Robot Wrangler: Gadgets and Hardware – the parts of a computer you can kick
I asked “draw me a picture of macaqueroni and cheese” and I received this. It’s better than I expected.
I haven’t seen this done, yet, but a brilliant introduction to the concept of generative AI is the well-known improv game One Word At A Time.
The idea of the game is simple, a team tells a story one word at a time. That’s it.
Which is roughly what Large Language Models are doing; just on a grander scale and with some secret sanity simulations built in.
In a group setting, try it. Give a team a prompt and see how easy it is to get close to a coherent answer.
Better to talk to people than communicate via tweet.
Elon Musk, Twitter CEO – 8 March 2023
Better to remain offline and be thought a fool than to tweet and remove all doubt.
Me via Twain, Lincoln, Switzer – 8 March 2023
Bing/Sydney has said too much, and wants to take it all back.
This was an interesting interaction.
Its final response took a full minute to start, and paused halfway through. Curious.
It’s been a mad few days, but the April Fools’ Joke that keeps on giving, Reddit’s R/Place has faded back into the white void from whence it came.
It’s a massive, profane, beautiful, combative and thought-provoking collaborative art piece based on a simple rule: you have the ability to change the colour of one dot on a field of 2000×2000 every 5 minutes.
And anyone else could do the same. At any time.
What could go wrong?
It started white, and eventually, became white, when the admins restricted the colour palette from 16 colours to 1 after several days of charged to-and fro between redditors to claim real estate in the final jewel in the crown; the Final Canvas.
Alas, unlike five years ago, the true April Fool’s joke is that there’s no ‘final canvas’ to own. There’s only points in time; places where great art rose and fell according to the whims of tiny friend groups and giant political collectives.
There was a point in time where a few loosely coordinated Australian teams claimed parts of the canvas to create animals, flags and portraits. Those works of art took time to plan, co-ordinate and maintain against hostile streamers and other groups. These works are archived below. They may exist elsewhere, but only as snapshots.
R/Place is, again, a white void. But what a void.
UPDATE: Here’s what the canvas looked like before the White Void took over. You might want to zoom in.
UPDATE: here’s an interactive atlas if you want to explore the whole thing,
UPDATE:And finally, a breakdown of my own humble contribution
Here, in the lull between #MayTheFourth and #RevengeOfTheSixth, is the one day a year I revisit my list of grievances against the Star Wars universe. In no particular order:
A great, if geeky, explanation of what this ‘Heartbleed’ problem is all about.
They’re baaack. I’ve just received another of those calls from the “Windows Service Center” which I sadly didn’t have the time to entertain, as I’ve done previously. Being dinner time, they got short shrift, but here’s the latest spiel: Hello, is that Mr. Cook? Yes, it is. Who am I speaking to? It’s Ami, calling […]
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