I posted in April that we were quite enjoying the lockdown, and homeschooling was going better than I expected ( Read more... )

I love Janelle Shane's "AI Weirdness" blog, and often dissolve into hysterical laughter at some of the text she gets neural networks to generate.

We recently discovered Inferkit (formerly Talk to Transformer), which lets you give a Transformer AI a prompt and have it generate some text. (It requires signup, but is free for casual usage levels.) A ( Read more... )

(Content note: This is about how the lockdown is going well for me. I know it's not going well for a lot of people. Maybe don't read on if it's not going well for you and it would distress you to read about how it's going well for me.)

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This is an update of this post from September 2017.

Good morning, lovely Mummy and lovely Daddy, my clock says seven... one... three. (with variations in the last two numbers). It's remarkable how this one has remained almost unchanged for over two years, just becoming more polite and... lovelier (previously "Hello, Mummy and Daddy, my clock says ( Read more... )

I took Zoe to a swimming lesson today. We happened to see a friend, in the previous-but-one class, just finishing in the changing room as we arrived, which was a nice surprise. Then, when we arrived poolside, the group immediately before ours (parents with very young babies) was still in the pool, and Zoe pointed out one of the mothers, saying "She ( Read more... )

(Mainly for me to look back on in the future)

Hello, Mummy and Daddy, my clock says seven... one... three. The last two numbers vary slightly, but this is how we get woken up most days. It's like the speaking clock (or perhaps an early version of it which could only speak individual digits ( Read more... )

Zoe turned 3 this month ( Read more... )

Zoe is two and a half now!

She's incredibly articulate, and speaks in complex sentences. (Some of her funnier quotes are here.) Her grammar's arguably got worse recently, because she's reached the developmental stage of noticing grammatical rules and over-applying them, so she'll say things like "We goed to the shop and buyed some ice lollies, and ( Read more... )

Bethany (singing): "Without meee... No one can come to the Father..."
Zoe: "Bethany, who's the Father?"
Bethany: "God."
Zoe: "Oh. But I thought Jesus was the Father."
Bethany: "No, Jesus is the Son."

I realised something about child language learning: they can't tell the difference between correction and agreement, because there isn't really one. You correct their grammar by repeating back what they said but with correct grammar: "The mouses eated the cheese!" "That's right, the mice ate the cheese." So if they say something correct, and you ( Read more... )