Welcoming the New Year with AI

I asked ChatGPT to write my monthly essay a few weeks ago. I first asked if it could write an essay, and it replied "Please provide me a topic or a prompt and I'll be happy to generate a 400-word essay for you." How about that? It would be happy. My prompt: "Wrapping up the old year and welcoming the new year."

The words poured out of the ChatGPT window quickly and assuredly. Put it this way: it "generated" 400 words faster than it took me to write the title to this post. The essay it generated had this opening sentence: As the final days of the year unfold, it is a natural inclination for individuals to engage in reflection, taking stock of the events that transpired over the past twelve months. (To see the rest, click here.)

This essay request is my latest foray with AI. Earlier in the year an old friend asked if I was up to date on AI, and I sheepishly admitted that I was not. I was in the camp of being against it, though I was curious about its recent hype. In the Summer, after a co-worker expressed great enthusiasm for it, I finally logged into Bard and gave it a spin.

I first used AI for looking up technical details I would normally search with Google. LMGTFY is a meme after all! The AI robots have a very confident presentation in their answers. When I type their code or commands in, most of the time their excerpts work! Of course, when they don't work I have to scroll through Google results or use my brain.

Writing essays and doing drawings was something I knew AI could do. I liked what the AI produced for me, but it ended its essay with this sentence: In conclusion, wrapping up the old year and welcoming the new year is a profound and universal experience that unites humanity in reflection and anticipation.

I didn't like the phrase "In conclusion". Too stuffy! Also, it was a bit repetitive. The more I read the essay, the more I found it sterile, and lacking in personality. I like to think that a regular reader of my writing would be able to tell if I decided to replace my writing with an AI's writing. 

What I liked though were the AI's ideas. I liked its conclusion that the year end is not just a "temporal event", but merely a step in our "continuous journey" of growth. I agree with it. I know that the AI is not thinking these ideas, but one day when it does start thinking and writing on its own, I'd prompt it to give me another draft!

ChatGPT

My (Almost) Self-Driving Car

Earlier in the year, I bought a new car, a Honda CR-V. It has two remarkable features that make me think the self-driving car is perhaps a bit closer than I thought.

The first feature is LKAS, which stands for Lane Keeping Assist System. It uses a windshield mounted camera to identify lane markers, and if the car drifts from the center, it applies some torque to the steering wheel to guide the driver to adjust the car.

When I first tested this on the highway, the steering wheel felt tight and somewhat locked. It took a few moments before I realized that LKAS was keeping the car centered by holding the steering wheel appropriately. When I got more comfortable I actually let go of the steering wheel, but after a few seconds the dashboard flashed a "steering required" warning. Still, the feature lets me keep a lighter touch on the steering wheel, making highway driving more bearable.

The second feature is ACC, which is Adaptive Cruise Control. I've always been a fan of cruise control but in my previous car the cruise control keeps the car at the selected speed. If you needed to slow down because the car ahead of you is going slightly slower, you had to disengage cruise control and drive. With ACC, the Honda modifies the speed based on the car ahead of you. If the car ahead slows down or even stops, the ACC controls the speed such that I never have to touch the brake!

The ACC feature has made long highway trips much more pleasant for me. In heavy traffic, I experienced the car slowing down to a full stop. After sitting idle, the car acts as if it was at a stop light and shuts off the engine. This is the Idle-Stop feature. When the car ahead moves, I tap the accelerator to take it out of Idle-Stop, and the car resumes driving.

Both features let me think that the car was driving me, instead of the other way around. Of course it's not entirely hands-free. I still have to navigate and steer! But both features made me think that self-driving cars are getting closer to reality. These two features coupled with anti-collision give me a strong sense of safety. (I only recommend these systems for highway driving only.)

Each iteration of the "smart car" is about the human helping the computer drive. One day, it'll be fully autonomous!

 

Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead

Since early April I've been playing the video game Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. It's a roguelike, the kind of ASCII-oriented game that first appeared on computers from the mid 1980s. Those original games normally present dragons in dungeons, but Cataclysm dishes out zombies in a post-apocalyptic New England.

You control a character who finds him or herself at the start of this terrible future. You have to avoid zombies and mutated animals. You have to find food and shelter, and then make or find weapons to protect yourself. Your character has to navigate a harsh landscape to the refugee camp, and it's difficult to find working vehicles.

