2023 Christmas Letter
We hope you are having a good holiday season.
Early in 2023 Keiko and I spent a week in Seattle just to see if we could handle the cold. Returned to California with a deep cough for weeks! After that, I resumed swimming and hiking here. Since then, our travel has been limited to Southern California, usually along Interstate 5. I often rent a car with the newest safety systems, which has saved me from a wreck at least once. The front-looking radar is useful, but the lane-keeping almost never works for me. Of course it requires hands on the wheel at all times (except the Kia Niro - is that a bug, or a feature?)
Grace did some of the animation in Disney's "Wish" movie this year, but her work slowed down with the Writers' Guild strike followed by the SAG-AFTRA. She has made the most of it by traveling to Japan, and to Taiwan. Her contributions include the gown moving when Star emerges, the green flames of King Magnifico, and dirt kicked up by his horse's hooves.
At work we are tuning these large language models to focus on detecting and explaining likely software problems. Anyone can use Copilot or gpt4 to generate code; we detect the weak spots and explain what it's doing. The user is still in control of how or whether to correct it.
Image at left is from chatgpt4. Each year these LLMs get more powerful; they can rewrite the least consequential news into the most inciteful language. Hold on to your sanity in 2024!
We hope that your holiday season is happy and comforting.
Ben and Keiko Reaves b.reaves@ieee.org http://brss.us/xmas2023