digging in to ChatGPT and similar AI stuff

I’ve successfully been ignoring all the hype around ChatGPT and similar AI stuff all through this year.

I was initially amused by some of the stuff folks were posting to Twitter when ChatGPT and DALL-E and other tools were made publicly available. There was a lot of funny stuff out there, with folks getting oddball results out of the chatbots, and using the image generators to make some really crazy images. Initially, it seemed pretty harmless, but also fairly useless.

Then came the op-eds and think pieces from people worried about the impact that these things could have on the world. Everything from worry about AI causing human extinction, to ChatGPT replacing writers and programmers, to the environmental cost of running all this stuff. A lot of that was overblown, I think.

But recently, something pushed me over the edge and I decided I had to start learning some of this stuff. I’m not even sure what did it, exactly. Either way, I’ve been digging into this stuff, and I thought I’d write up some notes.

First, I’ve been looking at two primary categories of “AI” here: the LLM chatbots, and the image generators. I like playing around with the image generators, but I haven’t found much practical use for them, and they’re not that interesting to me, so I’m going to skip talking about those. I’ll just say that the Bing image creator is pretty fun to play with.

As to the LLM chatbots, I’ve started playing around with ChatGPT and a few others. I registered for a free account with ChatGPT, which gets me access to GPT-3.5.  Upgrading to ChatGPT Plus for $20/month would get me access to GPT-4, which is supposed to be much better. I don’t think I’ll be doing that, but a number of people seem to think it’s worth it.

At work, we have our own chatbot called “Mindspark”, which is powered by Azure OpenAI, which in turn uses GPT-4 and/or GPT-3.5, if I’m understanding it correctly. It’s internal-facing, and at this point, really just an experiment, I think. I’m not sure if there are any long-term plans for it. Anyway, it’s reasonably good, and also one of the only options, from my work computer. For some reason, we block access to ChatGPT’s web interface, so I can’t use that directly at work. (Which is one of the reasons why I probably wouldn’t pay $20/month for ChatGPT Plus. If I was paying for it, I’d want to have access to it at work and not just at home.) I’ve also noticed that we block Perplexity, and I expect some of the other popular tools. (I’m not sure why, though I’d guess it has something to do with distrust of the privacy policies for those tools and worry that proprietary corporate info will get into them and then maybe leak back out?)

I’ve also played around with Poe, which is a tool that gives you access to a bunch of different AI tools, including ChatGPT. They also have a $20/month plan that gets you access to more advanced models, and lets you use it more. I’m not sure how worthwhile that is, vs. using ChatGPT directly. I guess there’s some utility in having access to multiple sources through a single interface. I definitely want to play around with it some more.

And I’ve tried out the new Bing chat. It’s also powered by GPT under the hood, I think. The nice thing about Bing chat is that, unlike the free version of ChatGPT, it combines web search with GPT, so that it can return more recent information than using ChatGPT alone. (And my company doesn’t block Bing chat, so I can use it at work.)

So that’s my brief overview of the front-end interfaces for LLM back-ends that I’ve tried out. I haven’t found one that is noticeably better than the others, at this point, but I haven’t done much with them yet.

I should also mention that all of these things, for a lot of the use cases I’ve tried, are spectacularly bad at returning correct and/or useful data. In general, I’m not sure if they’re super useful as general research assistants. If you can find an answer to a question with a regular web search or a simple Wikipedia check, that’s way better than asking ChatGPT.

Aside from just playing around with these things, I’ve also been reading some articles and listening to some podcasts. I thought I’d include some podcast links here, for reference.