The game has very primitive graphics. I use a setting where small icons represent the objects in the game. Since nothing in drawn, the imagery takes place in my mind. It's been quite a while since a video game captured my imagination like this one.

I'm drawn to the detailed survival scenarios. I'm drawn to zombie combat. But I'm also drawn to the permanent death of my characters. Once they die, that's the end of them, and all that they've learned and achieved. I've had lots of characters die on me the last few weeks. The game fits my mood these days.

Check out my reinvigorated Twitch channel to watch me play the game! And stay safe out in the Cataclysm.

Self-Driving Cars

Futurists have been ushering in the era of the self-driving car, but I was glad to see a recent article proposing more caution. A recent fatality involving a self-driving car underscores this. The emergency backup driver in that fatality was not paying attention to the road. Why would they? After all, the car was driving.

Two years ago I started teaching my daughter to drive. At first a lot of what I was showing her was checklist and task oriented. As we started driving I tried to demonstrate continual awareness and anticipation. It was a constant stream of me saying "look out for this", "watch that", and "this person is signalling." Driving is continually reacting and making decisions.

Trying to replicate what the brain is doing while driving is going to be quite the feat in artificial intelligence. Lots of driving involves intuition and, in some cases, improvisation. I couldn't even imagine the computer science behind how you'd do this, though I suspect machine learning is a part of it.

A co-worker said he cannot wait for the age of the self-driving car to arrive. He thinks it'll be the end of distracted drivers. Machines don't get distracted. Despite laws, people still peek and peck at their mobile devices before, during and after traffic lights.

I like the baby steps that the self-driving car is taking, namely starting with smaller vehicles on controlled roads. Let's get collision avoidance figured out, then the computer will at least hold their own on real streets with real self-driving drivers.

Beating an Addictive Game

In July I started playing "Can You Get to Twenty" on my iPhone. It's a pairs matching game that is very simple to understand, and you can play it in a web browser here:

http://twenty.frenchguys.net/

The game has a gentle start as you go from matching 1 tile to 10 tiles, but once you reach 10, the tiles are linked, and this can only be described as diabolical. The game increases its speed remorselessly, and I found myself bug-eyed watching all the tiles for matches. Once you start matching 15 tiles and beyond, it's haywire.

A full game from 1 to 20 would take about 10 minutes, and each time I played my body and brain would go from a relaxed to furious and frantic. I loved the sensation, however, and each time the game finished, I immediately pressed play to try again.

Was I ever able to reach 20? Yes, and I tweeted about it! But the game doesn't end at the glorious final match. The game instead continues, and once again you dive into a delicious hyper-active state.

I knew I had issues when I began to play the game immediately after dinner. No reading, no computing, no writing. Just this video game. It does allow you to start at the higher levels, so I'd start up at 15. Immediately, I'd be thrown into the hellfire of the final levels, but it was exactly what I was craving.

After a session of playing the game, my heart would be racing. It was hard to reset myself. I didn't like how long it took before I could fully unwind myself from the energy that the game generated. I didn't like how the answer to unwinding was often to play the game some more.

One night after reaching 20, and not sure whether I should start another game, I decided instead to delete it. I was feeling addicted to the game, and I didn't want to lose any more control. I did make sure to buy the in-game purchases, to reward the designers. They definitely created an addictive game, though just a bit too addictive for me.

Cracked iPod

Last month, I cracked the glass on my iPod.

For all the vaunted stories I've read about iPod's Gorilla Glass, the glass does crack if it falls from height. The glass can crunch up against a set of keys without a scratch, but it doesn't necessarily withstand a fall from your coat pocket.

I thought I could live with it. There was more than enough smooth glass for me to read and compose e-mails and tweets, but the back-breaker was playing Candy Crush. If I wanted to preserve my finger tips, I needed to get this glass replaced.

I've repaired electronics before, so I looked into replacing the glass myself. I thought it would just be a "do-it-yourself" swap. I couldn't have been more wrong. The repair of a 5th generation iPod "display assembly" has a very exacting procedure requiring specialized tools, and a surgeon's touch.

My wife helped me find Boston iPhone Repair in Harvard Square. The snug room filled with various iPods and iPhones in clamps gave me some assurance, but the second they realized my device was a 5th generation, they said "take it to Apple. It's too expensive for us to repair!"

