"You too now begin to be a magician"
The year has flown by; between full-time work, full-time doctoral studies, and family life, I sit here, finding myself on the brink of 2025. I continue to surprise myself by each and every year I cross the finish line.
There have been a lot of changes this year overall, the most significant being that my middle son married. Life continues to roll along. I may or may not have time to reflect on 2024 before ushering in the new year, but for now – Merry Christmas.
In Excelsis Deo!
My new watch keeps warning me every time I take the harley out that it is going to make me deaf.
Funny, because every time I take the Harley out, I’m thinking, “Why isn’t my motorcycle louder than this?”
I guess the watch is right.
I, too, have an experience to share regarding AI!
TLDR: The excitement around how amazing AI has become in replicating human creativity has various negative impacts, too. Here is but one: plagiarism detection.
I am coming up to the halfway mark of my doctoral studies. During my previous course, urged on by my professor, I started using Grammarly for the first time.
Grammarly suggestions have been an amazing tool to help me be more conscious of sentence structure and word choice while writing my papers.
However, to date, when writing, I *always* hand-review web version recommendations and manually change suggestions in an offline copy, as I still have a deep-rooted fear that I will be accused of plagiarism, and I have no idea what type of “fingerprint” AI leaves on my papers.
In pondering that question, for the first time today, I installed the Grammarly Mac app, and I am using it right now to help correct my punctuation and recommend better sentence structures as I post.
The genesis of this post: a few minutes ago, I decided to open the newly installed Grammarly add-in and ask it to detect plagiarism for the paper I began writing by hand, from my head. See the attached image below.
Apparently, 50% of the ideas that came from my brain, down the electrons and muscles of my fingers, and onto the digital paper of Microsoft Word show signs of being plagiarized through the use of Artificial Intelligence.
So, I begin to think: what if a university, driven by the societal pressures of adoption, picks an arbitrary KRI/KPI (we do this ALL the time in the real world) to say that if AI thinks 60% of my paper is AI, I will get accused of plagiarism?
Should I go back to not using any form of AI so I can in good conscience declare that I *never* use AI, or do I move forward and hope that universities and professors are themselves learning about the flaws and limits of AI even amongst all the amazing new benefits?
The irony is not lost on me that Grammarly is telling me I should rewrite much of this post for simplicity and clarity. When I look at the suggestions, it is probably correct.
However, my version sounds more “Human,” even if more flawed, and perhaps, just perhaps, by ignoring those great suggestions, my post will display fewer signs of the fingerprint of AI.
[NOTE: Grammarly reminded me of the sometimes hotly-debated statement that the comma goes inside the quote, not outside!].
Soon, I may find that I need to dance the dance with Grammarly just to change my human-written paper to avoid the appearance of plagiarism to those professors and universities who are, like everyone else, struggling to understand where AI fits into this brave new world. I can see a vicious cycle.
What tangled webs we weave.
p.s. Apparently, Grammarly originally thought there was 14% plagiarism in this post. I changed a few sentences, and now it says 0%. Maybe it is so low because I left all my poorly structured sentences in place. 😂
Amanda and I went to watch Sound of Hope this weekend. It is a story that hits close to home.
In 2008 I took on a position in a Missions board within our Church family. While I grew up dirt poor (e.g., no plumbing or running water), I still lived a sheltered life where God always provided for us, and to be fair, “poor” is a subjective word. We were money poor, but we were family wealthy.
When I became involved in the Missions board, a whole new world of poverty, true poverty, pain, and suffering opened before me. In 2008, a visiting bishop from Kenya prayed over our family, asking God to give us strength in the decisions we were about to make. What decisions?
My wife and I left from services with a heavy heart that drew us, unbeknownst to each other to go home, separately jump on our computers, and still unknowing to the other, we both started searching for children in need. A few days later we finally got the courage to speak out the plans that God placed in our hearts, and providentially, we had both found the same little girl from the same orphanage in Haiti.
Like John, (although somewhat figuratively) I could fill a scroll that stretched from one end of the heavens to the other in describing to you all the wonderful and amazing “God moments” we had over the next two years; it is AMAZING to see God’s power manifest in front of your eyes, and I can tell you with unwavering commitment that God performed many powerful miracles along the way – His only ask for us, was to trust in Him.
Whenever our hard work and efforts came to a dead end (so many times!), whenever we got to the end of our rope, once we gave up and let God take control, the miracles flooded in. It’s funny, looking back, how many times I would try to do things within my own power and strength, only once again having to turn to God in humility and ask. That’s all it took. Ask and you shall receive.
Adoption, is not an easy thing though, with it comes struggles, physical, emotional, and financial. There are so many adjustments needed, there is often brokenness there can be feelings of abandonment, and even medical and psychological issues. But God is good, and what better way to truly understand what it means to be “adopted” into God’s family. Sometimes when the tide of grief comes over one of our adopted children, I have to remind them, that we chose them, how much more so is that powerful bound, where we chose them, just like God chooses us.
