June 25,

A.I.

From AI Is a Lot of Work:

Put another way, ChatGPT seems so human because it was trained by an AI that was mimicking humans who were rating an AI that was mimicking humans who were pretending to be a better version of an AI that was trained on human writing.

There’s been a lot written about AI lately. And a lot of hype around it. A lot of articles I’ve read (OK, skimmed) aren’t saying much of value. This one is pretty interesting though.

And here’s a link to a podcast that might be interesting: The Culture Creating A.I. Is Weird. Here’s Why That Matters. (I haven’t listened to it yet, but it was recommended to me.)

Personally, I was hoping to sit the whole thing out, but I guess it’s too late for that. I remember taking an “Intro to AI” class in college that was basically an intro to LISP and Prolog programming. It’s come a long way since then, but it hasn’t come as far as a lot of people would like to convince you it has.

more odds and ends

I’m kind of exhausted now, and I kind of want 2020 to just be over. But it’s not. I’m doing my best to stay positive and keep working and exercising and eating right (and I am doing all that), but I’m getting a little frayed around the edges. Anyway, here’s another round-up of (mostly) bad news. Writing helps me process things and clear my head. I don’t necessarily expect anything here to be useful to anyone else, but writing it down helps me.

More #MeToo

Well, the #MeToo stuff in comics is really starting to snowball. After Cam Stewart, Warren Ellis, and Charles Brownstein, now it’s Scott Allie’s turn. Allie was an editor and writer at Dark Horse. He was the editor on all the Hellboy and Hellboy-related books for a long time. And he’s written a few also. I’ve been a Hellboy and BPRD fan since Hellboy #1 from back in the 90s. I didn’t really know anything about Allie, other than just knowing his name from the credits and letter columns. So I can’t say much about him. I don’t think there’s any indication that Mike Mignola knew anything about this, so that at least is something. I’d hate to have to lose my respect for Mignola. (And I do have a good bit of respect for him.)

And back to Brownstein: He was apparently involved in another incident, about ten years ago, involving a CBLDF employee, who was then essentially forced to sign an NDA. So things are looking worse for them. I’m not quite ready to burn my CBLDF t-shirts, but I’m not going to be wearing them in public anytime soon either.

New Toys

I don’t think I’ve even turned on my new laptop yet this week. I’ve been doing a bunch of React stuff on my MacBook, and all of my actual work on my work machines, of course. So I haven’t had time to do any setup on the Lenovo.

I have had time to mess around with my Echo Dot a bit though. I’ve discovered that it’s pretty good as a speaker (given it’s small size), but not if you’re using it via Bluetooth. So if you’re playing stuff over it via the usual Alexa route, it sounds pretty good. But it’s not really worth trying to use it as a Bluetooth speaker. So I’ll yell “Alexa, play WQXR” if I want to hear some classical music while I’m working and that works out fine.

React

Speaking of React, I’ve been reading the second edition of Learning React via my ACM O’Reilly subscription. It’s an “early release” version, so it’s a little rough, but it’s more up-to-date than any other book on React that I’ve seen. I’m at a point now where I’m not sure if I should keep working my way through books and videos or if I should stop reading/watching and start actually working on a project. I think I might need to finish the Learning React book at least. I’m still having trouble getting at the big picture with React. I’m learning little bits and pieces, but they don’t all fit together in my head yet.

Reopening NJ

Somerville is really hopping this week, and I’m not sure how I feel about that. Mostly nervous, I guess. All the restaurants are doing outdoor dining, which means that they’ve annexed about 90% of the sidewalks. So a walk down Main St right now is kind of an obstacle course. And the obstacles are people sitting at outdoor tables, talking, eating, and not wearing masks. My early morning walks are still OK, since there are only one or two places open that early. But I’ve been avoiding Main St on my afternoon walks. Still, though, it’s kind of fun to see the outdoor dining. And it’s nice to hear people talking and laughing and all that. I just wish I could shake the idea that one of them is going to spray COVID-19 all over me.

