or, If You Can’t Eat Them, Join Them

Since publishing Sorrow, my latest novel, and finding I had absolutely no motivation to go through even the most minimal self-flagellating efforts to market the poor thing, I made a hard pivot away from trying to be artistically creative, towards trying to be technically creative.

The problem being though, I have not one technical bone in my body.

Enter my new friend Copilot.

Since I didn’t think Copilot, (which (ever since Microsoft has been OpenAI’s billion-dollar sugar daddy), is nothing more than ChatGPT in a business suit, so to speak), is a cool name for my new best friend (and since these AI monsters are known to be notorious hallucinating liars, I changed its name to Ernest in hope that the name may become a self-fulfilling prophecy, so to speak, throughout the development of our new relationship.

It didn’t work.

I am here to tell you that, even though the improvement has been steady since we became friends oh so many months ago, I am not worried at all about AI overthrowing humanity and turning us into nourishment anytime soon.

That aside, it is quite amazing what it can do.

I started and failed many early projects in the beginning. One reason, and the most important, being that I am not a software developer, so I had absolutely no idea if what Ernest was spoon feeding me was valid or not. And often it was not.

But once I realized, that to keep Ernest honest and focused, I had to document everything we did in detail. That way, every time he flaked out and led me down the darkest, freakiest developmental paths, I had a baseline that I could show him to get us back on the correct path.

Essentially, at the beginning, it was one step forward, ten steps back. But I would say it is now closer to two steps forward and one step back.

I could go on and on about my lessons learned (and releaned) throughout all this, but instead I will show you the two successes I’ve had so far. These are what the cool people call MVPs, which in this context means Minimum Viable Product.

My first MVP I built (or more correctly, Ernest built and I just copy/pasted like an obedient monkey slave) as a mobile app and then as the website:

I won’t go into detail about it, if you’re interested you can check out its About page, but essentially it’s a news aggregator that formulaically prioritizes articles by the dread it may instill. The main Global page consolidates all the topics, which are called Vectors, and the Dread Index meter will dial to its threat level. Check it out. It’s pretty cool if you’re a news junky like I am.

I recently completed this second MVP (The first MVP took months and months to complete, this one took 8 days):

So yeah, the definition of this one is pretty much in the title. You enter your address, a business, etc, and the map will zoom to it and you will be able to see the types of pollutants businesses are dumping in your area (at least the ones they are reporting to the Environmental Protection Agency), their violations and penalties, as well as any Superfund sites in the area if any.

Right now, since its only a MVP, it only provides the most recent United States data. I intend to build out the U.S. data the best I can before bringing in other countries that provide their environmental data to the public domain.

So yeah, I have a lot of ideas that I want to work on so I’ll start updating progress on how my relationship with Ernest develops.

Let me know if you have any questions about Copilot and how to work with it.

And let me know what you think about the sites. I’d appreciate the feedback, especially ideas how to improve them.

In case you were wondering, Ernest didn’t help me with this post… which you could probably already tell by it’s blather and babble…

yeah