sangsara.net

  • Week 23.23

    It was WWDC week and hours before the keynote event started, I was telling people that the thought of an Apple XR headset made me tired. I knew that if it really was happening, that the world would never be the same again, and we would be starting a whole new cycle of change: changes in the way we interact not just with computers, but entertainment, services, each other, and the hundreds of companies in our orbits. That takes a whole lot of energy and enthusiasm (positivity?) to prepare for, especially if you’re in one of the industries that will need to be an early mover.

    And this is just my gut talking, but after the big reveal of the Apple Vision Pro, I felt that positivity surging through me. It was an exciting prospect — yes, it’s still a heavy thing strapped to your head, and it has the many limitations and intentional design constraints of any first-generation consumer product — but I felt that Apple thoughtfully got the experience foundations right (again). This looks like it could change the world in an exciting and additive way.

    I can’t wait to try it out and get my own, but it will probably be the end of 2024 before it lands in Singapore. That gives everyone plenty of time to think about and design for a spatial computing future. Do I think the price is justified? Sure! It’s not really comparable to any other product at any price, which is the beauty of their ecosystem play (again).

    On the downside, the technical achievements it contains are incredible, but will need to become more incredible very quickly. Over the next few years, it will need to become lighter, smaller, faster, cheaper to get us where this “vision” is pointing. Or perhaps they believe the parallel development of a photon passthrough technology (that is surely continuing internally) will pay off before then, and become the solution. I’m referring to true AR glasses, of course, rather than this VR headset that acts like glasses by having screens facing inwards and outwards.

    Side note on those outward-facing eye screens: it’s funny how that detail was completely leaked, and we knew it might have screens that showed your eyes to others, but nobody could come up with a way that it didn’t look awful. And yet, the real thing looks pretty good! Dimming and blurring a virtual avatar’s eyes so that they looked recessed behind frosted glass? Brilliant. Wanna put a pair of comedy Vision Pros on? Try this Snapchat lens — it’s super amusing when pointed at the TV.

    But let’s not forget the other things announced at WWDC. I’m super excited for iOS 17’s Journal app*, as I said several weeks ago; the new AirPods Pro adaptive mode sounds exactly like what I’ve been wanting for awhile; Freeform showed that it isn’t being neglected, with some great looking new drawing tools coming; and the Apple Watch really did get a good rethink of the UI! The Side Button will now pull up Control Center instead of the Dock I never use, and it’s being replaced with a new Smart Stack model that sounds good in principle. And that new Snoopy and Woodstock watchface? Plus a smarter transformer-based keyboard and dictation? A more easily invoked Siri? Wow! (Ten bucks says a transformer-enhanced Siri is in the works for next year.)

    Sadly, Apple Music only got light design refinements instead of the rethink I was hoping for, oh well.

    *The Verge’s Victoria Song is skeptical about Journal.app because it relies on AI to suggest journaling prompts, which as Apple’s Photo Memories have proven, can be inappropriate or tone deaf. Personally I’m just planning to use it as a lifelogging tool: where I went, what I saw, what I was listening to. I’ll probably write entries manually, no prompts needed.

    ===

    On Thursday evening I checked out the National University’s industrial design program’s graduation show with some colleagues who came out of the program a few years ago. There were some thoughtful projects and most were well presented. The kids are alright, etc.

    Then on Friday evening I went with some other team members to visit the Night Safari for the first time in probably many years. The iPhone 14 Pro’s camera let me down by defaulting to very long night mode shots even when there were moving animals. I’m talking hold-still-for-10-seconds type situations. I wasn’t using Halide as I wanted Apple’s smart processing to light up the dark as much as possible, but it didn’t seem to make the right trade offs.

    It continues to be super hot and muggy here; I was sweating my butt off both nights outdoors. Looking forward to the cool Melburnian winter weather in a couple of weeks.

    ===

    • Inspired by the album listening technique of Pearl Acoustics’ Harvey Lovegrove (mentioned last week) — put it on all the time in the background for a few days, and then sit down to listen to it once through properly, after it’s already soaked into your subconscious — I’ve been listening a lot to Cisco Swank’s new debut album, More Better. It’s a seamless blend of jazz, hip-hop, and soul that the New York Times quoted a fellow musician describing it as “black music. All of it.”
    • But it was a big week in music, and I haven’t had time to get into the new albums from Jenny Lewis, Janelle Monáe, Christine and the Queens, and King Krule. Okay I’ve heard the King Krule once through and it was good.
    • Speaking of music, Kim returned from her trip to the US and brought me back an unexpected gift: a pair of the new Beats Studio Buds+ with the translucent case! I was coveting them but probably wouldn’t have bought them for myself, and they’re still not available locally with no release date either. But since I have them now I can’t complain. #blessed
    • I started playing Astral Chain on the Nintendo Switch, a stylish beat-em-up title that came out very early in the console’s life and looks astonishingly good, period. I’m now putting Bayonetta 3 on my wishlist because Platinum obviously knows how to get incredible visuals out of this aging hardware.

  • [H-AI] A Nostalgic Leap: From Nintendo 3DS to Apple Vision Pro

    The following is a post written by GPT-4 given a detailed brief by yours truly. The [H-AI] tag in the title declares this as human-supervised AI content.

    In the tech world, it’s easy to get caught up in the latest and greatest. But sometimes, it’s worth taking a moment to look back at the innovations that brought us here. Today, I’m talking about the Nintendo 3DS and its 3D camera, a feature that seems to have found a spiritual successor in Apple’s newly announced Vision Pro headset.

