Q3 2025 quarterly review
I’ve been doing these quarterly reviews for a year now so this is the first time I have been able to look back at the previous year’s review. Things have changed a lot. I wasn’t doing much AI related stuff for clients a year ago, my focus was much more on data visualization than AI. I had a plan to start doing videos regularly, but it’s only really this last quarter where I’ve managed to do it. Which brings me to my most important development this quarter:
AI Fluency online trainings and videos
I tried repeatedly over the last year to start doing videos focused on my professional work, but I repeatedly failed:
- I’d made a few videos in a video podcast style chatting with people about various issues, but it was too infrequent.
- I set up an Information visualization group, but didn’t really have a good objective and didn’t get far with it.
- I set up an AI Builders group, which an in-person group. Although it worked fairly well, I didn’t feel I was learning much from it and it took a lot of organizing.
At the start of September I finally found a formula that worked — giving short weekly online talks about different aspects of AI, and recording them as videos. This works because:
- it is useful for the people that join the sessions. I’ve had some good feedback.
- being short means that I can create something every week.
- doing them online regularly means I have a commitment to create them, which forces me to stick to a routine.
- I’m learning a lot doing them — initially getting the technical setup right, but once that is in place I can focus on my delivery.
- it combines lots of my different skills and interests. I can create interactive information visualizations and use them in the presentations, and I can include the illustrations I do on my morning commute.
I’m excited about this new development and think it’s going to turn into something good, although I’m not sure what yet. But I’m definitely learning and improving.
See the videos I’ve made so far on the My YouTube Channel
I’ve made various notes about the things I’ve learned doing this:
- Best practices for creating LinkedIn videos
- Using a video Media Source with transparency in OBS studio
- Automatically pausing a video in Revealjs with custom pauses
- What I learnt giving my first online AI Fluency session
- What I learnt giving my second online AI Fluency session
- Automatically starting a video on browser tab focus
- Notes on editing my online AI Fluency sessions with Final Cut Pro
That’s a lot of notes! It shows how this new development has been my main obsession this quarter.
Meetup sessions
I did a talk on The Hard Problem of Consciousness in my meetup group on July 11th, and one titled How AI chat really works. Your chatbot isn’t really thinking. on the 29th of August and 12th of September. I enjoyed doing both of them, and I should really do one combining the two topics (something like Why current computers will never be conscious).
The group is still going well, and other people have presented three good sessions:
- Humanity and Hope Amidst the Climate Crisis
- Neurodivergent, apparently: labels, norms, and the many ways of being
- Post-labor economy: rethinking prosperity when human labor has no value
I really must move off meetup.com. I’m moving off Vimeo for the same reason I want to move off meetup.com, and I’ve written about it here: Moving my videos from Vimeo to a cloud server. I’ll get around to it eventually.
Creativity and reading
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