The art gallery

We pulled it off! Thanks to lots of help from a lot of people. Ash and Saa’s art gallery with a guest appearance by Tanav accompanied by a bunch of addictive bakes from Orange & Olive Co.

This was v2 of the art gallery we did in spring this year, in our living room. The idea was to make v2 bigger and better. And also to get Ash back to making art after her maternity break. Home prints became professional framed prints on nice paper (aka Natural Evolution ivory). The living room was supposed to become Vandith’s living room, but eventually became the common area in the housing tower for personal events, and the nicely maintained outdoor garden. And 40-50 people became over triple that number, based on Vandith’s estimates.

The framed art with transparent acrylic sheet on top meant we had to be really mindful of the lighting. And we couldn’t fix the indoor lighting without investing a lot of time, energy and money on improving the lighting. By a stroke of luck, we stumbled on the idea of doing it outdoors, and there was no looking back! We were able to find some nice easels on a quick commerce site, that friends also bought a couple, since the dark store near us ran out of them.

The weather gods came with their own plans, the next morning, though. We woke up to cloudy skies and the weather predictions that changed a lot from the previous evening. Sigh!

Saa refused to move her art indoors given how poorly the framed art fared in the indoor lighting. She also had the luxury of them being framed prints. We decided to take the risk, and it paid off! The rain predictions were so wrong, and there wasn’t a drop of rain. I wish we didn’t have to be constantly stressed and looking up at the clouds, etc., through the day, though. We still had to arrange for some lighting for the outdoors post sunset. We arranged for some lights, but we didn’t have a chance to test it the previous night, or be able to fix it while there were people looking at the art. We could’ve done better here.

Inviting people who were more than a degree or two of separation meant a lot more stress as organizers. It went from being a cozy home event to something where we cared about making things as proper as we possibly could. I didn’t enjoy this part of organizing the whole thing, but I’m glad it went off well. I only realized later that I didn’t get to engage enough with the art itself. I barely got a chance to take a closer look at Ash’s work. I did engage a little with Tanav’s work, while helping with the bakes which were next to his tables.

A bunch of features that I prodded Claude to build into chitreM (the CMS for art gallery management) came in handy. We were quickly able to change paper sizes, layouts, etc for the caption cards, for instance, to make the accompanying stories that Saa had written for each art piece. People connected with the writing and stories as much as, if not more than the art. One person even left a note about how thoughtful the “inspirations note” was and connected with the thought about how a well-rested person is going to inhabit the world differently from someone who isn’t. It was heart-warming to see people engaging so deeply with everything she put out there. Some people were also excited about the Yukata she was wearing with her own art on it.

Both Ash and Saa were also able to sell some of their work to friends or family of friends. Reach out to them, if you’d like to buy yourself some art!

Another revolution…

… around the sun, I’ve completed this week. I don’t know if I should be feeling any different with another year added to the age column, but I don’t seem to. I had a nice quiet celebration with some friends and Saa, bringing in the day. And a nice ordered-in dinner at home with my parents. Pretty good!

And it turns out, it was in week 42. :)

AI’s decision-making and alignment

This interactive article on Jev’s decision making in the trolly problem was a thought-provoking read. What decisions would you want to leave to an LLM to make? What information and what level of confidence would one need on how it works, to let an LLM make a choice for you?

First, no one should be asking an AI to rule on life or death (although I fear that is coming, regardless). Second, for critical decisions, there are useful lessons here that we can take to building with decision models. Knowing these models’ decision-making is inconsistently aligned with human preferences tells us we can’t just trust their decisions out of the box.

Workouts

I was only able to get in two sessions at the gym, not counting all the running around needed for the gallery setup! I was hoping to get a game of Frisbee or Badminton, but it was not to be.