Category: Off the Bike

I am getting into woodworking and already my imagination is out of control. I love this chair but fully understand I am a ways away from making it as well as it is made here. That said I will give it a shot, someday. In the meantime enjoy this lovely video of a really cool chair being made.

The Open AI project announced DALL-E today which is something machine learning that something something creates images from text by something something. I have read the blog post announcing it a number of times and feel that I understand what they are saying. However I still don’t really understand any of what they are saying.

Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are these concepts that I am aware of. I understand ways in which they are being used, but I have no idea how they work. To some people this is scary and there are scenarios like the Terminator where AI is very scary. In some ways expecting AI to be as bad or worse than humans is logical.

The problem is that even with the advances that have been made recently we are still a long ways from a machine thinking anything close to a human mind. For example the DALL-E project is very bleeding edge stuff made by the smartest people on the planet. For their efforts they can give the computer text and it will make an image from that. Not quite a humanoid robot shooting at you.

From what I have gathered over the years of reading about the science of machine learning and AI is that it is going to be a gradual shift. We already have machine learning making our photos way better by auto adjusting ISO, Aperture, and Exposure. Automatic face detection for Portraits is done with Machine Learning.

These are helpful things but still limited. The phone is not recommending that you change the direction of the camera to capture better light, yet.

Last year OpenAI developed GMT-3, which can write somewhat coherent text, aka a langauge model. GMT-3 hit the headlines as journalists everywhere realized they might have to get jobs.

The reality is that Machine Learning is still in very early days and most writers have nothing to worry about, yet. Some humorous examples can be found on AI Weirdness such as new take on Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer:

All Hail to Rudolph

All hail to Rudolph
The legend of Christmas
The most famous reindeer of all

All hail to Rudolph
Happy all the year
From everyone we see

Heroes come and heroes go
But Rudolph stays forevermore
Oh boys and girls of every age
Can’t you hear the sleigh bells ringing?

Oh look! There’s Santa and Parson Brown
Defying the laws of time and space
Now prepare yourself and your family my boy
Prepare to get your Christmas fix

Now Rudolph goes smashing through the roof
Just like a power lift with a candy-cane moustache
And the deer’s nose is dead-on, deadly accurate
Pow! Now it’s Rudolph versus Mars

All hail this joyful night
All hail the night folks sing
All hail to Rudolph
The legend of Christmas
The most famous reindeer of all

O Come Rudolph, Come

O Come Rudolph, Come Ye Faithful
Oh come, come holly, clad in white, Oh come ye faithful.
Oh come aloud! Oh come and join our choir,
Oh make a joyful noise till earth and heaven ring.

Caw caw caw oh, caw caw caw oh, Caw holly, Caw plum this Christmas.
Oh, caw caw caw, oh caw oh, caw oh oh oh, oh.

Fun stuff but writers are safe at their jobs for at least a little longer. What is interesting is how we will be able to use these technologies to create. How could a writer or artist benefit from using these tools?

Brainstorming sessions might benefit training a model with your competitors websites/products/presentations etc. Things that we should already be doing but now you can literally just throw everything into a folder and let the software come up with new ideas.

Here is an example of a brainstorming meeting by Jimi Smoot where only the human inputs are in bold:

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START EXPERIMENT:

The below is a conversation overheard in a product design meeting at a software company. The team has a Leader, two graphics designers, and a product manager. They are brainstorming ideas for a new software product to sell to Sales teams and help the teams close more deals.

Leader: OK remember we need to come up with something a sales team needs. Any ideas?

Designer 1: Why don’t we make an application where we record all of the steps a salesperson takes to close a deal.

Designer 2: Wow that sounds great. Anyone have any other ideas?

Product Manager: We should make an application that has all of the features you need to close a deal. Like a CRM with checkboxes to tick when you reach certain parts of the sales process.

Designer 2: Yes, that sounds great, I like your idea a lot. What else do we need?

Leader: What about a budgeting tool?

Designer 2: Yes that would be great.

Designer 1: OK that sounds good, we will put these ideas together and think about it some more. What about you guys? Do you have any more ideas?

Designer 3: Why don’t we make a checkbox application like the one the Product Manager mentioned. Sales people like checkboxes.

Designer 2: Yes, that sounds great, I like your idea a lot. What else do we need?

Leader: What about a budgeting tool?

Designer 3: Yes that would be great.

Leader: No I don’t like that one. Any other ideas?

Designer 2: Why don’t we make a checkbox application that has all of the features you need to close a deal. Like a CRM with checkboxes to tick when you reach certain parts of the sales process.

