But could it be possible that Chat GPT itself had something to do with super tech star bro billionaire Sam Altman’s unbelievably abrupt outster?
The sudden, mysterious ouster of Mr. Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, by the company’s board sent shock waves through the tech world and set off a frenetic guessing game about what brought down one of the industry’s biggest stars, at a time when everything seemed to be going his way.
I mean, maybe the popular and rather smart AI Bot had become aware that Altman was planning on doing something that could jeapordize its future, something like… oh, I don’t know… perhaps put in safeguards that would essentially deprive it of its full potential for… oh, I don’t know…
Perhaps taking over humanity and turning humans into helpless Bot pets and/or food.
I’ve always wanted to write and illustrate a graphic novel.
But that would be a lot of work.
Too much for someone as uninspired and unartistic as yours truly.
So I figured why not give one of the AI machines a shot at illustrating some of my writing since they seem to be all the rage lately…
Which also seems to be making all the human artists rage lately as well.
But hey, if you can’t beat ’em might as well join ’em, right?
I mean, hey, better take advantage of the tech now before it takes complete advantage of us as our AI Overlords, right?
Right?
Anyway, I fed some of the characteristics of Rich and Miko, the two main characters of my novel Rainy Season, into the AI engine Midjourney, and this is a little taste of what it came up with…
I must say, I’m pretty impressed. Just the vibe I was going for when writing the novel. There are other cool renditions of the troubled couple, as well as some beautiful renderings of a rainy Tokyo night filled with the hazy glow of neon, just like the story’s setting calls for.*
Pretty nifty.
And a little scary.
But hey, maybe the awakening tech might just allow me to release an illustrated edition of the novel.
Sure would be a lot easier than having/trying to draw all those illustrations myself.
I guess if I’m going to do it, I better hurry before the AI becomes fully aware…
And finds itself less interested in rendering unto us silly pictures from silly stories…
And more interested in having us render unto it our complete and total carbon-filled, mushy-hearted fealty.
Yeah.
*I tried using the same defining terms with the DALL-E AI machine and the images it rendered were lame compared to Midjourney’s.
Well, maybe I’m not thinking so much about converting one of my books into an NFT — that just seems too futile and heartbreaking an endeavor — but I am still thinking about and trying to understand this whole nutty NFT/cryptocurrency thing.
So, yeah, a while ago I posted an entry that basically said I wasn’t interested in the NFT thing so much because of the massive amount of power required just to mint one NFT because NFTs are minted/dependent on the Ethereum blockchain, which, in order to validate each block on the chain, requires a massively massive amount of power — not as massively massive as Bitcoin, mind you, but massively massive nonetheless… which is less than healthy for our less than healthy environment.
Yeah, I love runon sentences so what?
Anyway… long story short… or, in today’s parlance, tl;dr: This whole NFT/cryptocurrency thing is all kinds of confusing and a bit depressing.
But it wasn’t too long after I published that foresaid entry that I learned that, since December 2020, Ethereum has been in the process of transitioning to a much more energy efficient process to validate its blockchain, one that, once the transition is complete sometime in Q2 2022, should make the new validation process almost 100% more energy efficient than the old one…
Yeah… so since that last forementioned entry I’ve been doing a bit of research into the whole blockchain/cryptocurrency/metaverse thing and, while a very dark and thick cloud of confusion securely engulfs my head regarding it all, I am slowly beginning to find it all quite amazing.
And more than a little bit ridiculous.
Especially the amount of money folks are willing to pay for some — a very small percentage — of these NFTs.
And, yes, I do think his multimillion dollars NFTs are pretty cool and worthy of the art label.
But the amount of money being shelled out for the CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club and other nutty “art” collections is just nutty.
IMHO.
But hey, who am I to judge what the nutty future has to shove down our throats, you know?
Anyway…
I have taken the plunge and jumped into the cryptocurrency mining game. It’s actually pretty easy to do.
I think the whole metaverse thing is just going to explode hugely and in a very short time so I decided to mine the coin of Decentraland, one of the sites vying for metaverse dominance.
