It's Always More Complicated

People on bluesky have been sending up the claim that GPT-5 boosts ChatGPT can provide PhD-level expertise.

After all, if you ask me for Mi Xpertise, you are likely to get 'it's complic8ed' and your ear bent with perhaps TMI on the subject, and what the areas of uncertainty are.

Do we not think that it would be more like having an overconfident mansplainer in one's pocket?

This led me to the teasing memory of a quotation, which I have tracked down and found has been researched in considerable depth here: Quote Origin: I Wish I Was As Sure of Any One Thing As He is of Everything.

It's fairly reliably attrib. to Lord Melbourne about the historian Thomas Macaulay (not, we fear, a member of the discipline given to declaring IAMC, sigh). Though it's been ascribed to various about various (funnily enough, all blokes) over the years.

I am coming around to a consideration that I am officially An Old and in a risk group, though only by reason of age and not for any concomitant reason of health, and therefore that international travel is probably not going to be the most sensible of ideas in the foreseeable future.

I note that An Institution with which I have some association has already put out a notice to its staff and people involved in its projects to eschew international events.

I further note that although Wiscon has so far said that it is going ahead (though may reconsider) I have not yet heard anything about the Academic Conference I was intending attending shortly afterwards, and I suspect that this is more about the ongoing situation than the organisers not having managed to get together the usual organisational details email in over a month since sending out acceptance of papers. Which suggests it may not be happening or is being postponed or turning into a virtual conference.

I have been holding off on making travel arrangements anyway until all this was a bit more settled.

It's rather irksome because the timing was such that it would have enabled me to fit in a side-trip to polish off some research, but, well, them's the breaks.

***

And in the realm of, other minor frets of life do not vanish (I refer my dr rdrz to the genre of novels about the Phoney War and the early part of the War once it had started not being Phoney), I am wondering whether I need to get a new phone, chiz, moan, whinge.

With the battery which lasts well under 24 hours on full charge (having lasted over 2 days when the thing was new), and the thing whereby every so often when it's charging it somehow doesn't realise it's supposed to be fast charging... Could Do Better.

*Thomas Nashe, In Time of Pestilence, 1593.

I've been thinking recently about the fact that, only a few years ago, I would now (or even somewhat earlier) be having talks with HR, winding down my work commitments, etc, because I would have reached Retirement Age.

Which is no longer a thing, and okay, I totally get that people of my years don't necessarily feel like being put out to grass just yet, though I can imagine instances where they wish they could.

It means I don't have a definite end-date to work to, and that I have all sorts of thinks about if/when I should depart the workplace. Sometimes I feel it would be nice if one were just told to stop. One could then think what next and make plans and so on.

I think this may be another of those cases where you find me and Robert Frost's Neighbour, sitting in the bar with our drinks and our backs turned to one another.

It resonates for me with that rather terrifying thing one hears about about people in certain sectors who claim that they have no work/leisure division, because work is So Much Fun and during what might be leisure they are checking their email, social media, etc for work-related matters.

Also with people who are being obliged, rather than spending their days looking for work, or engaging in relevant unpaid volunteering, having to do uncongenial labour for no pay, just for The Experience.

There is something there about necessary boundaries and their erosion that bothers me.