Drew's sabbatical blog
I miss empanadas. They are so good in Argentina (even better than Chile, sorry Chileans). I don’t know what makes them better, but I have a feeling it has to do with lard? We actually met a Japanese guy down there who initially said he came to see South America, but later admitted he came because he loved Empanada Mama in NYC and wanted the real thing.
I’m going on a mission to find the best ones in Chicago. Anyone have suggestions?
ChatGPT is a university in your pocket. One new way use I’ve found for ChatGPT is to “go back to school.” I can design and take a course on-demand, but unlike a MOOC, I can also fully customize it. In pursuing my vision for this sabbatical, one of my ideas was to revisit some things I learned about way back, in some 100- or 200-level philosophy course: the aesthetic concepts of Awe and The Sublime.
Before getting into the details, how does this relate to my vision? Religion never resonated for me, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve felt a pull to discover and develop the spiritual dimension in my life, in my own way. I’ve been meditating pretty consistently for several years, but during this time away from work I wanted to focus even more on the spiritual dimension of my life. Like all my interests, eventually I asked ChatGPT about it. This started as a conversation, and later I had the idea to ask ChatGPT to design an actual syllabus, for an imaginary course I wish I’d taken back in college.
Before ChatGPT, I would have done one of two things. Either I’d have ordered several books on my topic of interest, and probably not have read them; or I’d have done some haphazard Wikipedia and YouTube deep dives. The former is almost worthless. The latter is not much better—I would learn some surface-level stuff, but would be unlikely to engage with the material in an organized way. So I wouldn’t gain deep and lasting knowledge.
But ChatGPT has lowered the bar for engaging with complicated ideas. If you like the idea of taking a course, it can literally design the syllabus, organize the readings, generate lectures, and act as both a professor and TA. Most important for me, it makes me more likely to actually do the readings, because I can see where I am in the course and have a sense of progress; and because for any part that’s not interesting, I can just ask for a summary and skip it. At the margin, I’m much more likely to really learn something. If a full class isn’t interesting to you, you can structure your own learning however you want.
So before our honeymoon, I downloaded the first two readings from the syllabus to my Remarkable 2. Both are in the public domain, so I could easily find PDFs. I have been working through them at my own pace, and using ChatGPT for questions and context,
It’s obvious this technology will have an impact on Higher Education, or in my case, continuing education. But this is one way that it could be an opportunity for Higher Ed, rather than just a threat: let students design their more of their own courses, have professors review the syllabi and approve that they are “course credit worthy.” Assign TAs to give weekly oral quizzes, and then the professors design and administer oral mid-terms and finals. Maybe this can be done in cohorts, organized by year and major/elective area. I could see professors having fun with it too, adding personal favorites to the reading list, making it more esoteric but also ensuring it’s aligned enough with their knowledge base that they can easily administer the exams. We’ll see if universities embrace these types of experiments. I hope they do.
I’m finally taking an improv class. Am I nervous? Yes, and excited. Improv comedy may be Chicago’s most important export, and is such a big part of cultural life in the city. Everybody knows somebody who is or has been deep in the improv game, moving up the levels at Second City, etc. Spending my 20s and 30s in Chicago, I always expected I’d eventually try it. Now I’m 35 and have time now, so it feels like now or never. Of course I’m not trying for SNL or anything. But I wanted to experience this part of Chicago’s culture before this phase of my life is over.
I did a little research on which class to take, but ultimately selected the program offered by my favorite place to see shows, the iO Theater. Last night was my first class, and I almost chickened out. But one of my rules for the sabbatical is to move toward the things that are scary. Mostly I was worried I’d be obviously the oldest person there, which wasn’t the case.
It was a blast. Uncomfortable in the right ways, and supportive in the right ways. Our teacher Sarah has a practiced but natural command of the room, obviously developed during her many hours onstage. She’s funny, obviously. Her advice to me after my first practice scene: “Make bigger choices.” I’m looking forward to the next eight weeks!
LLMs are still moving fast. I’d seen some speculation that a plateau is approaching, but so far it has not arrived. I’ve been out of the loop less than three weeks, and while I was gone: Google’s Gemini had a PR disaster, Anthropic launched its Claude 3 model family, and Groq launched its public web app (not to be confused with Grok).
The Groq launch made enough waves that despite being unplugged, I heard about it during our honeymoon and tried it out. The speed is impressive. Using Groq was a good reminder that on any dimension, one product’s “good enough” can be another’s differentiator. Six months ago, a one-, five-, or even ten-second wait for an answer from ChatGPT was absolutely worth it. The technology was so new and the conversations so valuable that the wait was both understandable, and obviously worth it. If you’d told me then that some new model (or in this case, some new architecture+hardware) was faster, I would not have been so excited. What I still want most is the better (more intelligent) model, not the faster one. I would have said speed is nice, but it’s clearly a secondary concern. That’s still how I feel, but my experience with Groq has made this a much closer call than I would have expected or predicted.
