Daily Archives:December 1st, 2024

The FreshWash Clip – Every home should have one!

This afternoon I went into our little utility room, made some measurements, and created this beautiful work of art on my iPad:

 

Rough sketch of clip

I then went upstairs and opened up my CAD program, where I was able to turn it into this:

Flat sketch of clip

And extrude it into three dimensions, so it looked like this:

whence I could 3D-print it, to get this:

Now, as most of you stand amazed, there may yet be some readers for whom its use isn’t immediately obvious, so I should explain.  

If, like us, you don’t have kids, and therefore don’t need your washing machine to be running 24×7, the seals and the inside of the drum stay fresher and nicer if you can prop the door open and let them dry between washes.

And so I created the FreshWash Clip™️.  

It works perfectly, and I get a deep, if childish, satisfaction from it.  The hole on the top makes a bit of a handle so it’s easier to clip on and off, and can also be used to hang it on a hook on the wall.

This particular model is sized precisely for our elderly and out-of-production model of John Lewis washing machine, so I doubt I’ll be producing it en masse, but no doubt Chinese entrepreneurs will seize the opportunity to prove a whole range of different sizes and colours, and on Etsy you’ll soon find artisanal variants lovingly crafted from bamboo.

And as FreshWash Clip mania takes hold, and no home can be considered complete without one, please remember that you saw it here first!

Wisdom of the crowds, or lowest common denominator?

I liked this:

People have too inflated sense of what it means to “ask an AI” about something. The AI are language models trained basically by imitation on data from human labelers. Instead of the mysticism of “asking an AI”, think of it more as “asking the average data labeler” on the internet.

But roughly speaking (and today), you’re not asking some magical AI. You’re asking a human data labeler. Whose average essence was lossily distilled into statistical token tumblers that are LLMs. This can still be super useful of course. Post triggered by someone suggesting we ask an AI how to run the government etc. TLDR you’re not asking an AI, you’re asking some mashup spirit of its average data labeler.

Andrej Karpathy

Thanks to Simon Willison for the link.

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser