A Recommendation for Trying AI

The following is a message I shared with my organization today. In light of NASA’s push to train up the workforce on AI, I wanted to share a tool that I’ve been using in my day-to-day. This is a simple tool that would be a good introduction for folks who haven’t been using AI much. Perplexity AI is a conversational AI assistant and search engine that provides citations for sources it is using.

“Children need to be used under adult supervision”

This made me laugh.

A while back I posted about Fed Meetup, the app I built that won an internal NASA challenge. Today I received my prize, a NASA@WORK sticker that flew on a SpaceX Dragon capsule that splashed down back in April! I have now committed myself to using this water bottle for life… 😅

A NASA@WORK sticker that was flown on a SpaceX Dragon, laying above an envelope addressed to Jacob Weidokal from NASA Jake holding his water bottle with the sticker displaying on the front of it

Do you ever say something and then the gravity of what you just said hits you hard? I was chatting with a coworker preparing for retirement and casually mentioned that I have 30+ years left. 30+ years! What!? That’s a lot of time to make meaningful and good things. That’s the goal.

How to Write a Kickass Article

I would like to note that as I write this, I am not following the advice contained within whatsoever. I want to write better articles. I want to use them to reason and think. I would like to do some research and link to sources, so that my articles have some ground to stand on and they provide real value. To this end, I’ve been doing some research on writing a good article and I made the cheat sheet below for myself.

Added a colophon page. I wrote it in a who, what, when, where, and how format, and I like how it turned out. I haven’t seen others doing it this way. I considered adding a “why” section but decided against it. I’m not sure if the colophon is the right spot for that, but if not, then where?

scritch scratch swoop and slash
furious scribbles relent
taut hush, reflection