  • Here’s an episode of the New Yorker Radio Hour from a few months ago, where they did an interview with Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. It’s somewhat interesting, at a high level.
  • Ezra Klein has done a few shows talking about AI and LLMs and stuff. Some of it is pretty interesting to me, but it’s mostly high-level philosophical stuff, and I’m not sure what I think about some of it.
  • On the more practical side, Scott Hanselman did an episode of his podcast recently where he interviewed a guy who wrote a book on “prompt engineering”. That’s the kind of thing that made me roll my eyes, until I started digging into it a bit. I still think the whole prompt engineering thing is a bit overblown, and I don’t want to read a whole book about it, but I’ll admit that some of it is useful, and I have now watched a couple of LinkedIn Learning videos on the subject.
  • Also on the practical side of things, I’ve queued up a few episodes of .NET Rocks related to AI. This one, from August, looks interesting.
  • And there’s a recent episode of RunAs Radio that got into some good no-nonsense explanations for how LLMs work. I think that episode has a better explanation of the tech involved than anything else I’ve read or listened to. (I’m sure there are other good explanations out there, of course, but this is the best one I’ve stumbled across so far.)
  • And, finally, related to .NET Rocks, I see that Carl has a video series called The AI Bot Show that covers this stuff. I guess I’m going to have to watch some of those.

So, in conclusion, I guess I’m doing a little less eye-rolling at this stuff now. I see some utility in it, and I’m getting a better idea of what it’s good for and what it’s not good for.

 

I probably still have COVID

I got sick with COVID two weeks ago. I took the whole week off from work, started Paxlovid, and got better. This week, I worked from home the whole week. I was feeling better Monday through Thursday, but was still testing positive as of Thursday. Then, on Friday, I got sick again. And I’m still feeling sick today. I haven’t taken another test yet, so I’m not sure if it’s a rebound COVID infection, a cold, or something else.

Here’s a good article on the Paxlovid rebound thing. The article says that a rebound usually lasts two or three days, but can last as long as ten. I’m really hoping for the two or three days, so I’ll be better by Monday. I’m not sure I can hack another week of being sick. And I’d kind of like to show my face in the office next week, if I can. (Not that I like being in the office, just that I don’t want people to think I’m slacking off…) I really wish we had, as a society, normalized the idea that erring on the side of caution is fine, and good, and pushing yourself to get back into the office as soon as possible isn’t good for anyone.

My Paxlovid was free, surprisingly. I’d assumed that, with the public health emergency over, there’d at least be a co-pay. But I guess the government program that pays for Paxlovid is still going. I did just see some articles about the coming price hike for Paxlovid though. Yikes. I hope my insurance will cover that, if I ever need it again.

With all the testing I’ve been doing, I almost ran out of COVID tests. I ordered a new batch from the free government program, but they haven’t shown up yet, so I ordered a couple of kits from Amazon. The retail price for a 2-pack seems to be $24, but Amazon had them on sale for about $16. So that’s not too bad, and of course they showed up the next day. (I also checked to see if my insurance would pay for them, but apparently that’s not a thing anymore, since the official “public health emergency” ended.)

Not that I would wish COVID on anyone, but it’s nice to know I’m not the only one getting COVID recently. Stephen Colbert caught it too, and did one show from home, then skipped the rest of the week. So, if he can take some time off, I can too, right?

 

Master Keaton

I’ve been thinking about Master Keaton a bit lately. I noticed that all ten volumes of the manga are listed as being banned in a certain school district in Texas, based on this article. I haven’t actually read the manga, but I’m having trouble figuring out how a manga about an insurance investigator could be problematic. (Well, it’s manga, so I’m sure there’s something…)

I have all the DVDs for the Master Keaton anime. I bought most of them in 2006, but have still only watched the first three. I’m thinking about re-watching those first few, and then going on and finishing the series.

And I poked around a bit today to see if the manga was still in print. It is, but apparently only in paperback and not digitally. As I was looking at that, I noticed that apparently Right Stuf is shutting down and getting merged into the Crunchyroll store. Right Stuf has been around since 1987, and I’ve bought a bunch of stuff from them over the years, but nothing lately. That’s partially because I have too much stuff to watch/read so I shouldn’t buy anything new, and partially because I can usually find what I’m looking for cheaper at Amazon. I always feel a little guilty buying stuff at Amazon instead of a smaller retailer, but I often do it anyway.

