What I'm up to, roughly as it happens.

after multiple listens to the new kaizen album. i still can't form a proper opinion on the various tracks. one thing i can say for sure though, is i am enjoying ALTER EGO. the rest of the songs, however, are still not quite clear to me.

for the majority of the years as a teacher (6+ years and counting), i have spent countless hours trying to make good worksheets that would help my students learn different topics and lessons. it took hours at times (literally) to make one worksheet. and you know what’s even more frustrating? it was not always good. so after hours of searching the web for similar worksheets for inspiration, a couple more minutes looking for suitable clipart or images, and then some more minutes browsing websites for texts and dialogues that would fit the lesson (even writing my own texts when nothing satisfied my needs), after all these minutes and many attempts, i would, most of the time, end up with a frankenstein worksheet that sometimes worked and at times failed. with years, of course, and experience, i managed to find a rhythm and a method. i would only need maybe 45 minutes to come up with an effective worksheet. even then, i often found myself stuck in the same loop and formula, which made my students feel bored instead of challenged.

LLMs are popularized

i gave all of my work to large language models and asked them to analyse it, keeping what works and dropping what fails. i used the official guidelines to ground the AI in actual theory. EFL theories were given as a context through which the AI views all the prompts and requests. and now, in less than 5 minutes, i can get a very good worksheet that, most of the time, needs only a few interventions on my side to make it usable in class. my time is freed, and i can think of ways to fully engage the students in class instead of spending most of my time designing worksheets and lesson planning. the tasks are now automated: i give my feedback and insights, and the AI does the rest. it feels like i have my own personal assistant, and a very capable one at that. it can turn any idea i have into reality with no hallucinations and no fake products, because everything it produces is grounded in ministerial guidelines, years of my own experience and products, and, most importantly, because i double-check everything it gives me. this reduced the task of coming up with new worksheets from a matter of hours to a matter of minutes. i am so glad i got to experience this. it would not feel as magical had i not struggled for years to make new worksheets and teaching materials. i would not trade it, though. i would not trade the years spent struggling for anything else. thanks to those years, i am now fully capable of utilizing the full capabilities of AI.

back in 2008, i made this ppt file with all sorts of journal entries, photos of my friends, and other nostalgic things. the password i used was a long name from a movie i watched. i remember what the password was but i forgot how i spelled it. now, i have the file still intact from the 2008 era but it's impossible to brute force. i tried every tool and every trick. even the most advanced LLMs did nothing for me to help. this will be my benchmark for AGI and ASI. if an AI cracks the password, that's AGI to me 😅

it's amazing how comfortable it is to use from anywhere. i can now blog, journal, update different sections of my site without having the need to touch a single code editor or open a terminal. i need to learn more about it.

i just migrated the site and rehauled the design. looks fine for me now. will check later.

as i went through my old videos, i came across this one from the closing ceremony of a small cultural conference we had at the FSE back in 2018. in the video, you can clearly see Prof. Salmane Tarik El Alami (may he rest in peace) playing the guitar and singing a little song in plain darija. i recorded the video at the time because i had already heard him sing that song before, and i did not want to waste the second opportunity i got to save it. i had looked for it online after i first heard it and could not find it anywhere; that's how i knew it's probably original, and of his own writing. i tried to regather the lyrics from this short snippet and from what i could remember of my first time hearing it, and this is what i got. it is such a beautiful song. if anyone knows it or has heard it before, please, please contact me here.

مالك و ما مالك
و مال قلبك متهالك
رضينا بغلالك
صابر و قلبك حالك

مالك و ما مالك
و مال جسمك متهالك
رضينا بغلالك
صابر و قلبك حالك

جميلاتي فوصافك
قلبك جنان السالك
ايلا جيتي نهدي ليك
الحب و كل مانمتالك

مالك و ما مالك
و مال جسمك متهالك
رضينا بغلالك
صابر و قلبك حالك

خلي بودلال يديني
ما بغيتو يخليني
يا وجدي ايلا سجنتيني
راه غلبني سلطانك

يا عشقي ايلا سجنتيني
راه غلبني سلطانك

in 2023, while teaching my usual classes at the high school, i got an idea. i had been watching futurama, and each episode opened with a short one-liner, sometimes inspirational but most of the time hilarious. i thought it would be fun to do something similar, except mine would all be inspirational, written as a little title card next to the daily date.

no one is perfect. as cliché as it sounds, it really is true. as a teacher, especially one working with teens, i constantly feel like i walk a fine line between being a good example and being a hypocrite. i feel the pressure to show up as my best self, to model the right behaviors and attitudes for my students. but sometimes i wonder if that very effort sends the wrong message making it seem like i have it all figured out, no skeletons in my closet, no flaws in my personality. how do i keep both sides of that balance without one bleeding into the other?