Tales from the jar side: I voted, YouTube milestones, new Perplexity and Flux 1.1 videos, Anthropic's computer use, and the usual tweets and toots
I just learned about recency bias and it's my favorite thing ever. (rimshot)
Welcome, fellow jarheads, to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of October 20 - 27, 2024. This week I taught my regular courses at Trinity College.
I’m done
Monday was the first day of early voting in Connecticut, which is the first year we’ve ever had early voting. My wife and I went over to the Marlborough, CT town hall during the afternoon.
I’m not good at selfies, as you can see. Here’s the important part:
That bushy beard is kind of new, in that I’ve never let it get this long before. My original plan was to trim it after the election, but I’m done now, so I may not wait.
My goal now, hopeless though it may be, is to try to filter out everything about the election from now until November 5. Yeah, I doubt I’ll be able to manage it either.
YouTube milestones
Meanwhile, I hit two milestones on the Tales from the jar side YouTube channel.
That’s nice number. It also means I have more subscribers on the YouTube channel than I have to this newsletter (currently 2430). I have no idea what that means, if anything.
Here’s the other milestone:
I think YouTube creators care more about that second number, but I don’t know.
New to the channel this week was my Flux 1.1 with Kotlin video:
and my Perplexity API video I talked about in the newsletter last week:
The week before I published a video on Flux 1.1 with Java, and that’s doing a lot better than the Kotlin one. I probably shouldn’t be surprised by that, but it’s interesting. The Kotlin implementation uses flows and coroutines, which was fun.
The Perplexity video has a lot of likes for only being out a few days. Apparently people are interested in that. I’ve started to use Perplexity as my alternative to Google, and it’s nice not having to deal with all those ads all the time.
This week, in celebration of Halloween, look for my video with the working title AI vs Cthulhu: Bypassing the Guardrails. Here’s a teaser:
That’s Cthulhu having a beer with the boys while watching football. Apparently Cthulhu is able to keep his beer warm, which is truly evil.
Anthropic’s “computer use”
In yet another reminder that AI vendors are terrible at naming things, Anthropic, the AI company that provides the Claude AI tool, announced computer use. The idea is that you can give Claude instructions and it actually carries them out. Their demo shows how it works in a container.
They explain it in their own two-minute video:
The demo shows Claude accessing their own (fictional) company’s customer system, finding a particular vendor in their CRM, and transferring all the relevant information into a form.
I ran their reference implementation during my AI Integration class this week. I asked it to create a spreadsheet that contained the names, number of views, and publication dates for the top ten most recent videos on the Tftjs YouTube channel. It proceeded to find my channel and go through the ten most recent videos (I should have been more explicit about what “Top Ten” meant), and added the relevant information to a spreadsheet.
I have say, it’s impressive, even though it’s slow. It looks like the use case for it is eliminating routine drudge work, which is a good thing.
Now for the down side. Can you tell which two days I did my experimenting?
Um, yeah. I usually work with a few dozen or at most a couple hundred tokens at a time. Somehow, doing three demos I managed to reach almost 4 million.
Fortunately, tokens aren’t expensive:
Given that my normal monthly spend for Claude is between 2 and 12 cents, that’s quite a change. It happens because while it is executing the “computer use” tasks, it takes a snapshot of your screen between each step to see what it has to do next. That’s a lot of steps, and a lot of snapshots.
One of my experiments asked it to visit the Amazon web site in several different countries. It hit a captcha and gave up. I asked it if it was capable of solving a captcha, and it said it had specific instructions not to try, which was interesting to hear. I wonder how long that will last.
Anthropic emphasizes over and over that this is all in beta and not to expose anything to it you don’t want shared, but this is the closest thing I’ve seen to a practical AI Agent, and it’s only going to get better.
In another example of lousy naming, Anthropic also released a new version of their Claude 3.5 Sonnet tool, which they called Claude 3.5 Sonnet (new). Really, that’s the name. Somebody please stop them before they name something else.
Tweets and Toots
Shocking
He doesn’t sound too bright, either, at least not currently.
Speaking of Dad jokes:
There’s a nugget of truth in that.
I resemble that remark
My wife claims I’ve done this a few thousand times, but I don’t remember anything like that.
Billionaires
Sounds about right. If the past few years have taught us anything, it’s how much damage one evil billionaire can do. As somebody pointed out, every day a billionaire has an option to do staggering amounts of good in the world, even without becoming Batman, and every day they simply decide not to. Ugh. Things will be different when I make my first billion or so, I promise you. In order to do that I need to find some workers to exploit….
Halloween
Are Pez still around? I hope so. I don’t want to check in case they don’t exist any more.
Time zones
This is a tough week for international meetings. I believe Europe switches to standard time this week, but we in the US have another week to go. That’s not a good reason to be mean to the poor clocks, though.
Which reminds me:
Running
I don’t run. Why take those kind of chances?
We’re going to need a bigger jail cell
Fair question, and maybe it was self-defense anyway.
Story of my life
Lol, 40-something. Right.
Finally:
Hungry
Have a great week, everybody!
Last week:
No training classes this week. Maybe that means I can make some more videos.
My regular Trinity College schedule.
This week:
No training classes this week.
My regular Trinity College schedule.