Returning to the subject of the Master Keaton manga being “banned,” I just dug into that a bit more by searching for it here, and apparently it had previously been classified as OK for middle school students, but has been reclassified as only for grades 9+. So maybe that’s not so bad. I remember the anime as being fine for all ages, I think, but maybe the manga is a bit more violent. Still, I’m sure most middle school kids in America have seen much worse.

some random links

I’m continuing to feel better today (see previous post), though I’m still not enjoying the “Paxlovid mouth” side-effect. I’m currently masking it with some apple juice.

I spent some time at the computer today, paying some bills, and catching up on some miscellaneous stuff I was neglecting while sick. I thought I’d put together a link post, with a few random things I stumbled over today.

  • The Coronavirus Still Doesn’t Care About Your Feelings – from The Nation. I don’t really have anything to say about this, but thought it was relevant to my current situation.
  • The cult of Obsidian – from Fast Company. I’ve mostly given up on Obsidian, and have decided to remain with Evernote for now. But I still think Obsidian is interesting, and I may return to it at some point. I’m a little interested in maybe picking up David Sparks’ Obsidian Field Guide, now that it’s out, though there wouldn’t be much point in that, if I’m not going to use Obsidian.
  • I just saw the news that JHU in Manhattan has closed, via this interview at The Beat. I’ve been going to JHU since back when it was in A&S Plaza. So that’s got to be back in the early 90s, since it was only called A&S Plaza from 1989-1995 (per Wikipedia). I always liked that store, both before and after Jim Hanley retired. Mind you, I haven’t been there in a while. I can’t really remember the last time I was there. In more recent years, I’ve been more likely to stop by Midtown Comics, mostly just because I’m more likely to pass by there on my way to or from Penn Station.

I’ve skimmed some of the news coming out of NYCC, but there’s not much that caught my eye. I looked at the Harvey winners, and there’s some interesting stuff in there. Having just spent a week at home, sick, you’d think I would have done some comic reading, but nope. I didn’t really have the energy for it earlier in the week. Then, on Wednesday, I decided to start watching Only Murders In The Building, and that kept me out of trouble from Wednesday through Friday. (I watched one season per day.) I should probably talk myself into doing some reading today and tomorrow, but I’m still not sure I have enough energy for it.

I got COVID

I got my COVID and flu shots on Saturday, as planned. On Sunday, I had a fair bit of pain in the arm where I’d gotten the COVID shot. But no other obvious side-effects. Then, on Monday, I woke up with my usual set of cold/flu-like symptoms: headache, slight fever, runny nose, etc. I assumed it was just side-effects of the COVID and/or flu shots.

It was still pretty bad on Tuesday, so I did a tele-medicine thing through CVS. The doctor there told me that, yes, it was probably just side-effects from the vaccines, but that I should do a COVID test. So I did that, and it came back positive. I really should have gone back and done a second call with CVS, but I didn’t. I can’t tell you why, except that I was pretty sick and just wanted to sleep. And I was hoping maybe it was a false positive.

I  was still sick on Thursday, so I did a second COVID test and that came back positive too. This time, I decided to call my regular doctor and see what she said. She wasn’t in the office that day, but her receptionist acted as a go-between, and she prescribed Paxlovid for me. In retrospect, I really should have reported the positive COVID test on Tuesday and gotten started with the Paxlovid then. Better late than never, I guess.

So now it’s Friday, and I’m feeling a little better. I probably could have gone back to work today (remotely of course), but I decided to just take a full week off. Better to get one more day of rest. The Paxlovid has a couple of side-effects. The worst is the metallic taste it leaves in my mouth. It’s quite unpleasant, and it doesn’t go away. (It’s not just the aftertaste of the pills, so you can’t just wash it out.)