With some fits and starts and help from my co-workers, I arranged my first ever appointment at Apple's Genius Bar in Burlington. When I arrived the technician looked at the cracked glass, then asked if I backed up my device. He said for this kind of damage, the usual route is replacement. It would cost me $149. I gave him my credit card in agreement.

The Apple employee had me erase my cracked iPod, then retrieved my replacement device. I was slightly disappointed that it wasn't in a glass box. Instead it was wrapped in some folded cellophane. I was even more disappointed that it didn't have any kind of charge, so I could't play with it in the store. But these were fleeting feelings.

At home I charged it up, then I summoned my old device from the cloud. When the future arrives and we can transport our consciousness into other bodies, it will look like an iPod restoring itself from the cloud. In an hour I had nearly everything restored, including my Candy Crush (level 55).

The iPod I had before this was from 2008, so I can only hope I can keep this replacement in good working condition for another five years.

A Year of Mining

I spent most of this year enthralled by a little game called Minecraft.

I downloaded this game just after New Years Day 2012, and ever since then I have been constantly engaged and delighted by it.

When you first play Minecraft, you find yourself in a natural area (blue sky, green grass, trees, water). Your character can break blocks of wood, and dig up blocks of dirt. You soon realize that blocks can be collected. You soon realize that these blocks can be built into other things, which in turn can be used to build yet more things. Finally, you find that night time is fast approaching, and you must seek some shelter. If you are up and about at night, a monster may come to attack you. Or not.

In Minecraft, you can turn off the monsters from appearing. You can, in fact, enter a "creative" mode where you can call up any particular block that you want, and with this capability you can build practically anything. (The blocks in Minecraft are like Lego blocks, and unsurprisingly Minecraft and Lego are building off that similarity.)

There's only one "rule" in Minecraft: you can only sleep at night. Other than that, you can do practically anything that you want. You can run a large farm, you can grow chickens, you can build a boat and travel the ocean, or you can climb the highest mountain, or explore the deepest mine. You can make maps, write in books, make a large railway or dig for gold.

I enjoy exploring Minecraft's seemingly endless world. Unlike most video games that have pre-defined maps or territories, Minecraft generates its world as you enter them. When your character reaches an area you haven't visited yet, the game produces a new territory for you to explore. It can be a desert, a wintry forest, or a vast plains area. It can be rainy, or snowy.

It's a game that caters to your imagination. I love walking around in Minecraft, getting lost, and building small areas so that I can sleep at night. I pretend I'm "the last person on Earth", except I often play with my daughter on our local server. I love exploring abandoned mine shafts, and climbing mountains. I pretend I'm an intrepid explorer. There's no time limit, so I don't have to rush anything.

Most video games are goal-oriented, but in Minecraft, the only goals are those that you set for yourself. Because of this, everyone's attachment to the game becomes deeply personal. Not everyone plays it the same way, and as a result the game becomes a reflection of you instead of a reflection of its creator. Think of Minecraft like a musical instrument: everyone knows the notes, but everyone plays them differently.

To say that it's my favorite video game is an understatement: it's one of the best things in my life.

Rules I Follow for Social Media

No complaining. The book How to Win Friends and Influence People contains the number one principle for dealing with people: "Never criticize, condemn, or complain." This is an incredibly hard principle to follow in real life, but online, I try to stay by it. If I find myself starting to compose some kind of whiny rant, I step away. Everyone has complaints, so I'll spare you my daily aches and whines.

No family posts. I try not to write posts (or Tweets or Facebook statuses) about my wife and daughter. Yes, I blogged about Mia's first year, yes, I regularly posted pictures of her until kindergarten, and yes, Jenn and Mia occasionally appear in my Tweets, but you won't see posts that start with "My daughter today did this", or "My wife said that." They can post their own stories. They have their own voices.

No privacy settings. I don't expect any. My Facebook profile is open. My Twitter is open. The fine-grain "privacy" settings offered by Facebook is admirable, but I don't want to be in the business of managing my access, locking down my pictures, or separating friends and strangers and acquaintances. If I want to write 'privately', I use a diary.

No living online. The purpose of social media is to share your life, not to live your life. To that extent, I live my life out here, where there's air and water. I don't worry or apologize that my status is not accurate, or that "I haven't posted in a while." The online Rick exists so that people looking can find the real-life Rick.

No audience but me. I write for myself. I tweet to amuse myself (more specifically, my 'future self'). When I put something out there, I try to come back to the question "Would I want to read this in the future?" Today, the answer is yes.

