Tag: AI

  • M-series Macs are Amazing

    I am blown away by this Apple M-series. And by blown away, I mean the complete opposite, because there are no fans. Nothing blows!

    And it seems like I bought it just at the right time. The new prices Apple announced today has made my MacBook Air 3000 NOK (around $300) more expensive in Norway.

    The price change did not come as a surprise. Tim Cook did give a warning last week that prices would have to increase due to high cost on memory and storage chips. The same chips AI eats for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

    I have not yet put the Mac through its paces. But in my experience, most laptops get a heatstroke just by playing a YouTube video these days.

  • (A)I made a WordPress Widget

    What I made is not important — it’s a list of kayak courses and available spots.

    I already had created the logic — no AI needed for logical thinking1. So I already had the authentication, the API calls, the custom filtering and the presentation layer.

    But since I didn’t have any experience with WordPress plugins/widgets, I hosted it on a separate domain and embedded it onto the web site. This has worked for years.

    However, there were a few drawbacks. Mainly that it was dependent on my private website to be up in order to work. On the positive side; when things broke, I could easily debug it on my own server. Like the time the API stopped working, and it turned out I had been using an internal API endpoint, and not the one in the documentation. Whoops.

    So, with AI being all over the place, and Microsoft pushing CoPilot on everything that can be displayed on a screen, I decided it could not hurt to ask it to make a simple Widget that I could plug my logic into.

    I asked CoPilot to create a basic Widget. I asked it to display a placeholder text for now, but that I needed a settings interface to enter username and password for the API authentication.

    When I tried this crude plugin, nothing worked. I wrote to CoPilot: “it doesn’t work”, to which it basically replied “Your code is wrong”, and then continued to present the right way to do it.

    And this is what surprised me the most. Several times, CoPilot presented some code, just to lament me about it later.

    Yes, I know there are other models2 out there that are a lot better for programming. But I only needed to make a simple template for a WordPress widget, not make an E-commerce system from scratch.

    But part of me wonder; do these models behave this way just to make people spend as many tokens as possible?

    Credit where credit is due

    But I have to give CoPilot some credit as well. First, it did eventually present a workable Widget that I could put my logic into. Secondly, it created new token manager for me. My previous solution was to use Curl to get the API token bearer and store in a file. Hardly best practice.

    I also learned a little bit more about WordPress.

    1. I know some people automatically thinks text with em dash is written by an AI, but everything I publish I write myself. ↩︎
    2. I am not a programmer. I do this for fun. If I have used the wrong tool for the job, so be it. ↩︎

  • How many people does it take to operate a data center?

    It looks like the big tech companies are building new data centers like there is no tomorrow.

    A few years ago, it was all about cryptocurrencty. And it should be noted that some of these data centers were not of the highest standard. Just look at the images in this article (in norwegian).

    Nowadays the pressure is on again, this time because of Artificial Intelligence (AI). And, like cryptocurrency, they need a lot of electicity. In return they promise jobs.

    But I have a hard time believing that data centers will employ as many people as these companies claim. Nscale are promising 200 jobs (in norwegian) once their new data center is operational.

    And, maybe 200 people in total is needed to run what they plan to be Europes biggest data center for AI, but I doubt it, and I think most of them would be remote jobs anyway. So much so that I would say that whomever works at the data center is the remote worker.

    What they need is this: cooling technician, electrician, someone to do basic maintenance and a couple of data technicians to install and remove servers. And maybe some on-site security, depending on location. Did I forget anyone?

    What is interesting is that acording to this article (again in norwegian), Green Mountain, in 2020, estimated that a new data center in Norway could employ 8 300 people. But then 3 years later, in 2023, it was adjusted down to 500 jobs. And this data center would be smaller than Nscale’s, which promised 200 jobs.

    I can only assume that the 8 300 jobs mentioned was during construction, and not during regular operation. Anything else would just be absurd.

    Asking Googles AI about how many (people) does it take to operate a data center, the answer is: “Operating a typical data center requires a surprisingly small core staff—often ranging from 25 to 150 permanent workers“

    Then again, we are talking about AI data centers, so maybe most of these jobs will be people with wire cutters. Ready to take down any rogue AI agent.

  • Do you really care?

    Let me see if I get this correct.

    You can’t really be bothered to write, so you get ChatGPT to write for you.

    But you also can’t be bothered to read, presumably text someone else got ChatGPT to write for them, so you get ChatGPT to make a summary.

    Then you find the summary so insightful that you just have to share it. However, it is a bit short, so better ask ChatGPT to embellish it a bit.

    You want to look like a professional after all.