.02 . 🔥( and yet, quantum computing is still fake)
I must assume that Google's "error-correction" paper is the driving factor. It was at 1.35 on November 20 when Google announced "AlphaQubit". ⚙️( https://blog.google/technology/google-deepmind/alphaqubit-quantum-error-correction/ ) 💡( AlphaQubit is nothing. It is an LLM that does a computational task very slightly better than a much simpler model), and 4.4 on December 9 when Google announced Willow ⚙️( https://research.google/blog/making-quantum-error-correction-work/ ) 🔥( Willow could be Big If True. )
Of course, quantum computing is still fake. 💡( even with Shor's algorithm, one cannot accomplish anything useful with 49 bits in 58 microseconds) But, that isn't the question for the markets. The logic is "LLMs are big, quantum computing feel similar, QED".
The question is: when will the Samaritans get off the train? I have no answers.
football is done.
⚔️ well, actually, there is still "week 18" of the NFL, plus two more rounds of college football playoffs, and ... does the East-West game count?
it is college basketball season. much like football has done, there is too much supply for me to care about any individual game right now.
unlike in football (where Iowa State is always the "scrappy underdog" or the "lovable loser" or "team with a great year wins the Pop-Tarts bowl"), ISU sometimes is legitimately good in basketball. 💡( both men's and women's; although this year only the men's team is possibly "legitimately good") this might be one of those years.
four of the top 6 teams in the polls are in the SEC. the other two are Duke and ISU.
ESPN describes how good the SEC has been.
although, I have one gripe. If you look at the team records (as-of 5 January), the worst home record in the conference is 8-1. The most road games any team has played is 3. 💡( this is not unique to the SEC; most major-conference basketball programs play 5 games against bad teams at home in the non-conference. it lets them sell tickets, it lets them get easy wins, and it hopefully doesn't erode the integrity of the sport too much.) ⚔️( well, actually, some teams have as many as six "neutral-site games")
goals for today:
- write the long Atacama to-do list
- laundry
- Peloton ride 🌎( the attempts to use a level to level the bike were not successful. but I think it is good enough to ride.)
- shopping?
- no terminal/IDE usage until after sunset