Ahhaa science centre.

About two thirds of the space holds a permanent exhibition, while the remaining third is used for temporary ones. Past exhibitions have ranged from “spies and detectives” to “nutrition”. Currently the theme of the temporary exhibition is “adrenaline”. In effect, it was a small-scale amusement park for older kids.

There was a “rocket chair” for acceleration…

… and an extra steep slide, with a thick mat to land on…

… and a 360 degree loop bicycle ride. All three of us tried it, but Ingrid was the only one to manage the full 360 degrees – there was something wrong with the pedals on the bike that sometimes made them go backwards forcefully when the bike itself rolled backwards, and when that happened, we kept losing our footing and got hit in the shins by the pedals. Ingrid somehow got past that and beat the day’s record of most consecutive loops.

The permanent exhibition also has plenty of hands-on experiments. Like using a rope and pulley system to lift up your friends, and learning how the number of pulleys affects the force required…

… or riding a bike on a tightrope, and learning how a counterweight makes balancing trivial.

For the first time in years, I took the time to go to a developer conference. The schedule looked like it would give me at least some sessions of value or interest both days, and the conference is in Stockholm so at least there’s no travel involved.

It was better than expected, even. The sessions that sounded good, were – and those that sounded possibly slightly promising, were better than that.

Among the most interesting sessions were two about ChatGPT – one about how it works under the hood, and one about how to get the most out of it, using prompt engineering.

The first one should be required listening for all the bloggers and journalists out there who keep saying that if we just keep making ChatGPT stronger and better, it will reach actual intelligence and truly understand the answers that it gives. ChatGPT is entirely and only about word prediction. Not even words, but character sequences, shorter than full words. Given these words, what is likely to come next? We saw actual live demos of an earlier version of ChatGPT running locally on the speaker’s computer, and he demonstrated how tweaking specific parameters will make ChatGPT more “adventurous”, i.e. more likely to vary its word sequence from the most likely, or more “conservative”, i.e. more likely to use the most common next word. Given “The cat sat on the…”, pulling the controls in one direction would make ChatGPT always continue with “floor”, whereas pulling them in the other increases the likelihood of getting “bed”, “table”, “shoulder” etc instead.

The second one taught me, for example, that instructing ChatGPT to provide step-by-step reasoning for whatever its conclusion is, makes it more likely that it will reach the correct conclusion. And sometimes you can get better, more detailed answers if you offer it money. In the source material that it has processed and is regurgitating, money leads to better work, so it behaves the same.

First there were stamps that you had to moisten (= lick) to put on an envelope.

Then came the self-adhesive ones.

Then came prepaid postage for parcels to print at home.

Now I can buy prepaid postage and just write it on the top right corner of the parcel. Three rows, four characters each, to be written in capital letters in dark ink.

I’m selling a thing online through Tradera, and they offered this as a standard service. This was the first time I ran across this method of paying for postage. A pretty obvious invention, after the fact, but I still find it really clever.

Adrian’s one an only birthday present this year – which is also his Christmas gift – is a new gaming computer. Just like for Ingrid’s computer three years ago, Eric did all the choosing and ordering, and almost all the building and assembling. It went smoother than the building of Ingrid’s computer – by the end of the day, Adrian had a shiny, colourful new computer.

Seventeen years ago I was looking hopefully at the possibility of space tourism. Too bad the prices haven’t come down much since then – it’s still from a quarter to half a million USD even for brief suborbital flights. And unsurprisingly I haven’t gotten any million-dollar windfalls in the meantime.

All of sudden my laptop is not recognizing the monitor through the USB hub. I was going to work from home today, but working on just a tiny laptop screen would be bad for both my mood and my productivity, so that’s not going to happen. More commuting. Luckily I have another USB hub that I keep at the office and can bring home tonight – with a bit of luck, that will solve things.

I seem to have inherited a keyboard.

It used to be that Ingrid and Adrian inherited Eric’s and my old electronics – laptops, phones, cameras, etc. That was when it was exciting to have any kind of laptop that was their own. That they were trusted to use, that wasn’t borrowed, that they could use without having to wait for when I didn’t need it. Performance didn’t matter, and neither did OS versions.

Now we’ve come full circle and I may end up inheriting Ingrid’s hardware. She upgraded her gaming keyboard, utilising the Black Week sales to get a great deal on a really good model, and asked me if I wanted her old one.

I have actually been thinking of replacing my keyboard, because the keys on the one I have feel a bit “mushy” and indistinct when I type. Plus it’s noisy enough that I have to turn off my conference microphone if I want to type during an online meeting, or my colleagues will complain about the noise.

Ingrid’s old keyboard turned out to be as noisy as mine, so that’s not going to be any improvement, but it does have a nicer feel.

It also has LED backlighting.

I guess I can understand the appeal of colourful backlighting if you’re trying to set the mood for gaming, but I’ve literally never felt any desire to have the keys on my keyboard light up when I type, or to have all the colours of the rainbow constantly rotate across the keyboard. But I had to try out all the effects after I had plugged it in – if not for anything else, then to see just how crazy they were. The Wheel was truly almost nauseating to my old brain.

The Breathing effect was actually kind of nice, though. A pleasantly slow swell of a single colour colour, that softly ebbs away again. I liked it well enough that I didn’t immediately turn it off.

So now I’m doing my work on an RGB keyboard. With colour effects. For real.

This is the SD card from my main camera. In fact the actual SD card is a micro SD and almost too small to be photographed, and this one is an adapter to bring it back up to a reasonable size. The thumbnail-sized fingernail-sized card itself fits about 4000 high-resolution RAW photos, which is pretty amazing. I remember floppy disks, and having to swap them out halfway through installing an application or running a game, because you couldn’t fit all of it onto one disk.

Less amazing is the write protection tab, which keeps catching on the the card slot on my computer when I insert the card, and moving to the ON position against my wishes. It was getting to the point where it took me ten tries to get my photos imported and deleted from the card.

I bought a new card of a different brand, and it works much better for me. The write protection tab is much harder to move. Weird, how two makes of the same thing, that is so strictly standardized when it comes to size and shape and performance and protocols, can still differ so much in such a tangible way.

The recycling station across the road from Coop in Spånga has disappeared. Maybe it has moved, I haven’t checked. I guess I should.

Instead I’ve just gone to the other recycling station nearby, next to Spånga Folkets Hus. Which I think might technically be marginally closer to us. But because it lies in the wrong direction and doesn’t have a supermarket next to it, those 20 metres that I could possibly save by going there are useless. I can walk 700 metres to the recycling station and to the supermarket, and the same back again – or I can walk 650 metres to the recycling station, and the same back again, but still need to make the whole trip to the supermarket in the exact opposite direction.

Coincidentally there are DHL and Schenker parcel pickup points very close to each of the recycling stations. The algorithms usually pre-select the one next to the Folkets Hus, because I guess it appears closer. And I always override their choice and pick the one in central Spånga instead, because then I can pick up my parcel on my way from somewhere else. Technically closer does not mean better.

I still end up walking to the “wrong” pickup point regularly, though, because many online shops don’t let me choose and leave it to the algorithm.

Adrian is still home with a cough even though he is basically all well. I take him out with me when I go for my daily walks, so that he also gets some daylight and fresh air.

There is so much talk in him, about just about everything. When I come back from a walk of my own, my brain is clear and rested. After a walk with Adrian, work feels like rest.

We talked about daylight savings time and time zones, among other things, because he asked what I’d done at work thus far. (Time zone conversions.) In this day and age with international entertainment everywhere, like live streams on Twitch and special events in games, even an eleven-year-old is well aware of how time zones work. I certainly wasn’t, at his age.