Tag: technology

Shmintelligence – Opinions on AI

A friend of mine seems to use ChatGPT to write every message he sends out. It’s still pretty easy to spot when he has used it, and it still leaves a strange taste in my mouth. Why is a robot texting me in his place?

That strange taste is the overarching effect of AI on myself, and I don’t think anybody knows quite what to do with the feeling left over after interacting with a bot where we used to interact with a human. Especially when we know the bots are not 100% trustworthy. Not even close.

Strange feelings aside, it’s clear that AI is not going away, and the interactions with robots will accelerate because convenience overrides quality. Just like streaming overtook the CDs and LPs of the world, and we were forced to choose Spotify or A.N. Other – The net result is that I need to choose an AI platform. I need my own opinions on various options I have used, and below is the lay of the land as I see it:

  • ChatGPT – All powerful and popular, but not appealing because of the origin stories and the boardroom dramas, and because of all the lawsuits. Elon Musk teamed up with Sam Altman and that resulted in a greedy scraping Robot, and I just don’t want to use it. It just hit a billion dollars revenue a month but it is burning as much in energy and costs. Extraordinary.
  • Grok – seemingly more extreme and outlandish in its utterances, and more links with Elon with all his lawsuits and wildness. Not an X user. Not particularly interested.
  • Claude – appealing for its supposed focus on safety and transparency. I like the free version as much as I like any talking robot prompt, but commitment is expensive at USD 17 a month.
  • Gemini – already part of my Google One account subscription and works much the same way as the others for me. Appealing for me as I think Google’s lead in search and deep history in creating AI will give it advantages long into the future. I am going to choose this one not because of any difference in quality that I have had with interactions, but because of the bundle.

My point about bundles above suggests to me that the tech is a commodity already. Sure, there are benchmarks to measure performance, but do we really see those differences in our daily use? I certainly can’t tell. But hey what do I know? I still write my own blog posts. It feels good to have come up with an opinion on the tools I have used so far, even if they have been foisted upon me without much of a say on my part. What a strange world it is.

Happy Thursday Chimps.

Playing with DALL-E

Below are my recent efforts playing around with OpenAI’s DALL-E art generator. I have included the picture, and below each picture is the prompt I used to generate the art. Happy Friday, Chimps.

A mouse’s eye view of an eagle swooping down to grab him, in the style of Picasso

street art stencil picture of a chicken playing badminton

photo of a sculpture of a grizzly dwarf forging a sword

impressionist painting of a perfectly symmetrical orange tree on top of a hill

mice playing poker cyberpunk digital art

a painting of the head of a donkey in the style of martin aveling

Music plus tech

As a teenager I used to think I would listen to my walkman for the rest of my life. It was so essential to me – the cassette tapes I had painstakingly curated, the stock of fresh AA-size batteries, the headphones I found in an airport in England. The ritual of plugging it all in and pushing play. It just didn’t get any better.

One day in my early 20s I found my dad’s LP collection and an old hifi setup. I heard classics like Otis Redding and Springsteen in such clarity and power. Besides the fidelity, there was the long beautiful process of choosing the record, cleaning it, playing one side through and flipping it over, reading the liner notes, poring over the album covers, adjusting the needle and the audio settings. A new ritual was born. My life changed.

Now in my 30s I have my iPhone and an Apple watch. New tech, new ritual. I can call up any song I want no matter where I am. The digital liner notes are getting better every day and the sheer convenience of Bluetooth and music on the go is changing my life again. Don’t even get me started on Spotify’s daily mix and discover weekly playlists. That revolution in curation is a topic for another post.

Older forms of technology can all still be used of course. And often they retain their original power even though the convenience factor is low. Vinyl has made a come back. Audiophiles also tout the benefits of CDs and cassettes. For me this means I now have an arsenal of ways to access the Music drug. The music is the constant, Platonic form while the tech revolves and morphs around it in a clumsy, circular dance.

Perhaps one day the headphones will be nothing more than chips in our brains. A neuralink device Elon Musk sells for a fee. What might a music listening ritual look like for this scenario?

I get comfort from the fact that the music never changes. Taste and quality may vary, but a song is a song no matter what. The catalogue keeps on growing, but the essential form and function of a song is set. It is information in the form of a sound wave being received by the brain. Only the tech for delivery varies.

Mourning the death of a newsletter

Actually, there is no mourning – the newsletter didn’t last long enough for me to become attached in any way, shape or form. 3 episodes was more than enough.

So what has happened? Well, in my quest to build a meaningful website I have realised that I do not need to have a newsletter, and that worse still – I do not really have meaningful news to share!

Instead, I ought to work on what I get excited about. I love making podcasts, and I love the idea of ‘escaping the jungle’. This idea was a feature of my newsletters but I have instead brought it into the website under its own page. It’s likely to feature a broad range of things I find helpful. A record of life hacks and interests which help.

As painful as this might be to follow, I am slowly figuring out what I want. It is all in realtime as I develop this blog of mine. “Escaping the jungle” could just as well be called ‘coping with life’. Life is hard, so let’s figure out how to cope with it best. Let’s keep record of what helps.

It’s a little narcissistic to keep on rearranging something to suit you and your readers. It’s also a trait of mine – for example I will often feel a compulsion to rearrange my house. Things could always be better, but there’s a limit. I am going to leave the site like it is for a while, drop the newsletter, and see where it takes me.

Happy Thursday chimps.

Research tips and tricks

In this age of Google and unlimited information at our fingertips, there is still great value (perhaps greater than ever) in aggregating, curating and gleaning insight out of information. The internet is a firehose and we need some way of focusing in on something useful. Research reports of interest. Look at the archive of http://www.ben-evans.com as an example of what I love.

With that in mind, and with my brief career as a research analyst as a background, I am searching for hacks, tips and tricks to bend information to my will! I have always appreciated great research but I feel under-skilled to come up with a good piece of research myself. Perhaps it is a matter of brain power and IQ not being up to scratch, But I think it is just as likely a matter of methodology and understanding the process.

So, if any of you have any expert tips on using google to your advantage, or on how to compile a research report then please let me know. I am open to all learning on this topic, even if it seems obvious and basic. I need to know how to approach data, how to approach sources and how to make interesting links of interest. It is something that I wasn’t taught at school….or maybe I just didn’t listen.

Thats what is running through my head.

Happy Monday Chimps.

 

Hifi and WW2

Cognitive dissonance is tricky to deal with.

In Germany after the war, Allied forces found a new recording technology – magnetic tape. This provided a huge leap in audio fidelity ahead of disc recordings and rapidly became the dominant mastering medium for sound. The Nazi’s had used it for a while already for broadcasting. It later enabled multi-track recording and led to the first hifi systems being created.

Fast forward 74 years and here we are, the audio equivalent of the autobahn. A Nazi legacy item that audiophiles and musicians couldn’t really do without. Magnetic tape enables those timbres, tones and spacious melodies.

Of course it would have been infinitely better without the war, and with Nazis never having existed.

But here we are.