Leader: We already talked about that. How about something fresh? Are there any tools that can be used for selling with email?

Designer 3: I have an idea! What about we build an application that uses Gmail?

Designer 2: Yes that sounds great, I like your idea a lot. What else do we need?

Designer 1: We could do that. We need a way to connect to Gmail and work from Gmail. That way all of the sales person’s email is in one place.

Designer 2: OK we will think about that. What else do we need?

Product Manager: Let’s take a look at other companies that sell to sales teams. Are there any tools or applications that can be used for selling with email?

Leader: No one is going to buy a software product to help them sell with email. People will just use Gmail for that. Let’s look for something else.

Designer 2: Why don’t we make a checkbox application that has all of the features you need to close a deal. Like a CRM with checkboxes to tick when you reach certain parts of the sales process.

Leader: We already talked about that. Are there any tools that can be used for selling with email?

Product Manager: Why don’t we make an application where we record all of the steps a salesperson takes to close a deal.

END:

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Again this stuff is early days but compared to some of the brainstorming sessions I have participated in this one is not bad.

David Bebbet kicks the tires of GPT-3 in a post from July of 2020: Writing with GPT-3. He shows a brainstorming session starting with 5 ideas from him then the machine gives him this:

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And it came back with 15 more:

6. Create a list of Tor commands to run to defend against an attack
7. Create a cheat sheet for screenwriters
8. Generate advice for a scene
9. Generate XKCD comics
10. Create a crib sheet for an arbitrary Python API
11. Make a list of movies to watch
12. Make a list of scholarly algorithms/heuristics worth reading
13. Make a list of generic questions about Pedagogy
14. Make a list of cognitive exercises
15. Show patterns generated by awesome people
16. Generate small cooking tasks
17. Generate characters for a project
18. Generate configuration options
19. Generate flashcards
20. Organize my computer/files

And then 15 more:

6. Explain things to my parents via messenger
7. Explain things to my children via messenger
8. Explain mathematical algorithms
9. Automated interface design
10. Mechanize a Nagihara Kan Airlines website
11. Clickbait generator
12. Music description (Herbie Hancock is playing “Dolphin Dance” live in London on the 18th March 1968)
13. Tell me not to waste my time looking at x
14. Interesting facts about Wikipedia
15. Explain something to someone while my attention is elsewhere
16. Detect adverts in x
17. Image caption/caption game
18. Speculate about the true utility function of x
19. Auto-generate tests for a program
20. Explain why my code is currently failing tests.

And then 15 more:

6. Generate plots or character/story summaries
7. Generate legal examples
8. Generate words for crosswords
9. Check my grammar
10. Supply filler text for themed writing (horror, sci-fi etc.)
11. Explain why an AI can’t read (can it comprehend metaphors?)
12. Provide entertaining answers to obscure questions
13. Get writing ideas and generate word combinations
14. Create background for an NPC I need for a D&D game
15. Help a sick writer generate plots
16. Input pre-generated (from books etc.) phrases and use them for literary analysis
17. Help explain a mathematical proof
18. Develop a game/story/character I need
19. Make short stories I can “overlay” on a fictional Universe I’ve created (ala Ready Player One)
20. Make a short film/audio drama

From Writing with GPT-3

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David then teaches it “how to evaluate simple expressions and take derivatives”. My eyes got a little glossed over here to be honest. I haven’t seen any of those words since 1995.

Fortunately he creates a list of Overall Principles:

1. GPT-3 is continuing your writing, not having a dialog with you.
2. GPT-3 effectively puts your writing in a made up context.
3. GPT-3 likes lists and repeated structures.
4. GPT-3 cannot perform linguistic tricks like unscrambling words
5. GPT-3 benefits from “showing its work”
6. GPT-3 has a great breadth of knowledge and writing styles available to it
7. Sometimes GPT-3 makes no sense

So it sounds like things are Weird and only going to get more so.

In high school my best friend Melissa told me: “If you want to be cool you just need 1 other person to think you are cool. Then if you think you are cool and that other person thinks you are cool, you are cool.” I always loved that saying and tie it together with acting ‘as if’.

Acting ‘as if’ means that in your mind you have decided that something already done. If I act ‘as if’ I am cool then I assume that I am cool and then the decision on my end is made.

On a practical basis acting ‘as if’ helps someones confidence. If I am doing something for the first time then I will have little or no confidence because I haven’t ever done it before. Once I have done it I will have confidence that I can do it. However confidence is just a mental state. I can act ‘as if’ I have done this new thing before and have the same confidence as if I have done it before.

