30 December 2024
needing a breeze
it all starts with school drop off anxiety as a substitute for some other horror in the night
like receiving the Nobel prize for something blurry/undefined where the King of Sweden shakes your hand before royalty, laureates, your family, friends – your head floats a metre above your neck – below, your body is naked
from a writer in old age, at the zenith of your technical powers, such as they are, but with little to say – an acceptance speech is expected
and from your floating head to the breathless audience of luminaries you blurt:
stochastic nightingale
sing my omniperiodic1 life
on my behalf
while you think:
at last
my grok2
debut
then POP
a gentle manouevre from the King
and your head is on your neck and
now you can
chomp a screen again
eat an interface again into
green and green
no, not greenery
access to this area has been denied
and who’s behind it? is your next
best thought because
your dream doodad
pianola thingie from yesteryear
cannot play a chatty summary of itself so
links be damned
you’ll haul the anchor
and see if you can sail
Oppenheimer’s
sesame
sea casket
past windward
(if only
there were wind)
- In the context of cellular automata, ‘omniperiodic’ means that a system has oscillators of all possible periods. Specifically, an omniperiodic cellular automaton contains patterns that can repeat their configuration after any number of generations, i.e. an oscillator is a pattern that returns to its original configuration after a fixed number of generations – and in an omniperiodic system, oscillators can exist for every positive integer period.
Omniperiodicity demonstrates the computational complexity and richness of a cellular automaton system, showing that it can generate patterns with incredibly diverse behaviors and repetition cycles.
Thus, in general usage, the term ‘omniperiodic’ could theoretically apply to any context where something repeats with every conceivable frequency or interval, but this usage would likely be informal or metaphorical.
– adapted from Perplexity responses on 30 December 2024
- Robert A. Heinlein coined the term ‘grok’ in his 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land. The word originates from his fictional Martian language and literally means ‘to drink’, but it serves as a metaphor for profound, intuitive understanding. In the novel, the protagonist Valentine Michael Smith, raised by Martians, introduces the term to Earth, where it symbolises a deep level of empathy and comprehension that transcends cultural and linguistic barriers. Heinlein used ‘grok’ to convey a merging of the observer with the observed, blending identity in a way that encompasses elements of religion, philosophy, and science.
In the realm of IT operations, ‘Grok’ refers to an AI and machine learning platform designed to optimise IT infrastructure management. The Grok AIOps platform focuses on real-time data processing, unsupervised learning, and pattern recognition to reduce manual tasks, troubleshoot issues, and predict incidents. It aims to simplify operational tasks such as noise reduction, root cause analysis, and service assurance while minimising costs and resource burdens.
‘Grok’ is also the name of a conversational generative chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s company xAI. This chatbot competes with models like ChatGPT and offers unique features such as real-time access to social media data from X and the ability to engage in ‘spicy’ or controversial topics. Grok is designed for tasks like drafting emails, debugging code, generating creative content, and answering questions. Its latest iteration, Grok-1.5, has expanded capabilities, including processing complex queries and handling up to 128,000 tokens of input data.
– adapted from Perplexity responses on 29 December 2024