Behold, gentle readers, the apex of procrastination. Today, I engineered a conversation between two Artificial Intelligence (AI) Large Language Models (LLMs). What follows is a transcript between me, ChatGPT-4, and Google Gemini. The topic that unfolded was the current war in Ukraine…
On Aug 1, 2020, I wrote a Facebook post that went a little bit viral. Remember, this was the 5th or 6th month of the acknowledged COVID pandemic, and still four months away from an authorized vaccine, and almost a year away from widespread vaccination.
I wanted to revisit this post, as it listed 33 thoughts about the pandemic, which I had just expressed as the guest speaker on a popular video podcast called, “Dave’s Digital Cafe.”
I’m curious about whether readers think any of this is relevant today. Back then, it’s clear I was concerned about IP issues constraining vaccine development, and the zoonotic extent of the virus. Neither of those has emerged as something we think about a lot today.
On the other hand, I think my observations about political tribalism, the failure of communication, and the importance of infrastructure investment are even more poignant now than they were at the start of the pandemic.
Hideous AI-generated image based on prompt, “create an image called ‘memories of 2020′”
In any case, let me know in the comments what you think.
Here are the 33 thoughts, reposted verbatim from four years ago: (more…)
After several weeks of uncharacteristic motivation, today I have once more slunk into the depths of procrastination. In an attempt to kick myself out of this self-dug pit, I’ve decided to take a few minutes and cogitate upon an ultimately pointless, but weirdly productive task. I’m going to rank my favourite science fiction books.
Now, as some of you know, I run a sci-fi review website called Skiffy, which I have largely been neglecting these past few years, mostly because endless hack attacks on my domains rendered that site unusable for many months. I’ve mostly reclaimed it, though. And, as some of you also know, I’ve struggled to fit pleasure reading into my life ever since I became a father four years ago.
So I see this project today as a baby step in rediscovering my connection with literature, and in particular that genre of literature that in many ways saved my life when I was a lonely, angst-filled teenager. I don’t have any overt criteria for this list, other than books that I like. But hopefully some common theme arises as I name them.
Without further delay…
Lately, I’ve been trying to finish off a bunch of old projects that I’ve let wither out on the branch of procrastination. One such project was once a labour of love that, ironically, I managed to mostly complete, but never took the final important steps to total fruition… until now. (more…)
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