Apologies for the late issue. My travel for a talk got severely delayed. But no use in crying over some spilled lovely machine learning links!

The Latest Fashion

• There is a new data poisoning method for artists to fight back against unauthorised inclusion in genAI training data.
• The “Set-of-Marks” approach seems quite promising in the world of GPTs
• And IBM is pushing into the AI chip space. I wonder how this turns out, looking at the last AI-specific chips in the 80s.

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My Current Obsession

I was in Utrecht, Netherlands, this week to speak with the national weather service KNMI and present our work of operationalising machine learning solutions in weather forecasting at a symposium.

The talk went well, except I was losing my voice due to the dry, filtered air in the venue. But I got a lot of good questions and pleasant conversations resulting from it!

I haven’t given many talks this year, so it’s good to see that it’s still fun!

Thing I Like

My noise-cancelling headphones informed me they were out of charge the second I stepped on the train back home. So, I was more than thankful for my power bank. Just a really useful emergency tool.

Data Stories

A few weeks back, I showed the beautiful A* visualisation a few weeks back.

I wasn’t the only one who would’ve loved an interactive App to try out A* in my own neighbourhoods.

Jan Pánek created this lovely app where you can create your own pathfinding experiments.

This one shows an exploration of my old stomping ground in Hamburg.

I lived across the big city lake from campus.

I always wondered if it was shorter to go above or below. Felt like the above was slightly optimal, and through my years of studying, I have tried many of the paths you can see in the animation below.

You can try it out here: honzaap.github.io/Pathfinding

Here’s the Github repo

Question of the Week

• What custom GPT are you building first?

Post them on Mastodon and Tag me. I’d love to see what you come up with. Then I can include them in the next issue!

Tidbits from the Web

• It was big news that OpenAI announced “Custom GPTs” during their dev days.
• This song of “how my brain sounds at 3:59” is too accurate
• And to finish the weekend, if one croissant doesn’t make you feel better maybe this will!