So the plan now is to isolate through the weekend and start back at work on Monday, working remotely all week. Our company doesn’t have a firm policy about that, but I’m pretty sure it’s OK for me to do that. I’d like to be in the office for at least one day next week, if I could, since we’re supposed to have a meeting with the guy who (I think) will be my new boss, and it would be good to meet him in person. (My current boss is retiring at the end of the year.) But hopefully I can participate in that meeting via Teams.

Meanwhile, NYCC started yesterday. I guess I’m glad that I didn’t make plans for that, since I would have had to cancel them. I haven’t kept up with any news coming out of the con, since I’ve been pretty out of it, prior to today. This whole thing has made me even more reticent to go out and re-enter the world (as it were). And it’s made me realize that I’ve gotten a bit too lax about masking up. Lately, I’ve been skipping the mask sometimes, in environments where I should probably be wearing one (even though no one else is…).

 

NYCC, football, booster shots, and other stuff

It’s Sunday morning, and I’ve got a bunch of assorted thoughts kicking around in my head, so I’m going to try to write a rambling blog post, and see what shakes out.

NYCC

NYCC is next weekend. I’m not going this year. And I’m not even enthusiastic about watching any panels from home, really. I looked at the schedule of what would be streaming via Popverse, and there’s not much that looks interesting to me. I’m pretty sure that NYCC 2021 was the last time I went into NYC for anything. (Leaving out the time in 2022 when I passed through on my way to Albany.)

It’s also occurred to me that I haven’t really taken a vacation this year, and we’re getting near the end of the year. I’ve used up a fair bit of my PTO time this year on sick days, but I could still take a few days. I should probably do that. I don’t need to have a plan to do anything specific, but it would probably be good for my mental health to check out from work for a bit and go for some long walks or something.

TV and TiVo

I see from my “On This Day” widget that I bought my TiVo eight years ago. I keep thinking about finally getting rid of it and pulling the plug on cable TV entirely, but I’m still hanging on to it. I only get the basic broadcast channels through cable now, but that’s still useful for stuff, including football, news, and a handful of shows.

Meanwhile, I talked myself into signing up for NFL+ yesterday, mostly because it was 50% off, and because I kinda wanted to watch the Jaguars/Bills game from London this morning at 9:30, and it’s only on NFL Network. So now I’ve got subscriptions to both MLB.TV and NFL+. At some point, I’m going to have to cull some of these subscriptions. I’ve got Netflix, Peacock, Paramount+, and the Disney+ bundle, plus Apple TV+ from my Apple One bundle, and Amazon Prime Video.

The Giants are doing pretty bad this year, by the way, and I usually lose interest in football if the Giants aren’t doing well, but I still haven’t given up hope this year just yet.

COVID and flu shots

I got my COVID booster and flu shot yesterday, COVID in the left arm and flu in the right. My right arm is fine today, but the left arm hurts a lot. It was bad enough overnight that I couldn’t put any weight on it, so every time I rolled left, I got a stab of pain. That made for a rough night.

I’ve noticed that all of the “ceremony” around COVID shots is basically gone now. The person who gave me the shots didn’t ask for my vaccination card or ask me to sit around CVS for 15 minutes afterward. And the old CDC V-safe program was shut down earlier this year, so I won’t get all of those fun text messages this time. So I guess we’re in the phase now where we’ll just be getting a yearly flu shot and COVID shot together every year, and it’ll be no big deal. Oh well.

Social media

Like most sane people, I’ve almost entirely given up on Twitter now. I’m mostly using Mastodon and Threads. I’d hoped that most of the people I followed on Twitter would move over to Mastodon, but that didn’t happen. A bunch of the tech folks moved to Mastodon, but most non-tech folks (and news orgs) have moved to Threads instead. That’s not great, since Threads doesn’t have any third-party clients, and will probably eventually have ads and a bunch of other dumb cruft, but it’s good enough for now, I guess.

