Week #781
On Friday and Saturday, there is the UTMessan tech conference here in Reykjavik. We’re not directly involved, but indirectly we’re helping the Worldmapper team with some VR maps. On Tuesday, we meet-up for the afternoon to plan what sample of cartograms to use. Our goal is to create two deliverables: an AVP app that puts you in the center of a sphere with the map projected on the inside of it and a equirectangular video playable in a Meta Quest VR headset that loops through a selection of maps.
To do al this, we got down and dirty with DaVinci Resolve. You can create a bunch of nodes which transform and augment the input into new output. We are making the flat cartogram into a sphere and adding additional text and logos that warp correctly with the designed output.
On Tuesday we had morning coffee with another old friend and chatted about projects, work and AI. He’s got a huge corpus of text that’s he and his team have written for 15+ years. Now he wants to ask an LLM questions and get a structured response. We had some ideas, so the research began.
On secret project we’ve been working on had a demo on Wednesday. They met with the co-CEO of the company and demoed our prototype. This is an iOS app that merges both or their products together. There is a lot of fake data in the UI, but the important parts work. They were VERY impressed!
Working with another old friend at Háskóli Íslands, we started in on creating an online solution to a new vocabulary retrieval tool. Starling was developed in the UK to help improve vocabulary which in turn improves reading. As part of the grant, the UK works with two other EU countries; Iceland and Estonia. The method is currently done on paper, but much (if not all) could be digitized. So we ran a small spike this week to setup an online thesaurus tool to help teachers find tier 2 words and their tier 1 definitions.
On Friday and Saturday, we went to the Gulleggið master class. Each year there is a start-up competition called Gulleggið (Golden Egg) and we’ve joined a small, young, enthusiastic team to help them. This isn’t our first start-up rodeo, but it is their’s. Our goal is to help with the prototype, guide them in the general direction and answer questions. As part of the competition, we need to submit a 1-minute explainer video and a specific 10-slide slide deck. That’s due next Thursday.
Week #782
On Monday, we started the next round of parent surveys by sending out emails to all participants. After a few days, on Wednesday we sent the first reminder SMS. We do this partly because the first email is highly-likely to go into spam. SMS catches them on a different band and it really helps the response rate. We’ll continue with emails, robocalls for another week, then swap the randomly selected guardian and do it again. Finally in the last week, whomever is left below the required response rate will get human phone calls.
Off and on this week we worked on the Gulleggið slide deck. On Tuesday, KLAK, the organization organizing Gulleggið, had an open house to show the slides and get feedback. We went and things were generally positive and the comments were excellent places for us to improve before the Thursday deadline. With some feedback, we finished the slides and sent them in. Next step is to see if we’re through as one of the top 10 best ideas. There are over 100 teams that showed interest. Many of which didn’t attend the Master Class. It’s probably easy to say many will fall at the first hurdle: Do the Slidedeck correctly! Then many ideas won’t be businesses. If ours is not in the top 10, it’s not because it’s a bad deck or bad business idea, there were just 10 better than ours. It’s been a great experience and had a great time building a small, new team for this. We’ll see where it takes us.
We’ve made it a priority to get more local projects. As part of that we’ve drafted an email to a few close friends letting them know that we’re making 1-2 days a week open for local projects and to keep their ear to the ground for opportunities. We realized that we also need something to speak for us in our absence, so we updated our capabilities page. It will forever be an ongoing process. Annoyingly, the coolest, most relevant projects we either can’t talk about or aren’t in a place to demo yet.
After last week’s AI coffee conversation, we explored running a local LLM. We managed to setup LM Studio and get an open source model working. Then we downloaded AnythingLLM to setup a RAG vector database of our own articles. We exported all of these articles and imported them into the RAG Database. The resulting queries were; let’s be generous and say “horrible”. We asked it “How long have we been publishing” and its response was 02017. We poked it a bit and it agreed that the first article was published in 02009, not 02017. Great, “So how long have we been writing?” it’s response was “5 years”. After some more prompting we asked how many years is it between 2026 and 2017? and it said “10 years”. We went back and changed some of the text chunking and overlapping parameters and it did better, but it still has a LONG way to go and we have other more pressing tasks and deadlines this week.
Bric-à-brac
This week we got to try Retrocade in VR. The detail is INSANE! It fakes old CRT monitors, but then also the pepper’s ghost trick too! The 3D game cabinets are amazing. They feel used, worn and played on. For a few minutes you really forget you’re not really there.