tokyokevin: Kevin Ryan in Tokyo

Kevin putting it out there

  • Making an LLM based Wiki for myself

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    Casey Newton of Platformer (many know him from Hard Fork) is a productivity geek. Each year he tell about what best worked for him. This year, he takes the advice of Andrew Karpathy and uses an LLM to create a personal wiki. He say it strikes him “as the teleological end of whatever process began the day I first installed Evernote on my Mac in 2008.”

    Me too. Moving from Evernote to Obsidian last year allowed me the freedom to add all my MacOS Notes, and my Google Keep notes, and put them into one place. Last week I added more than 4,000 links with descriptions I have put on Facebook over the last 17 years. Next adding all my research notes and sources from Zotero.

    The hardest part is not collecting, but making them useful when you need them. That is where the wiki comes in. With the help from an LLM, creating the wiki is a lot easier than doing it manually. And the more you use it, the more you learn from what you have collected.

    Link: https://www.platformer.news/karpathy-llm-wiki-journalism-productivity/?ref=platformer-newsletter

  • Brain Stages

    Recent research points to multiple stages of a brain as it goes through life. From The Guardian:

    The study, based on the brain scans of nearly 4,000 people aged under one to 90, mapped neural connections and how they evolve during our lives. This revealed five broad phases, split up by four pivotal “turning points” in which brain organisation moves on to a different trajectory, at around the ages of nine, 32, 66 and 83 years.

    This seems to be new information, especially about the latter stages. But I remember reading Joseph Chilton Pearce (author of Crack in the Cosmic Egg) in Evolution’s End about brain ages. He suggested a pairing of neurons just before birth, then again about 2, and again at puberty, and finally as a teen. He also suggested many people did not partake in that last one, which depended on environmental factors such as relation to the mother and interaction with other people.

    In each of these phases many neurons (that were’t being used) died off, and ones that were used received more myelin to insulate and increase the electric stimuli.

    So I went back and looked at some reviews of his books. I remembered them stimulating, with fondness. Now I see that he was a bit of a crank, and perhaps out of his depth on the neurological front. He did like Carlos Castaneda, like I did, who turned out to be great fiction.

    I’m going to look at some other authors of my highschool/college era to see if they were equally wacky.

  • Last post for TokyoKevin

    This is Kevin Ryan from Tokyo.

    I retired a couple of years ago.
    I am not using this domain very much any more.

    Another Kevin Ryan is running for the US Senate from Illinois, my home state too. He could sure get a lot more use out of it, so I am giving it to him.

    So this site will go dark in a couple of days. Kevin the Senator hopeful may put it to use, so the content will change.

    I may resurrect the content here at tokyokevin.com next week, if I decide there is a need.

    Thank you everyone for all your attention. I hope you enjoyed the ride. I certainly did.

    Cheers!

  • Vibe coding new activities?

    I just learned what vibe coding is, and how people are using AI to create great new simple tools without coding. I think to myself: I want to put the power of the internet using information gap activities literally into the hands of my students (well, their mobile devices, but close enough).

    NYTimes Hard Fork podcast segment 3 (gift). What is vibe coding. examples include making games online,

    Ethan Mollick also writes about his experience VibeCoding on Claude 3.7.

    What I want. Create A/B info gap activities on the fly. Input a topic and an interaction, (dialogue, interview) and some kind of information gap. The result, I hope, will be a set of instructions on mobile-friendly html where students can choose A or B and get specific step-by-step instructions to scaffold, then complete the activity. I’ll let you know how that works.

  • The Dao De Jing

    by Laozi, about 2,500 years ago. New translation by Ken Liu.

    Do by not doing, and there is nothing that cannot be done.

    The text is short, and contains enigmatic phrases that have been interpreted over the millennia. Ken Liu writes mostly science fiction, and very well at that. Over the pandemic he found himself unable to write and looked back. His will to write returned but he held off to finish a new translation with notes, along with stories from contemporaries to fill out the understanding.

    It’s helping me too. Thanks to Kottke for the recommendation.