garden/2024-08-01.md

2024-08-01

• Today is National Day in Switzerland and I don't work. So I plan to do some Agora :)

• Back on Silverbullet after a few days.
  • I moved my journals here also to the root of my garden, as I did with wiki vim a few days back, so you will see them at /YYYY-MM-DD.md from now on instead of at /journal/YYYY-MM-DD.md.
  • Happy to hear that vera is also using Silverbullet!
• I read criticism of the Gemini ad: https://www.npr.org/2024/07/30/nx-s1-5056201/google-olympics-ai-ad
  • I first read the article and then I watched the ad.
  • You could say the ad does miss any note worth hitting; but I did like some aspects like the dad's voice (is it the real one, though, I wonder?) and the fact that it's not too long.
  • It has the usual by now out-of-touch aesthetic of Google ads, which you could call enterprise whimsy.
  • And it's just... a bit nonsensical, on top of the other criticisms. Why is the dad involved at all? He comes across as lazy. If this was an ad showing how the little girl can use Gemini to help her with her writing, it would feel a lot more natural/less problematic probably. It is true that kids are going to be using generative AI to learn how to write (presumably they are already doing this), and the ad could have shown some of that instead. Maybe this was considered but lawyers didn't want to show too young people using the technology for some reason, and we got the lazy dad as a compromise?
  • Anyway. Google ads are pretty bad on average these days IMHO, so I'm not super surprised.
• Yesterday 2024-07-31 in the Fellowship of the link call Aram shared a nice article he wrote as part of the semilink activity we were experimenting with: the internet is a series of webs.
• Flancia:
  • I wrote on the Agora today. This is a good day :)
  • I intend to also do some Agora development.
    • I fixed an issue that vera reported with transclusion in Silverbullet -- interesting.
    • I wrote a script to assist in Agora maintenance, health.sh