This week marked the FT's first hackday in two years. The theme was AI and we had just over a day to try and build something interesting. It was loads of fun!
My team of EH, AC, OO, FS and I started out by trying to generate video accompaniments to articles - but after realising that the videos were rather long, we pivoted towards video shorts (think: tiktok). To enable our hack, I wrote a cursed integration between google sheets and our internal LLM. We managed to create a few videos but it's nowhere near ready for prime-time: we didn't win, but we did get a few laughs and a shout-out from the judges!
Some teams built some really cool stuff! Including a novel chat based UI for interacting with the site (one that actually seemed quite fresh) and a Nikkei team built a tool for geolocation for use in investigative journalism.
Tuesday marked Arjun's birthday and for lack of rain we went on a mission to infiltrate another drinks: In the end we were invited and so the mission failed.
Continuing the theme of Machine-Learning, I picked IBM's AI Engineering certification back up (having paused it in 2020) and finished the whole thing over the weekend. Lots of repeated content, but also a really nice opportunity to really get to grips with the innards of neural networks.
Between the ML stuff, at the weekend I hung out with Tanha and we ended up going to Tokoton ramen which is a solid recommend. Really good: Owners are from Fukuoka and Osaka respectively, and even though it's not on the menu, they do a mean karamisoramen (辛味噌ラーメン)!
On a whim I've been watching AP Bio recently, and it's great. Same feel-good vibes as SuperStore.
