Grainau: hiking and beer at 3000 meters
How it all looks from the ground.
For her vacation, Yuliya decided to show me the beautiful German mountains and took me for a couple of days to Grainau — it's a piece of Bavaria that's almost like Switzerland. At least, it is similar to the pictures of Switzerland that I've seen :-D
In short, it's a lovely place with a measured pace of life. If you need to catch your breath, calm your nerves, and enjoy nature, then this is the place for you. But if you can't live without parties, you'll get bored quickly.
What's there:
- The highest mountain in Germany plus a couple of glaciers.
- There's skiing in winter. If you really need it, you can find a place to ski in summer, but the descent is short, and the lifts are turned off.
- A large clean lake and a couple of smaller ones.
- A huge number of trails for hiking.
- A huge number of waterfalls, streams, and a couple of mountain rivers.
- Restaurants with beer.
- Beautiful fallen trees in the forests, private property, fences, cows with bells, and "racing tractors" (I don't know how to name this phenomenon better, but tractors are moving fast there :-D).
This is briefly, and now in detail.
Migrating from GPT-3.5-turbo to GPT-4o-mini
Guess when I switched models.
Recently OpenAI released GPT-4o-mini — a new flagship model for the cheap segment, as it were.
- They say it works "almost like" GPT-4o, sometimes even better than GPT-4.
- It is almost three times cheaper than GPT-3.5-turbo.
- Context size 128k tokens, against 16k for GPT-3.5-turbo.
Of course, I immediately started migrating my news reader to this model.
In short, it's a cool replacement for GPT-3.5-turbo. I immediately replaced two LLM agents with one without changing prompts, reducing costs by a factor of 5 without losing quality.
However, then I started tuning the prompt to make it even cooler and began to encounter nuances. Let me tell you about them.
About the book "Piranesi"
Cover of the book "Piranesi"
"Piranesi" is both a continuation of the magical stories of Susanna Clarke and an independent book.
The book has no direct connection with the world of English magic [ru] from "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell". If desired, one can find a connection and even say that the worlds are the same, only at different times: the events of "Piranesi" take place in the early 2000s. However, the author did not give any hints on this. Therefore, I consider the worlds to be different for now.
Susanna continues to persistently and effectively dig not even in the direction of animism as the basis of world perception but in the direction of extremely holistic view of the world, in contrast to the currently dominant reductionism.
The latter blows my mind. As an engineer, I'm an intuitive reductionist due to professional deformation. Reading "Jonathan Strange" and "Piranesi", I felt how Clarke, like Peter the Great, cuts a window in my brain to another picture of the world, a different world perception. And it's wonderful.
By the way, don't confuse holism with, say, an engineering view of the world, a-la systems engineering [ru] or even science. The latter is about decomposing reality into isolated parts with clear boundaries and synthesizing "pure" models of the world [ru], while in holism, the parts have no clear boundaries and penetrate each other.
But it is my interpretation, there are interpretations when holism is just an alternative name for a systems thinking/view — it's hard to find literature on this topic now, so it's hard for me to say where the truth is.
So, "Piranesi"
Preferences of strategy players
Looking at the survey data and trying to find something useful.
Recently I've conducted a survey about the preferences of strategy players.
In the previous post, we cleaned up the data, and in this one, we will try to find insights within it.
In this post you will find an interactive dashboard with a bunch of charts, where you can compare two samples of your choice. There are many samples — for every taste and color, so feel free to explore and share the patterns you find on Telegram and Discord.
But be careful with conclusions. There is little data, in some cases very little. For example, the difference between the sample sizes of male and female respondents is about tenfold => you should be very careful in interpreting the differences between them.
In general, do not take this post as a full-fledged study. I'm sure many analysts would have torn my hands off for such a thing. Then sewed them back and torn them off again :-D Use the post as an interface to the data, and make your own conclusions.
Cleaning up the results of the strategy players survey
The survey was targeted at the fans of strategy games. It seems, I was able to find audience quite accurately.
Recently I asked you to fill in a survey about strategy games.
Thank you to everyone who took the time to do this. It's time to share the results.
363 respondents filled in the survey. 304 answers remained after data normalization and cleaning.
There will be two posts:
- This one — about the methodology of data collection and processing, and their cleaning. Cleaned data will be shared.
- The next one — about the analysis of the results.