AYT

A few months ago, I received my first text message spam. I thought somehow my wife learned how to text. But instead it was spam, so I deleted it. Over the next few days, the spam began to increase in frequency. I learned to mass delete the text messages on my cell phone, after quickly scanning their obvious subject lines. As the weeks went by, I was doing this more and more, until Jenn asked "what's up with your cell phone bill?" Sure enough, I was getting billed for each of these text messages. Every one of these messages took 15 cents out of my pocket, and after thirty or forty a week, it was beginning to add up. After trolling through Google, I found two sites ([1] [2]) that showed me how to turn off the ability to receive text messages. I did it, and now I'm spam-free. I'm sure when I get another phone, or my daughter discovers texting, I'll be inclined to turn this back on, but until then, just send me e-mail.

Essential Software

My wife and I just bought a new computer from Dell. It took Jenn only minutes before she asked "Where's WinZip?" Here are the programs that I downloaded so that the new computer could be as helpful as the old one.

• WinZip
  
  How in the world is this not even installed with this new PC? My registration key for WinZip dates back to 1997!
  
  
• PuTTY
  
  I can't compute without a good terminal client. A terminal client allows me to access my UNIX machines, where I do nearly all of my professional and recreational computing. I have a registration for SecureCRT from VanDyke Software but PuTTY is free and quite fully-featured.
  
  
• Firefox
  
  What? Did you expect me to use Internet Explorer? Firefox is light and safe. It blocks pop ups. It has tabbed browsing. It has a whole bevy of cool plug-ins that make web programming much easier.
  
  
• TightVNC
  
  To access our old computer to migrate files off of it, I just plugged it into our router. Then from my new PC I ran the TightVNC client to access the TightVNC server running on my old PC. This software allowed us to run our old PC without a monitor!
  
  I am still impressed with this technology. When I learned about it a few years ago, I thought it was amazingly cool. Now, it's not only cool, it's useful too.
  

Tuning a Guitar

My daughter Mia received a guitar this weekend. It's a kid's guitar, but it's a fully functioning instrument.

I used to play the guitar when I was little (around fifth, sixth grade). I took guitar lessons, and learned how to play some basic chords. First song I ever learned: Bad Moon Rising (G-D-C). I can also hit the notes for Happy Birthday and the main theme to Star Wars. I still remember how to play these songs even though I haven't owned a guitar in several years.

I got my hands on Mia's guitar in the afternoon and tried some of my songs, but the guitar was sorely out of tune. Mia also enjoys playing with the tuning knobs at the end of the guitar, which wasn't a help.

I visited a web site to relearn the basics of tuning. I eventually found Tuner Tool, a free program that let me hear the correct notes for the guitar. But this wasn't enough. I had a hard time matching the notes played by the tuner to the notes played on Mia's guitar.

After more minutes with Google, I found a better program, by Encore. This tool not only played the correct notes, but using a PC microphone (which I had), it "listened" to the notes the guitar was playing, and pointed out whether it was too sharp or too flat. It's quite amazing seeing the display change as the note played. I was able to tune the guitar in minutes! I recommend this tool (and yes, I'll be buying a license).

Wireless

Last night, I installed a wireless router in my home. Now I can share my broadband Internet connection with my wireless enabled work laptop. Of course, what this really means is that I will be able to do real time IRC chat while watching sports. Go Pistons!

Forgoing Counts

What gives? There are now ads here again? And where did my counter go?

Just so you all know, I've decided to move the site, to yet another location. I haven't done this yet, but I plan to soon. The new location will be ad-free. I've also decided to forgo my web counter. The final report showed this:



Full disclosure: In March 2003, I decided to put the counter on ALL my web pages.

Jonathan Camaya

One day long ago, when I was in high-school, I went over my friend Jonathan Camaya's house. He was almost done refinishing the kitchen cabinets. He was amazingly handy, and he had that craftsman's touch. One year, he built a gazebo in his back yard. I told him once "I'd like to get started with wood working someday." He said "Start with something simple. Make a box."

Jon's advice has been lodged in my head ever since.

How do you start anything new? You have to start small. I can imagine Jon making those small boxes, using wood lying around his basement. I can see him trying out different nails, trying different tools, making small boxes, then small benches, then small lattice work, until eventually he made a small gazebo that for all I know is probably still in parents' back yard.

