PicoBlog

There was no stopping Inter Miami’s season-ending free fall. Not even with Lionel Messi returning to the starting lineup. Inter Miami’s 2023 regular season finished on a losing note after an early Kerwin Vargas goal doomed the South Florida side to a 1-0 road defeat to Charlotte FC at Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Saturday night. Vargas bagged his second tally against Inter Miami in four days, scoring in the 13th minute of a campaign finale that marked Messi’s first start for the Herons since Sept.
You’re reading The Charlotte Ledger, a digital publication with original local news and insights for Charlotte, N.C. — The following is a list of local mental health services for children who are in crisis or who need more than once- or twice-a-week therapy appointments for mental health conditions.  Support groups for parents are also listed. This list does not include programs that specialize in substance abuse or eating disorders.  Note: This is not a complete list.
One of these things is not like the other, but yet is exactly the same! Welcome to another edition of Charlottesville Community Engagement, a program that for some time now seeks to document what’s happening here in central Indiana with as much information as possible about Hancock County and all of the various townships in and around the 46117.  I’m your host, Tawn Subbs.  The tax deadline is coming up in Hancock County
Amidst all of the debate around Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, I was shaken this week by a typically salutary thread by Alan Allport on the anniversary of another bombing. Eighty years ago, in a ten-day joint operation, American bombers by day and British bombers by night destroyed a large part of the German industrial and port city of Hamburg. On the ascending curve of aerial attacks on cities - a terrifying vision that haunted the 20th century - a crescendo that started in earnest in Guernica in 1937 and continued with the attacks on Warsaw, Rotterdam, the London Blitz and Coventry, after the RAF’s 1000-bomber raid on Cologne in 1942 and the sustained campaign against the German industrial centers of the Ruhr in the spring of 1943, Hamburg marked a point of culmination.
In 1978 Grover Jackson bought Charvel’s Guitar Repair from his boss Wayne Charvel. The shop was located in Glendora, CA.  At that time their main line of service was as a parts supplier producing bodies for Mighty Mite and DiMarzio. The Charvel brand did very well going into the 1980s and accelerated significantly in the early 1980s. Then it downright blew up when Grover started the Jackson label to market the Jackson Randy Rhoads which went into production in 1983.
Last week, I was invited to chat behind closed doors with a working group on generative AI consisting of a bunch of representatives from education foundations. This group has money to pass around and is wondering, “Should we pass this money around to generative AI projects? How much and which kinds?” I was invited to offer my perspective on classroom applications of generative AI. My perspective, as you may know, is more pessimistic than the median education technologist’s and certainly more pessimistic than the other guest this group brought in for the conversation: Sal Khan.
One of my earliest blog posts was about John Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment and what it means to ‘understand’ something. The old blog is now defunct but the argument still stands. Searle noted that any computer programme could, in principle if not practicality, be written out in a book. I imagine something like a choose-your-own adventure book — “If you see this symbol, tun to page 19987” etc. This applies to any programme, including the programme controlling an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system that produces human-like responses to queries.
That’s not a joke, it’s a quote. And also a warning. Over the last few hours, people reporting having been report a variety of problems with ChatGPT: Devin Morse, a philosophy PhD student has collected more examples in this thread. OpenAI itself has acknowledged the issue: I won’t speculate on the cause; we don’t know. I won’t speculate on how long it will take to fix; again, we don’t know.
On Monday, OpenAI announced GPT-4o, an upgrade to their ChatGPT technology. Claire Zau has a summary of the announcement that I found helpful. I’ll focus here on two videos relevant to math education. In one video, several OpenAI employees sit around a table solving 3x + 1 = 4. They hold a cameraphone above a piece of paper and ChatGPT parses their work using OpenAI’s new multimodal technology and guides them to a solution.