Groq’s primary product appears to be the chip and the architecture, not the chatbot, so I don’t expect to see my usage migrate from ChatGPT to Groq. Maybe OpenAI will acquire them. But it did get me reflecting on what would get me to change products, or adopt additional products for specific tasks. Over the past few months, 95% of my LLM usage has been via ChatGPT. I will try a new product when it launches—I tried out Gemini Pro 1.5 for a few days before we left on our trip, before its issues surfaced. I will also try different products when I want different opinions—for a recent research project I was asking the same questions simultaneously to ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. But so far, nothing has come close to displacing ChatGPT as my go-to LLM. The first-mover advantage is real, and OpenAI’s pace of innovation has been fast enough to retain their early lead, at least for me. But Groq reminded me that the race is far from won.
We made it back to Chicago, totally wiped out after a long travel day, but happy to be home. Sometime this week I’ll post one last day of pictures and memories. For now, unpacking and relaxing.
We are at the airport in Santiago, waiting to board our flight home. It’s sad, but it’s time. Today we had an early wake up, flew from Puerto Natales to Santiago, and had just a few hours to explore the city before returning to the airport.
In the next few days I’ll hopefully post some reflections and more pictures from the trip. For now, I’m too tired. See you stateside.
After yesterday’s big hike (similar distance, but 1,000 vertical feet more than our big one in El Chalten), we needed a less strenuous day. We went horseback riding in the morning, and spent the rest of the day relaxing in the hotel and spa. In the lobby we found a coffee table book of Chile’s fanciest hotels, where we learned a little more about this place:
Its architects, Cazú Zegers, Rodrigo Ferrer, and Roberto Benavente, sought to create a structure with a sense of place, a geo-poetic work in which the key element was beech wood worked to resemble the texture of the old-time sheep barns on the ranches where they once dried the wool and leather.”
Destinos de Lujo by Ana María Lopez & Marí Paúl
Tomorrow, we have to start the journey home! Unless we are hired by Kine, the hotel’s cheery Excursion Director. (We have inquired.)
It will be hard to leave this place. It is so special here—both the park and the hotel. But we’ll have a full day in Santiago before our overnight flight, so there will be some time to transition and enjoy a bit more adventure before getting back to Chicago.
Today was the big trek in Torres del Paine. After a ~3.5-hour climb, the clouds opened just enough to see the towers (las torres) for a few minutes while at the lookout. As we finished lunch, the clouds returned and the rain, cold, and wind picked up, making the descent a bit treacherous. But we made it safely, and the day was amazing. Yet another wonderful guide, Diego, made our trip extra special with lots of info about the terrain, flora, and fauna—he’s an avid birder. And also with surprises: delicious fresh coffee at the top, and champagne at the bottom. We learned that paine is native Tehuelche for “sky blue,” so the park’s name is a mix of Spanish and native language meaning something like “Towers of the Blue Sky.” We also learned that another feature, the French Valley, is named for the former landowner, a Frenchman. Apparently this was private land (!) before being donated to the park.
Our hotel, Tierra Patagonia, is mind-bogglingly beautiful, and in perfect harmony with the landscape. This hotel was the inspiration for our whole trip, and it has exceeded our hopes. I’ll post more photos tomorrow, and hopefully learn and share more about its history and architecture. For now, we are recovering with some tub time, sauna, pool, and then off to dinner.
Arriving in Chile, we had an extremely lucky day. We went out for a short hike, and immediately saw a baby armadillo, followed by two pumas (aka mountain lions), and a flock of flamingos. Armadillos are rarer to see than pumas here, but seeing two pumas together is even rarer. On the hike, we saw a huge avalanche, that looked and sounded like a huge waterfall.
Tomorrow we’re doing one of the big hikes in the park, and we can’t wait. The granite peaks here are stunning, we can see them from our hotel. It’s a rainy day tomorrow, so we may not have a great view on the hike. We’ll see!
Our day began with a drive around Estancia 25 de Mayo, a huge ranch named for Argentinian Independence Day. It’s also home to a 2,000 year-old native tribal gravesite, and the oldest settler house in the area. Our guide Christian is a former pro skater who was roommates in California with Chad Muska (the one with the backpack, remember?). Now he’s a nature guide and absolutely loves his job. Every plant and animal he showed us, it was like he was seeing it for the first time. We had a blast with him. He drove an old forest green Land Rover, a totally mechanical car with no electronics at all. Going uphill the engine chirped and squealed. “That’s the stereo today,” said Christian. There are guanacos everywhere, even though the properties are all fenced off, they just jump over the fences and roam and graze freely. “The guanacos are the real landowners,” said Christian. The tour finished at La Seccion, “the section house,” which is like a guest house / owner’s weekend house at the estancia.
Christian dropped us off Calafate Coffee Roasters, where we enjoyed excellent coffee and atmosphere. We wanted to buy some of the cool mugs but were worried they wouldn’t survive the trip. Tipping in US dollars never gets old here—even one or two dollars gets a big reaction from people. They thank you sincerely. They may show their coworkers, who also thank you. Or sometimes they pocket it right away without showing anyone. Either way, there’s a constant sense of an economy hungry for dollars, and of people hungry for financial stability. Putting dollars into the economy at the very micro level feels meaningful. When we tipped our guide Christian, he looked at us intently and said, “I will save this.”
We finished the day at the hot tub and then dinner, both at the hotel. Tomorrow we cross into Chile and head for Torres Del Paine, our final, and maybe most epic, stop on the trip.
sabbatiblog 