Sound of Hope was a tear-jerker through and through. It didn’t just show the happy side of adoption, it showed some of the hard times, the bad times, and maybe even a little bit of the fringe of the ugly, but God is good, all the time.
I commend this movie to you, and hope it will be an inspiration wherever you are in your walk of life and your faith. Perhaps you are already involved in some way in caring for orphans and widows, perhaps this movie might plant a seed to stir you up for even more noble things.
https://www.angel.com/movies/sound-of-hope-the-story-of-possum-trot
Thank you for letting me share a little bit of my story, maybe someday I will share more!
I received the following picture related to my dinner delivery.. I think my response was spot on.
This week I had to (e.g. had the opportunity to) travel from the east to the west, and back to the east (California trip); the trip back, starting 3AM Thursday morning to 12AM Friday morning, where I eventually ended up outside of Liberty for a college experience tour with our two youngest. I also stopped in the office towards the end of the day to get my own physical student ID card!
The campus of Liberty was beautiful, well kept, and well organized. We were so impressed by the safety of the area, and even more so, in the investment in community and safety as a whole.
Convocation was a humbling experience, witnessing thousands upon thousands of creatures connecting with their creator. We even stood on the 17th floor of the Liberty tower while the bells struck the top of the hour.
I am super exhausted, and now trying to get caught up on my doctoral assignments that were extended for a few days, but still due by the end of the week.
God is good – all the time, it just so happens, that this week resulted in experiences that were immediately recognizable as great and gracious.
I’ve been staring at Ben’s videos for the last 6 or so months and really wanted to dig a little deeper.. however, with as much knowledge and experience as I have with technology, I really don’t (didn’t..) understand electricity at all, except for the experiences I’ve had with accidentally grounding out light switches in the gang box, because I didn’t realize the electrician had sourced multiple circuits into the same box.. *poof*
What I did know, however, is that electricity is dangerous, and while I had a basic level of understanding electricity, and a pretty solid understanding of how digital circuits work, and how a computer is pieced together from thise circuits, I had no idea how actual electricity flows through all the different components to build up to a functional computer.
For example: what is a transistor, how does a resistor work, what about a diode, or a FET, how do capacitors work… how about electrical flow in circuits that are parallel, or in series, how do you “size” your circuits correctly?
I understood high-level differences with AC and DC, but how do you convert from one to the other, and why use either? The list goes on and on and on.
So, I started with an 11 hour course on Udemy from Ian Juby, on Electricity and Robotics, then I spent hours and hours and hours on youtube watching follow up videos, and demonstrations around Ohms law, impedance and the likes.
Now, I finally feel ready to start on my 8 bit computer from Ben, and confident I won’t electrocute myself. I’ve even started soldering components for the first time on my life – the first time was pretty ugly, but I quickly leveled-up.
I’ve also chosen to use lead-free solder; I don’t spend all my free time trying to boost my brain capacity just to smear lead all over my hands, which means I’ve had to run my soldering iron at 750 degrees!
Anyway, I’ve got a pretty good start on the 8-bit; I’m likely to spend most of my vacation working on it.
Some things never change – this is what my vacations usually look like:
I.e. Adventures in Networking
I don’t have a lot to say right now, other than I spent *hours* trying to get my new Palo Alto to work with the Unifi Suite.
Little did I realize that Unifi’s concept of “Native VLAN” means it is going to strip the VLAN tag of the “Native VLAN” off the 1Q header, and the Palo Alto doesn’t have a concept of the “Native VLAN” which means, when it gets an untagged packet it sends it to the primary interface (not any of the sub-interfaces).
The fix:
– Create a Network Profile that has no native VLAN and tag the VLAN specifically destined for the Palo Interface.
I’m dropping this note here, b/c I could not find ANYWHERE on the internet that explained this, I had to piece it together based on lots of different documents around how Unifi, Cisco, Palo, etc. work.
Plus, I’ll probably forget this next week when I go to try and configure my next interface.
09/24/2023 – Also found out the hard way that the IP addresses set on the interfaces themselves have to have a net mask added, or apparently they consider themselves in a network all to themselves, and won’t route traffic. I think, after troubleshooting, I realized that it is because this is acting both as the IP of the interfaces, and the gateway address for the interface.
At least I can happily say …. it wasn’t DNS!
It’s been a trying few weeks; so many challenges as children transition from young adult, to adult. On some evenings, it definitely feels like everyone is not growing up fast enough, and yet, still other evenings, it still seems like they are growing too fast (and we are aging) way.to.fast.
But in the silence of the peepers and the wind chimes, I sat here and realized that soon, in the proverbial “tomorrow”, they all won’t be around; so tonight, I’ll just be thankful that I still see this.
I love this little dog. but I also kind of wonder if she wakes up every day, realizing life will be the same story over and over until she moves on from this life.
Wake up, walk, nap, scrounge for food, walk, sometimes chase the cat around the living room, then bed again.
I mean, at least I get to work 9+ hours a day too.
#RatInACage
