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Food for thought

  • An Idea That Wouldn’t Let Me Sleep

    ,

    Hello, anonymous readers.

    It’s January first, a new year, and there’s an idea keeping me awake. Whenever that happens, I write it down and send it to someone, and I almost always fall asleep afterward. Today, you’re the one.

    I want to simulate possible conversations in English on all sorts of subjects, so I’ve been thinking about an app that simulates conversations. It could be a proactive type that wakes me up or sends me a message in the morning.

    “Hi Diego, how was your night?”

    Then some predefined answers come up, the ones used most often in English.

    • A. It was great
    • B. Same as always
    • C. I didn’t sleep at all
    • D. …

    Depending on which one I choose I get another message.

    “Oh no, what happened?”

    • A. I felt ill, I think I’m coming down with something
    • B. The dog wouldn’t stop barking
    • C. The baby cried
    • D. I had an idea that wouldn’t let me sleep.

    Every answer brings in a new question or some tip, as if it were a casual conversation using the typical expressions and phrases.

    My answers could be sent just by saying one of the options out loud, to train my pronunciation, and later I could go back over that history and look at my progress. It would be a sort of diary.

    But my main goal as a user is knowing the range of the most common answers to everyday questions, and training my pronunciation.

    And in the future the app could have some intelligence to detect whether my pronunciation is any good, and maybe understand sentences outside the list of options and carry the conversation on by interpreting what I said.

    The questions themselves could be in audio too, using one of those text to speech technologies, simulating a phone call… Wooow. Imagine listening to the whole conversation at the end, and being able to share it, with friends or even with my teacher. It would be beautiful.

    After a while of questions about various subjects it could map out the user’s interests and bring recent news about whatever I showed most interest in, know that the person is out of work and simulate a job interview, an opinion about the elections, some flirting, a trip.

    Or it could be more passive, and the user picks the themes to simulate conversations about.

    I have a feeling the coming years will be the years of artificial intelligence. Let’s see.

    The next day I’d get another message:

    “So Diego, did you sleep any better?”

    • A. No
    • B. More or less
    • C. Of course, I sent my idea to somebody else so it could keep them awake instead. 😜

    Bye
    Diego

    Update 1: March 2023

    Had a blast reading this while migrating content from my old blog. It’s funny to see how easily ChatGPT can be used to solve these problems. Still, I’m kind of excited to build something like this in the future, maybe to learn Korean, because I gave up on improving my English :(… it’s just bad enough to be understood :p

  • The meat has been overcooked

    , ,

    It gives me chills
    to imagine a global
    and personal revolution
    starting so simply,
    so immediately,
    just by stopping
    the eating of dead animals.

    A tiny gesture
    with a giant impact.

    Fire the barbecue chef
    living inside you —
    the one who insists,
    the one who pretends not to hear.

    Because the meat,
    honestly,
    has been overcooked
    for a long time.

  • Then I heard other people

    ,

    I built an opinion
    from TV reports
    while sitting on a comfortable couch,
    throwing out clever lines
    triggered by nothing more
    than a raised eyebrow.

    Then I heard other people
    repeating the same rehearsed phrases,
    and it hit me,
    those thoughts weren’t mine.
    It hurt.

    So I went quiet
    and started rebuilding.

    I learned an opinion
    is never finished,
    and touching it
    is always painful,
    especially on mornings
    like this one,
    reading the brutal map
    of incarceration in Brazil    ,
    letting the discomfort
    do its work.

  • I don’t work with Captain Ahabs

    , ,

    A tip to all the Captain Ahabs out there:

    “Be careful when hiring young men with dreamy faces, thin bodies, and deep eyes; be very careful, for whales must be spotted before they are hunted. A boy fond of meditations will take your ship around the world ten times without seeing a single whale.”

    From Moby Dick

  • Missing Letters

    I received, 500 years later, a letter from a traveler (Pero de Magalhães Gandavo) who once wandered through a place vulgarly called Brazil.

    Among his writings, this observation caught my attention:

    “The language of these natives along the whole coast is one; it lacks three letters, you will not find F, nor L, nor R in it. A remarkable thing, for thus they have no Fé (Faith), no Lei (Law), nor Rei (King); and in this way they live without Justice, and in disorder.”

    Pero de Magalhães Gandavo

    Oh, Gandavo…

    I wish we had kept our lives without those letters.