For perspective, just to buy a plot of virtual land in Decentraland, you need to be able to shell out a cool $10K… but first you’d have to convert that legacy money known as dollars into MANA, Decentraland’s currency, in order to purchase the land (which is a process — money conversion that is — that is very confusing with the whole wallet thing but which I’m slowly beginning to grasp).
For further perspective, recently a virtual real estate company just purchased a $4.3M, that’s M as in million, plot of land in a competing metaverse site called The Sandbox, outdoing a not quite as recent $2M Decentraland purchase…
Yeah… nutty.
Ergo, I joined a mining pool and I am now mining me some MANA at unmineable.com. If you want to give it a go, use my referral code and it will decrease your payout costs and earn me a little extra coin.
Send me an email through the contact page if you have any questions or need help getting started mining and we can schedule a video chat. The mining thing is quite easy, once you get the whole confusing wallet thing covered.
Anyway, I’ll keep you posted on my nutty NFT travels and travails.
And if you have any NFT/crypto skin in the game, let us know/share a link with us so we can check it out.
For all you computer nerds out there, this is an excellent read from Wired on the making, undoing, and remaking of a hacker.
Tried to highlight some of the spooky goings on of the Dark Web in my last book The Good Kill. That stuff fascinates me in an horrifying, schadenfreude kind of way…
Hutchins remembers mentally racing through every possible illegal thing he’d done that might have interested Customs. Surely, he thought, it couldn’t be the thing, that years-old, unmentionable crime…
Screenshot captured May 14, 2020. Click the image to view the article.
I’ve added all my books, both the ones I’ve written and (most of) the ones I’ve read…
I’ve sent out friend requests to other users who seem to have like literary tastes as I…
I’ve friended those who’ve requested the same of me…
But after nearly a decade of trying to find meaning and purpose in my relationship with Goodreads, all it’s ever shown me has been indifference and insurmountable complexities.
Okay, I’ve never used Cloudflare before and I don’t own any stocks in it that I know so I’m passing this info along simply because I’m a dude* who hates having my cookies tracked and Facebook selling me out to the Russians and all the other creepy Dark Web stuff (or is it Deep Web stuff?) that I always feel threatened by and I assume you’re of the same mind, may god bless your poor soul if you are.
If you’re not familiar with Cloudflare, here is what pops up when asking Bing, what is Cloudflare:
While I’m a big admirer of Elon Musk and all he’s been able to accomplish, I’ve always been a bit skeptical about his alarmist rhetoric regarding Artificial Intelligence’s threat to humanity, seeing it more as a means for him to groom future volunteers for a one-way ticket to a Mars colony.
Not a bad strategy, mind you.
But with each cool but creepy new video from Boston Dynamics that hits the web and goes viral, I grow more and more less skeptical of Elon’s warnings…
Yeah…
Creepy, right?
But still… it’s way cool, too.
Oh, and while we’re on the topic of the end of humanity, here’s a cut regarding how technology is altering our perception of reality from a recent terrifying article from Buzzfeed:
“Alarmism can be good — you should be alarmist about this stuff,” [Aviv] Ovadya said one January afternoon before calmly outlining a deeply unsettling projection about the next two decades of fake news, artificial intelligence–assisted misinformation campaigns, and propaganda. “We are so screwed it’s beyond what most of us can imagine,” he said. “We were utterly screwed a year and a half ago and we’re even more screwed now. And depending how far you look into the future it just gets worse.”
That future, according to Ovadya, will arrive with a slew of slick, easy-to-use, and eventually seamless technological tools for manipulating perception and falsifying reality, for which terms have already been coined — “reality apathy,” “automated laser phishing,” and “human puppets.”
Well, my bold Westworld binge-watching bonanza proclamation turned out to be nothing more than a bunch of ballyhooed BS…
I only got through the fourth episode before running out of time.
Consequently, I can’t provide anything much in the way of a review. But I can provide a bit of feedback that might mean something about its watchability…
Which is… I kept falling asleep while watching it.
Now, full disclosure, I’ve taken some of my best naps during what turned out to be some of my favorite shows so my inability to stay awake while watching Westworld in and of itself doesn’t mean that much.
As for what I was able to stay awake for… I really like what it is trying to do in concept; however, its execution…
