§ Week ten! This upcoming week will be the last one before a nice, two week long, spring break.

I narrowly avoided catching Norovirus despite seeing a catastrophic number of cases at my school. Now we just need to see if I can make it all the way through this next week unscathed.

§ I started teaching my fifth grade classes with the Circuit Playgrounds. It is easy to forget how exciting some of the “basic” elements are when they are new to you. For now, at least, most of my students are endlessly fascinated by lighting up the RGB LEDs into animated sequences.

I have also been having a lot of fun working on a hand-drawn activity booklet for the Playgrounds. It is certainly still an early draft but feel free to check it out!

§ GPT-4 might be announced next week? The linked article alleges the defining new feature will be multimodality — the ability to generate images and videos in addition to text. Very exciting, if true.

My prediction is that GPT-4 will launch as a “ChatGPT Pro” exclusive feature. It would explain why the pro plan is so much more expensive than “gpt-3.5-turbo” API access despite them both currently interfacing with the same underlying model.

§ Kagi announced some updates relevant to what I wrote about them last week:

  • They are raising their prices beginning March 15th. The new unlimited plan will be $25/month, up from $10.
  • Their generative AI features will launch next week as well, with the ability to summarize a list of search results, summarize a single page, or “chat” about a page. These summarization features might just be a frontend for the OpenAI API, though.

I am still excited to try the new features but I am very unlikely to renew my subscription at the new prices.

§ I finished The Last of Us Part II. The game does have an ending after all. I tried replaying it but quickly stalled out. I guess that is the downside to such a story-heavy game.

§ Links

§ Recipes

  • Pav Bhaji
    • I will admit I was nervous about this one—boiling and mashing isn’t typically my preferred way to prepare vegetables. This turned out great, though, and will definitely become a regular part of my rotation