Right now, I’m listening to Sleepy Hollow on XPN, and Julian Booker, who used to post the playlist to Twitter, is posting it to Threads. So it’s that kinda stuff that’s probably going to wind up on something like Threads rather than Mastodon, and I guess I need to deal with that.

In theory, Threads is eventually going to support ActivityPub, so there will probably be a way to consolidate my Mastodon and Threads browsing into a single third-party client at some point. (Assuming Meta isn’t pulling a Lucy/football thing and lying to us about ActivityPub support…)

Speaking of Lucy/football stuff, here are a couple of fun takes on that from today’s Foxtrot and an older Off The Mark. And, while I’m posting comic strip links, I liked today’s Cul De Sac too!

Quicken Classic

I’ve been using Quicken for a long time, and I’ve been complaining about it for nearly as long. (My earliest Quicken complaint on this blog is likely this one from 2004.) And, once in a while, I get frustrated enough with it that I start looking for alternatives. There were two things that happened recently that have got me interested in that again.

First, they’ve changed the name of the desktop product to Quicken Classic. Here’s a video where their CEO tries to explain that. The name change itself doesn’t really matter to me, but it makes me worry a bit that they’re de-emphasizing the desktop product even more than they already have. Their web product is called Simplifi, and it might be worth thinking about switching to that, but I’m not keen on that idea. I’m pretty sure I’d lose all my history and wouldn’t have nearly the same functionality I have with the desktop app.

The second thing that got me thinking about moving off Quicken again is some continuing issues with the link to my 401(k) account. I’ve searched the web and found a bunch of other people are also having trouble with Fidelity, which is the provider for the 401(k). In my case, the funds got pretty mixed up, so I deleted and re-created the account in Quicken. That got me a bit further, but there was still a weird thing going on where it looked like I had twice as much money in the account as I actually do. I might have fixed that now, but I won’t really know for sure until I sync the account again.

When I have trouble with Quicken, I start getting “the grass is greener on the other side” thoughts, but then if I stop myself, I realize that Quicken is still the biggest player out there, so if Quicken is having issues with Fidelity, then smaller players like Banktivity and MoneyDance probably are too.

Maybe it’s time to give up on this stuff entirely and just switch to keeping a summary spreadsheet, where I update some high-level numbers once a month.

Jury duty and a rough week

This has turned out to be one of those weeks where I feel like I’ve barely made it through in one piece. OK, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it was still kinda rough. I had jury duty this week. I thought that might be kinda fun and interesting, but now I’m regretting not just finding a way to dodge it. In and of itself, it was perfectly fine, but I picked up a cold or something there, and I’m still getting over it.

I thought it might be fun to write up a few notes on how jury duty worked out. The process was kind of interesting. It started with a Zoom orientation session last Friday. That lasted about two hours. There were about 300 people in the session. It mostly consisted of watching this video. So that wasn’t too bad, though there’s no reason why they couldn’t have just emailed us a link to the video and a few notes and skipped the whole Zoom thing.

Then, I had to show up at the courthouse on Monday, at 8 AM. That’s not a big deal for me, since I live just a few blocks from the courthouse. And I was actually looking forward to seeing the inside of that building, since I’ve lived here for so long and never had a reason to go inside.

The jury assembly room is inside an old church that was built in 1898. It’s pretty cool. We spent an hour or two sitting around in that room. They showed us another video there, this time on bias. I think that’s something they started doing about a year ago. And I think there were about 75 people called to come in that day. (And, of course, I can’t stop wondering why they showed us one video over Zoom and the other video in person. Why not both on Zoom? Or both in-person? Or just email us the links and let us watch at home?)

Some time between 9 and 10, they starting taking people up to the courtroom, which was on the fifth floor of the courthouse. (This is the newer, modern, courthouse, and not the nifty historic courthouse that was built in 1907. So I still haven’t been inside that building.) They took us up in groups of ten, and I think they took up maybe 40 or 50 of us, total.

