The best place to relax is near water.
After just 2 minutes of viewing water outdoors, blood pressure and heart rate drop. It's more calming to look at a lake, pool, or stream than trees or grass.
Beaches are popular for a reason. Wider bodies of water bring more tranquility.
Meta is pushing harder to compete with ChatGPT by putting its AI assistant everywhere. You're going to start seeing it in the search boxes of Instagram and Facebook. There's now a standalone web app. Google Search has been integrated.
And the first two Llama 3 models are being released ahead of a 400 billion parameter, multimodal version that's being trained.
"At this point, our goal is not to compete with the open source models,” Mark Zuckerberg told me. “It’s to compete with everything out there and to be the leading AI in the world."
https://t.co/hUQkoHOxn1
Why is enrollment declining in Seattle Public Schools?
Reasons pondered in this Seattle Times piece:
- low birthrates
- migration
- "just fewer kids in Seattle"
- high housing costs in Seattle
NOT mentioned in this Seattle Times piece:
- closing the district to in-person learning longer than any district in the world except SF, which "beat" SPS by a couple weeks
- decision to tear down advanced/accelerated cohorts
- a focus on "equity" over helping each child become their very best
- pedagogy gone crazy, with a proposed woke math curriculum so bizarre it made national news
- a school board so dysfunctional its director sued the district
- a five-year strategic plan in 2019 whose goals focused pretty much exclusively on black males (I'm not joking, look at the SPS's "Strategic Plan" website)
- safety concerns, with shootings in recent years near school grounds
- ignoring repeated calls by Broadview-Thompson parents to intervene in an encampment near school grounds
- a teachers union so intransigent that 70%+ of members voted NOT to return to work during the pandemic even after given vaccination prioritization in February of 2021, and one which went on strike in September 2022
Worth reading or rereading: The Undoing Project, about Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky, by the amazing Michael Lewis. It's astonishingly good, and hilarious, and quite moving.
https://t.co/hKoBIKdUDX
Happy New Year! And day 1 in a new job as in-house counsel on Meta's Legal AI team, focusing on Privacy and AI Regulations, in the Seattle office. Super excited to take on this role!
Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman to serve as a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, has died at the age of 93.
@JudyWoodruff looks back on her life and legacy.
We remain committed to our partnership with OpenAI and have confidence in our product roadmap, our ability to continue to innovate with everything we announced at Microsoft Ignite, and in continuing to support our customers and partners. We look forward to getting to know Emmett Shear and OAI's new leadership team and working with them. And we’re extremely excited to share the news that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, together with colleagues, will be joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team. We look forward to moving quickly to provide them with the resources needed for their success.