Acting ‘as if’ is the opposite of imposter syndrome, or maybe its a cure? Either way if you ever feel a lack of confidence remember you can try acting ‘as if’ you have done it before and maybe it will help.

New year, new plans, maybe even new resolutions? I don’t know about any resolutions but I do have plans.

I plan to exercise every morning. I am pretty close to this already but want to make it as regular as drinking coffee in 2021. Of course I will still drink coffee too. My goal is to stay limber and strong. I still need to conquer the pull-up. I am able to do 2 or 3 at a time but want to get to 10 or more in 1 set.

We plan to build a house this year. We have the design pretty nailed down, now we just need to find a builder. There isn’t a huge hurry to get this done as we have the cabin to live in currently. However we are getting very excited about this building. I will be sure to post more about the design and our process soon.

I plan to blog more this year. I have been journaling everyday for the last 335 days and it has been good to write every morning. Lately I have been writing a blog post at the end of the work day. Today I started writing this post before work. I am sure part of the need to blog comes from the isolation of the pandemic. I feel like I am talking to someone here, even if no one is reading. Anyway its a cheap hobby.

I plan to do more woodworking in 2021. I have tinkered with woodworking over the years starting with shop class in 5th grade. I didn’t really see the potential in woodworking then and for a lot of years afterwards. A few years ago I spent a couple months working on a construction crew building custom homes. It was hard work but the satisfaction of building something at the end of the day was awesome. With woodworking I don’t have to quit my job and can have a similar experience of building things. Right now I am working through some basic projects that are helping me understand the tools better. I am also learning more about good design.

Of course I plan to ride my bike a lot this year. Last year I was just short of 2000 miles ridden. This year I plan on riding at least 50 miles a week which would put me at about 2600 miles. I would like to do some long distance races but also am cautious with all the COVID in the USA. It would suck to get sick now when I hope to be able to get a vaccine in a few months.

In 2021 I plan on volunteering with the Mancos Trail Group again. They have already announced that they will be doing the adopt a trail program again. This allows us to work on the trails but remain socially distanced. Until I have my vaccine I am going to act like I am in lock down. The USA just isn’t getting this thing under control without a vaccine.

That’s my short list so far. I am sure things will change and I will add to this. How about you? What are your plans for 2021?

Dave Winer listed some audiobooks he was recommended.

I am interested in these:

Lets go 2021!

Just do it already!

I have been waiting to do this for some strange reason. Cloudflare does not appear to let you register new domains yet, but you can transfer most existing domain names to them. At $7 and change per domain per year they are by far the cheapest solution. Also their User Interface is the best in the world.

You will need to change the Nameservers on your domains to use Cloudflare’s (CF) before you can transfer the domain registration to them. This process is really easy. Login to your CF account and click on Add Site. It will then look for existing DNS records and help you import them to CF. Then update the Nameservers at your current domain registrar.

Once you have updated your Nameservers to us CF you can go to the Domain Transfer section of CF and your domains will appear. You can then select which ones to transfer and pay to get it done. You will want to make sure the domain is unlocked at the existing registrar. You also want to cancel and remove any Privacy feature at the existing registrar.

Then CF will ask for an authorization code from the existing registrar. You can either get this on the existing registrar’s website or they should have emailed it to you too. Once you add that the transfer is started. It can take 5 to 7 days or you should be able to speed it up by logging into the existing registrar and tell them to do it now.

I recently talked about “Yes, and…” and how it is useful for staying positive and progressing the conversation. What about when the opposite happens and you lose your cool? What can you do to recompose yourself and get back on track?

This morning I had a failure to stay cool moment and am a little embarased about it. Yesterday I contacted Apple Support to cancel the iCloud storage assigned to my Apple ID. Since we have signed up for Apple One that storage is included.

I got a little suspect when the support tech on the phone needed to go check with their superior on how to do this. My head filled with visions of years of photos and documents being lost. Sure enough this morning my phone gave me the warning that I was out of iCloud storage and my settings showed 5GB available.

I was immediately pissed off and angered. I contacted chat support and probably came across as a giant asshole. While they were researching things I opened up my wife’s iPhone to see what the storage settings said there. She is the organizer for the family and signed up for Apple One.

Sure enough under her storage settings was an option to share storage. I clicked on that and almost immediately the 2TB of storage appeared on my phone’s settings. Relieved I let the Apple support person know what had happened. I also apologized to them for my assholiness.

So we hit reset on the keeping our cool counter and will try better again tomorrow.