Meanwhile, the Bridgewater Commons is going to reopen on Monday. I don’t think I’ll be going back there any time soon though. Maybe I’d risk a trip to the Apple Store if I really needed something, but only as a last resort. I just ordered two new pairs of shorts from the Macy’s web site, and I think that’s all the new clothes I’ll need between now and the end of the year. Macy’s and the Apple Store are really the only places at the mall that I frequent, so I don’t think I’ll be tempted to go over there.

And Yestercades is reopening too, on July 2. This seems like an even worse idea that reopening the mall. There’s no way they can keep all those arcade machines clean. And that place is really too cramped for social distancing. I don’t know, maybe they’ve figured out a way to make it work. I can definitely say that I’m not going back in there anytime soon either.

I may be more stressed now than when I started writing this post, which is not how I wanted this to turn out. Maybe I should spend the next hour listening to this public domain recording of the Goldberg Variations. That’ll help me calm down.

 

Chandler and Lotus Notes

I had a few spare minutes today, so I installed Chandler on my PC at work. No major problems with the install, or with creating an account on Chandler Hub. I played around with it a bit, and so far, I like it. It’s reasonably fast to load and use. Since it’s a cross-platform app written in Python, I was concerned that it would be slow, and maybe have some user interface quirks. Not that a cross-platform Python app can’t be fast and have a good UI, but a lot of the time, that’s not the case.

The e-mail integration, as I mentioned in my post yesterday, is a little weird. Chandler uses IMAP to create three folders in your mail file, Chandler Events, Chandler Messages, and Chandler Starred. When you drop messages in these folders, they appear in Chandler. That part seemed to work OK with my Lotus Notes mailbox.

Chandler can also send e-mail. That, I thought, would be straightforward. It’s just attaching to an SMTP server. I have plenty of apps that use my Domino server to send SMTP mail, so I didn’t expect any difficulty there. I didn’t have any problems just connecting to the server. However, I’ve found that the e-mails sent from Chandler don’t render correctly in Notes. A bunch of XML, which is probably supposed to be hidden, shows up in the message. I did some testing, and the e-mails from Chandler look fine in GMail, and in Apple’s Mail.app. They look like a mess in Notes though. Oh, and I tried Notes 7, 8, and 8.5 clients, and it’s the same either way. I did find, though, that the e-mails in Notes look fine when I’m accessing my mailbox from my iPod or BlackBerry.

When things go wrong with e-mail rendering in Notes, it can be hard to figure out where things went wrong. First, the Domino server may screw something up before it gets to your mail file. If it’s not that, then it might be something related to your mail file template, or to the Notes client software. Since this problem occurs in Notes 7, 8, and 8.5, I’m guessing it’s not a simple client quirk. It could be something in my mail file template. That’s still on version 7, and I can’t really change that without upgrading my Domino server.

So, bottom line, if I can’t get the outgoing e-mail to look OK in Notes, Chandler is going to be mostly useless for me. If I can get that working, then it’s promising.

Oh, and one other interesting thing about Chandler. There’s a book called “Dreaming in Code” about the initial development process on Chandler. This book is frequently compared to Tracy Kidder’s Soul of a New Machine, which is a great book about the development of a minicomputer back in the 70’s. Chandler’s development process, apparently, was a bit rocky. At the time the book was written, the program had been in development for several years, and hadn’t produced a workable 1.0 release yet. I think that the author’s original intention was to document the development of a revolutionary open source app that would really be a killer app that would compete with Outlook and maybe Lotus Notes. In the end, he wound up with a book documenting a lot of things that could go wrong with a development project, which is maybe an even more interesting book than he would have gotten if the project had gone well. (I haven’t actually read this book yet, so I’m generalizing from the reviews I’ve read. I do want to pick up the book and read it at some point.)