For the past few months, I've been making lots of small boxes, in my attempt to learn Java, a computer technology that's missing from my resume. Java is very current. There's yards and yards of books about Java in the technical book stores. Where do you start? How do you start? "Start with something simple. Make a box."

With the help of some good books and some freely available tools, I've begun to explore Swing, XML, JDBC (using MySQL), Tomcat, Servlets, JSP, and SOAP. Can I make a gazebo yet? Probably not. But the boxes I'm making are getting bigger, and more intricate. I'm writing a lot of small to medium-sized programs, and learning how they work. I'm becoming more comfortable with the tools and the jargon. It's a good start.

"Start small. Make a box." Thanks, Jon.

Down Entry

I'm down a bit. I had a transaction go "bad" on eBay (I'll write more about this later). I had to leave work "a little later than usual", which always irks me as it disrupts my commuting routine. And to top it all off, I actually wanted to do some work from home but my PC at work seems to be flaking (I connect to my work PC via TightVNC over SSH).

I'm also down because I spoke with a former co-worker this afternoon, and we were reminiscing about our high-tech careers. As we were going over where we were and where we wanted to go, I was sensing that he made some good decisions career-wise and that perhaps I haven't.

It's always important to look up beyond the trees to see what forest you're in. Are you in a good situation? Does it fit in with your values, your vision of yourself? Do you have a vision of yourself? For me, I have values, I have a vision. Today, career-wise, I wonder if I'm in the best situation.

JAlbum

Folks who visited my last picture album probably noticed that I didn't make the HTML pages myself. Instead, I used some shareware called JAlbum. I like this software. It automatically generates the thumbnails, creates the slides, and also creates the navigation between the individual slides. You already have to know HTML, and some basic CSS.

I wrote my own little Perl program to create the web pages over at the Mia Picture Site. But my program never created thumbnails, and my program didn't do the image manipulation (mostly size reduction). I originally wanted to tackle these problems, but I never got around to learning how to use GD, never mind trying to integrate it with my Perl program.

There's a fine line between "doing it yourself" and "building on the work of others." Since I know how to write computer programs, almost every problem that I look at involves me writing a program. We need to organize all these music CDs. "I'll write a program." We need to figure out how many colors to put on this quilt. "I'll write a program." It's the adage "If your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

Well, David Ekholm (the author of JAlbum) used his hammer, and used it very well. I'm glad he's sharing the fruits of labor. I have given up trying to write my own program to make picture albums. The amount of pride I had to swallow was very small. Instead, I'll take pride in the albums themselves.

DNS Woes

According to the Tripod "Alerts" page (off their Help page), the servers that host my BLOG are undergoing an IP address change, which necessitated a DNS change. The exact wording:

The IP addresses of all Tripod servers has changed causing some users who are attempting to access or edit their Tripod sites to see an old version of their site...

This is the exact problem I'm seeing. Whenever I access my book mark for this page, I do not see my latest entries.

Changing a record on the Domain Name Server involves updating a few records, and then letting the change propagate throughout the Internet. Apparently, the propagation can take a long time. Folks on the Tripod message boards (Tripod Club) are complaining about this very behavior.

For those of you reading this at http://members.tripod.com/rick_umali/rickblog/blogger.html, consider yourselves fortunate. Your ISP is properly updated with respect to the new Tripod servers. Some of you are accessing this via http://rick_umali.tripod.com/rickblog/blogger.html. For some reason, this URL allows me to view the correct content.

Either way, the estimated time to have the DNS records propagated is December 3.

Connection Timed Out

For the past few days, I was seeing this message:

001 java.net.ConnectException: Connection timed out

when I tried to publish this BLOG using Blogger to my host (Tripod). For the past two days, my previous entry sat in my "posts" queue. I sent a note to Blogger technical support. I posted a note to Tripod's message boards. Fortunately, after leaving the problem alone for a few hours, I attempted to publish again, and now things are working. The Tripod message boards suggest an issue on the Tripod side. Perhaps. I just hope things are resolved.

umali.com

umali.com is once again up for sale. This time the price has gone down. It's now selling for $299.

When I last wrote about this, the price was $950!

I just put in a bid for the domain ($200). We'll see what happens.

Worm

According to this page, I'm not affected by the latest Internet worm because I'm running Windows 98. For once, having an older system is paying off.