Artificial Intelligence

Art and AI but not AI-generated art. Updated Tech Stack During this recent holiday break, I had some time to work on eskild.art, and I’m excited to share those updates here. Although I haven’t added any new art (yet), the site has been redesigned from the ground up. The initial version was a FastAPI app on GCP Cloud Run using basic HTML Jinja templates; it was simple but got the job done. The new version is now running Django with Tailwind CSS using Postgres deployed on Google’s Kubernetes Engine (GKE). ...

I attended EAGxBerkeley last weekend, and wanted to capture a few thoughts and ideas before my memory taints them any further. For context, this was my first EA conference, making it hard for me to compare with other EA conferences, I don’t live in the Bay Area so part of my excitement might be an artifact of the novelty and being with friends, and, I’m a software engineer who uses and builds with AI on a regular basis but I’m not an AI safety researcher. At a high-level, I would rate this among the most entertaining and worthwhile conferences I’ve attended; it was also hosted at one of the most unique venues I’ve been to, the Lighthaven. The event organizers and volunteers deserve another round of applause for all of their great work! ...

As it currently stands, I pay for two AI services, ChatGPT Plus and GitHub's Co-Pilot but this number will surely increase in the coming months and years. I think the term “co-pilot” perfectly captures the current relationship; these are tools that help me automate some of the boring or tedious tasks while also acting as an assistant that I can use to bounce ideas off. Recently, while working on a side project, I needed a real URL for some testing. As I began to type out url = "https://, Co-Pilot generated a suggestion that I could accept by hitting tab. At this point, it didn’t matter what the URL was so I accepted the suggestion. Any guesses what the URL was for? What if I told you it was for a YouTube video? ...

Photo by Nils Rasmusson on Unsplash Forest fires bring death and destruction, yet they also catalyze the birth of new plant life. The fire clears the overcrowded underbrush to create space and opportunities for the next generation, a cycle necessary for the health of the forest. However, like so many things, the quantity matters. Too little fire and not enough space is created for the next generation, while on the other hand, too much fire and the entire forest burns down. ...