Chevre, this week’s parsha is Chukat (חקת). The parsha starts with the laws around The Red Hefer. Miriam dies and there is a lack of water followed by the error of Moses and Aaron along with their punishment. Amalek attacks and the parsha ends with the battles of Sihon and Og. There is a lot going on here. A chok is a law for witch we don’t really understand the meaning. It’s often thought of being brought here because of the wars that happen and the fact that the special waters created with the ashes from the Red Hefer are used to purify after becoming impure due to contact with the dead (like after a battle). That also connects with the water (or lack of water) after Miriam’s death. And it could be said that the battles happen now when the people are weakened either through lack of water or because of the error and punishment of the leadership.

Personally, I’ve been using more and more AI at work. To be honest, I really was repulsed by the hype around GenAI. Until finally a friend showed me that I could use GenAI effectively during my workday. Either by asking questions that an internal GenAI could answer, along with sources. Or the fact that I could connect a GenAI (Qchat on the cli) to an AWS account. This is what really opened a lot of doors for me. Asking the Qchat to do things in my account that either I found difficult or time consuming. I was not able to get it to do things too complicated. While I asked it to perform a task yesterday, it tried for several hours and was not able to finish it. I spent the evening in front of the TV with the family writing a Lambda (in bash!) that did what I wanted. So we’ve come a long way, it can tell me via CloudTrail what email address (even using Identity Center SSO) deleted or created a resource. It can create Athena tables, partitions, rescans, and even reports. When asked about EC2 instances, it not only found all of them, but then told me that they were being managed by Instance Scheduler (ok, that was surprising). But when it gets complicated, the human is still needed. Job is safe, Rudi (from the Jetsons) isn’t going to replace me yet. But I do feel like George Jetson writing to the computer all day.

Shabbat Shalom.