In the courtroom, they had us fill out a questionnaire while they went through some preliminaries. I was a bit surprised to find out that this was a murder trial. I had assumed it would just be something fairly ordinary, like a civil suit, or a low-level criminal thing.

Then, they picked 14 people to move into the jury box. And they questioned them one by one about any “yes” answers on their questionnaire, which would all be reasons why they might not be able to serve on the jury, or things that might prevent them from being impartial. There were some conversational questions too, like “what do you like to watch on TV?” and “where do you get your news?”. It was interesting to sit through that, and listen to what everyone said.

The judge dismissed a number of people fairly quickly. Those were mostly folks with prior commitments, or where being away from work would cause a hardship for them. And there were a few folks who knew some of the police officers involved, and one who knew the prosecutor personally. Then, a bunch of people were dismissed by the prosecutor and the defense lawyer. I guess they don’t have to state their reasons aloud for those, but I think they’re supposed to have reasons for most of them. I’ll admit to wondering about why some of them were dismissed. A few were kind of obvious, but most weren’t, to me. The whole process of going through the questions, dismissing people, bringing more people up, questioning them, dismissing some of them, and then bringing up more people took quite a while. It was long enough that we had to take a lunch break and come back. They finally had a full jury at 2:30 PM, and dismissed the rest of us.

Overall, initially, I was glad I got called in, and glad I got called up to the courtroom to see how the process worked. It was all pretty interesting, and everyone involved was professional and courteous.

Later, though, I kind of wish I’d found a way out of it. I got pretty sick on Wednesday, and it’s obvious that I must have picked it up at the courthouse on Monday. I’m a bit mad at myself for that, since I didn’t wear a mask. I’d brought one with me, and intended on putting it on at some point, but nobody else was wearing one, and I got lulled into a false sense of security, I guess. So I had to use up two sick days this week, on Wednesday and Thursday. I worked from home yesterday, and was feeling a bit better, but I’m still not back to 100%. I guess this is only a cold, since I took two COVID tests and they both came back negative, so that’s good.

So now, I’ve missed a half a day of work last Friday, most of the day Monday, and all day Wednesday and Thursday. And I wasn’t really 100% on Friday, and didn’t get as much done as I’d hoped to. Now I’m hoping I can shake the remnants of this cold over the weekend and be ready to work a full week next week. It’s a little annoying to me how easily I can get thrown off track by something like this, but I guess it’s part of getting older. And I guess I should appreciate that I have some flexibility at work, with regard to time off and working from home. But I don’t want to push things too far there. Oh well. I guess this weekend will be spend mostly watching TV and napping.

Ghost in the Shell

I was looking for something to watch yesterday afternoon, and decided the finally watch the Ghost in the Shell 4K Blu-ray that I bought in 2020. I enjoyed it a lot. I hadn’t seen the original Ghost in the Shell movie in quite some time. And there’s a nice audio commentary on there too, with four folks who had a lot of interesting things to say about the movie.

Sometimes, it seems like I can’t watch or read anything without it pushing me to either buy something else or at least add something to my wishlist. In this case, it motivated me to buy the Blu-ray set for Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, which was only $12 on Amazon. And to buy a digital copy of Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence from Amazon, which was only $4.

I know I’ve seen Innocence before, but I can’t remember when or how. I dug around in my piles of DVDs and Blu-rays, and couldn’t find a copy of it. So maybe I saw it in a theater. I kinda remember liking it, so I wanted to watch it again.

And I really liked SAC when I first watched it, probably on Cartoon Network. I have a couple of DVDs of the second season of that show, and one volume of the first season, but I never bothered buying the box sets or the rest of the DVDs.

Speaking of SAC, I watched the first season of SAC_2045 on Netflix in 2021. The second season is out now, so I want to watch that too. (I had mixed feelings about the first season, but it was good enough that I want to watch the second.)

So overall, watching one movie yesterday has moved me to buy a new Blu-Ray set, a new digital movie, and add a season of a TV show to my Netflix watch list.