Travel

“This is exactly what LLMs are made for”

I was in Toronto, Canada. I’m on the flight back home now. The trip was very productive. A few of us went there to meet part of our team and discuss our plans for the coming months.

First time in Toronto. Beautiful city. Next time I’ll make a point of staying longer. Stefan Scherer (a smart one, this one is) suggested we go for dinner at “Prime Seafood Palace“, one of Matty Matheson‘s creations, found in the MICHELIN guide. Amazing food and dining experience.

I only stayed for 3 days. Nothing else exciting happened outside the great and productive meetings with the team but I can’t talk about that. Oh yeah… There was also drinking. That Stefan guy can drink!

So, I wouldn’t have posted anything about the trip if it wasn’t for “the incident” on the last day.

Following “the incident,” there was chatter in our messaging channel. I suggested that something had happened but didn’t give any details. A colleague, who wasn’t in Toronto with us and had recently gone through our company’s “health and safety” training, joked that any incidents had to be reported. So, I oblidged…

Report:

  1. The back of a Canadian plastic chair could not handle a metric ton of Savas’ weight, especially when said chair was not used as intended.
  2. Canadian cups of coffee, when thrown in the air during a person’s fall due to a broken Canadian chair’s back (refer to 1 above), do not land on the ground with originally contained liquid still in said cup.
  3. Canadian hot chocolate, when applied on white walls and floors, due to said liquid flying in the air (see 2 above), causes a lot of mess that requires at least 5 people to clean.
  4. When liquid from container described in (2) and (3) leaves said container, it also gets applied to clothing, requiring wearer to walk 1mi in high humidity to buy new clothes, given the unfortunate timing of the incident (last day of the business trip).

How about this as a report? 🙂

My super awesome colleague and partner in crime at work, Kevin Calberg, decided to use the above report as input to LLaMA and a request to create a poem. This is the result…

Alas, poor Savas, a man of great strength,
Whose chair, alas, could not withstand his mighty length.
A Canadian chair, with back of plastic weak,
Did break and splinter, unable to bear the strain.

And as he fell, his coffee cup did fly,
And spill its contents, a bitter, bitter draught.
The liquid, hot and steaming, did pour,
Upon the ground, and walls, and floors, a woeful sight.

And in the chaos, his hot chocolate did spill,
Upon his clothes, a sticky, messy thrill.
A tragic fate, indeed, for one so brave,
To walk a mile, in high humidity, a slave to fate.

The business trip, alas, did end in woe,
For Savas, whose chair did break, and liquid did flow.
A lesson, dear friends, to heed with care,
To choose a chair that can withstand our weight, with ease.

And thus, poor Savas, did suffer great shame,
A victim of fate, and a chair’s weak frame.
But still, his spirit, unbroken and strong,
Did rise above, and sing a sorrowful song.

A song of woe, of misfortune, and despair,
But also, of hope, and courage, beyond compare.
For though his chair did break, and liquid did spill,
His spirit, unbroken, did stand, and will.

And so, dear friends, let this be a lesson,
To cherish strength, but also, humble weakness.
For though we may not know what fate may bring,
We can, like Savas, rise, and sing.

Sing a song of hope, of courage, and of might,
For though our chairs may break, our spirit, unbroken, will take flight.

LLaMA with Kevin Calberg’s prompt. Exact prompt is unknown.

I am going to quote David Ngo‘s comment as the epilogue to this post.

This is exactly what LLMs are made for.

I love working with fun people 🙂

Savas Parastatidis

Savas Parastatidis works at Amazon as a Sr. Principal Engineer in Alexa AI'. Previously, he worked at Microsoft where he co-founded Cortana and led the effort as the team's architect. While at Microsoft, Savas also worked on distributed data storage and high-performance data processing technologies. He was involved in various e-Science projects while at Microsoft Research where he also investigated technologies related to knowledge representation & reasoning. Savas also worked on language understanding technologies at Facebook. Prior to joining Microsoft, Savas was a Principal Research Associate at Newcastle University where he undertook research in the areas of distributed, service-oriented computing and e-Science. He was also the Chief Software Architect at the North-East Regional e-Science Centre where he oversaw the architecture and the application of Web Services technologies for a number of large research projects. Savas worked as a Senior Software Engineer for Hewlett Packard where he co-lead the R&D effort for the industry's Web Service transactions service and protocol. You can find out more about Savas at https://savas.me/about

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Savas Parastatidis

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