Coming up for air.

What happened is: I lined up the Next Thing (as mentioned at the end of last quarter’s worknotes), and then it promptly proceeded to entirely consume my time and brain for the next quarter.

Which is good, from an income-and-labour perspective, but was somewhat to the detriment of the content strategy here, where I’d hoped to be able to write smaller, spikier pieces of content between the studio updates.

So a goal for this quarter: making sure I don’t let client work overwhelm the routines I’d like to establish.

What’s been going on for the past few months?

Google Research/Deepmind AIUX - prototyping and exploration

The previous Next Thing.

Just as the quarter was beginning, I lined up a short, intense prototyping project with the crew at AIUX that I’d previously worked with. They began the project within Google Research, but by mid-project had been reorganised into Google Deepmind.

This made almost no difference to our work, though it did make the “ooh” people make when you tell them who your current client is go up a semitone more than usual (before you tell them you can’t tell them anything else owing to confidentiality).

I spent a couple of months with a motley crew of internal and external folks, pulling together an interesting, full-stack working prototype. Designing interactions, poking technology to see what it feels like, working out how to communicate the new ideas that a piece of software makes possible.

I think all I can say about what we were up to is “stuff to do with vector embeddings”.

The stakeholder feedback at the end of the project was really enthusiastic, and there’s talk of further work on this brief. Very much the right project at the right time.

Creative Computing Institute - end of term

June marked the end of term at CCI, where I wrapped up my fifth year of teaching Sound and Image Processing to first year undergraduates - and which means shortly after I’ve breathed out from the end of class, I have to mark 31 portfolios. It’s a lot to get through, but I’m always surprised and delighted by the places some students will take me, and it’s those moments that keep me going as I work through reading and executing a lot of Processing.

When I tell people I’ve been marking, they often ask about the impact of ChatGPT on my results. All I can say is: yes, we are educating in the age of ChatGPT now. (Other LLMs are available; I’m using ChatGPT as shorthand for LLM chatbots you ask for answers).

We don’t have a problem with students using LLMs; they’re a tool like any other, and for students less confident in a second (or third+) language, or students newer to programming, they can be a confidence-booster. We ask students to cite them just like any other source. (I usually teach citation by suggesting you quote as little as possible, and then, if you are uncomfortable revealing the size of your quotation, perhaps that’s an indication for you to quote less.)

Despite this, I believe I had many students who used ChatGPT and didn’t cite it. You can’t prove it, but there’s a… vibe? Smell? It never feels like plagiarism or copying; it’s more like a number of students all sharing the same tutor, whose personal style and predilections keeps appearing in their work. The programming equivalent of delvish, perhaps. (I had lots of (int) style casting this year, for instance, which seemed like a tic given I’d never really introduced it, and Processing’s built-in int() function is probably more intuitive).

But there are also thoughtful uses of these tools. I’ve had students submit entire transcripts of their conversations with ChatGPT, for instance, which has been good: they showed they had the knowledge necessary to ask meaningful questions and build on them, and showed how they refined their own knowledge in the dialogue. I’ve also had students describe processes - one talked about submitting his code to ChatGPT and then asking how would you improve this? which is an interesting approach to virtual pairing/refactoring, and shows a good degree of insight - not to mention curiosity.

With marking done, I rounded out the year by going to the student festival, the end-of-year show of work. This was the second year where students I’d taught in their first undergraduate year were graduating. It was hugely enjoyable and rewarding to see how they have developed, and how they are expressing their ideas and interests in creative computation a few years down the line.

Lunar - hardware/software refinements

I’ve just kicked off a very short engagement with Lunar - some further refinements to the LED interaction tools work that we did. Some new hardware, and a revision to both firmware and browser tooling has made for a busy week back leaping between C++ and Typescript.

What’s next?

The next few months are coming into focus now. August looks a little less frantic, with some smaller projects slotting into the schedule alongside a deliberate amount of Slack, and there are rumblings of larger work in September that could keep me busy for several months.

Meanwhile there’s admin to be done, and some plates to keep spinning, as well as making sure I return to some Process Notes here. And so: onwards!