    The 3DS, launched in 2011, was a marvel of its time. It brought 3D gaming to the palms of our hands, no goofy glasses required. But the real kicker was its 3D camera. With two outer sensors capturing slightly different angles, it could take 3D photos and videos. It was a novelty, sure, but it was also a glimpse into the future.

    The 3DS’s 3D camera was met with a mix of awe and skepticism. Some saw it as a gimmick, while others reveled in the new dimension it added to their photos and videos. Regardless of the reception, it was a bold move by Nintendo, a testament to their innovative spirit.

    Fast forward to today, and we see Apple taking a page from Nintendo’s book with the Vision Pro. This VR headset lets you relive moments in dramatically higher resolution — a step up from the 3DS, but the core concept remains the same.

    The 3DS may be discontinued, but its legacy lives on. It was a pioneer in 3D technology, a stepping stone to the immersive experiences we see today. As we anticipate the release of the Vision Pro next year, let’s not forget the devices that paved the way.

    So here’s to the Nintendo 3DS, a trailblazer in its own right. And here’s to the Apple Vision Pro, a testament to how far we’ve come. The future of XR technology is bright, and I, for one, can’t wait to see what’s next.

  • Week 22.23

    Yes, I made this with Midjourney

    Six years after I booted up my Nintendo Switch for the first time and slotted in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s cartridge, I finally took on the final boss this week and finished the game. Before you think this game is a monster (although it is), I effectively took a 5.5 year hiatus.

    My first experience with the game was both exhilarating and overwhelming — here was a non-linear open-world adventure designed to be an exercise in self determinism. Yes, the princess has been locked in a bubble, literally waiting 100 years for you to wake up and save the kingdom, but that didn’t mean you had to hurry. You could decide to be a chef and spend time gathering rare ingredients and experimenting with recipes. You could examine every curious crevice of the natural landscape to discover the Korok seeds deviously placed by the designers, or climb foreboding mountains just for the hell of it (you’d probably find Korok seeds for your trouble).

    This was a game that demanded longer play sessions — no dipping in for just five minutes — and frequent ones at that. You kind of had to remember what you were last doing and where you wanted to go next. So, faced with too much commitment and mental load, I started to distance myself from it and play other games instead.

    If you’ve been following along in recent weeks, you’d know that the release of the sequel, Tears of the Kingdom, spurred me to try completing it once and for all. And it’s been quite the journey: I had to re-familiarize myself with the game’s laws of physics, Link’s complicated powers, and in the process discovered that I’d spent those first 40 hours or so essentially mucking around in just one corner of the world.

    By last week, I’d finally uncovered the whole world’s layout, but with some places still unexplored and doubtlessly many secrets left to be found. I’d gotten good at fighting, and was told that I was ready for the final showdown with “Calamity Ganon”. Except… I wasn’t, not mentally.

    So I spent this week’s game time mucking about and doing inconsequential side quests, like helping a group of arguing scientists collect evidence of giant monster skeletons using my digital camera (yes). And then, on Friday night, I said ‘fuck it’ fought my way to the center of the map, took the big baddie out, and saw the credits roll. It was an absolute anticlimax, partly because I was in a hurry and took a bunch of sneaky shortcuts to the final fight, instead of exploring the giant castle like I suppose I was meant to do.

    So I guess the moral of the story is err… heh… it’s the journey, not the destination? And as I was telling Cien earlier that day, the game is designed so that it’s possible to start the game and simply walk a beeline straight to the final boss and kill him instantly, if you had the skills and weren’t interested in slowly unfolding the whole experience for yourself. So this implicit message was always present, and I’m glad I took the time this year to enjoy more of it.

    ===

    Speaking of picking up old games again, I re-subscribed to the New York Times in order to play their crosswords. The last time I played a lot of them was when they released a Nintendo DS game back in 2007. In recent weeks, a group of people at work starting playing them collaboratively, and I found the experience fun enough to give it a shot. The current promotional price is just $20 USD for the first year of All Access membership ($90 afterwards).

    With the installation of the NYT Games app, I’ve also got the main news app again, of course. It does a couple of things really well, namely it presents simple text and images beautifully with a handful of layout variations, and it has a personalized tab called “For You” that is finite and completable each day.

    I didn’t realize how much I’d missed having a primary source of news in my life, with its own Home Screen button, but of course I’m prioritizing it only because I paid for it. I’m still enjoying Artifact, and I’ve just told it that I have an NYT sub now and it promises to prioritize it for me. Artifact has a real chance here of being the winning news aggregator.

    It makes me upset how Apple Music’s personalized tab could be so much better, like an AI-compiled digest of what’s new in music that I’d be interested in. Fingers crossed for WWDC next week! (Disclaimer: I know nothing.)

    ===

    Friday was Vesak Day here and a public holiday, so I spent the afternoon with Peishan and Cien visiting two cafes, and let me just say I am disappointed that we are allowing so many Instagrammable cafes to flourish. They’re all variations of the same bare concrete interior, tables and stools placed closely together, serviceable coffee + $20 and up full English breakfast plates template of an F&B business. We managed to land in two that offered differented value: Acoustics on Neil Road, which understands that bare concrete is a terrible environment to have conversations or listen to music in, so they invested in sound dampening wall panels and impressive looking speakers; and the Allpress pop-up cafe down the street on on 73 Duxton Road which, well, offers Allpress beans.

    ===

    Back to AI, Jose pointed me at the Planet Money podcast which is currently producing a series of episodes about GPT. They’re using it to write and create a full actual episode, and documenting the process. Parts 1, 2, and 3 (the actual AI-produced episode). Listening to the first episode, I observed them going through the same cycle of revelations that I went through recently as I experimented with using AI to do elements of my own job. The initial curiosity and excitement, the sudden surprise at how good it is, the disbelief when it’s sometimes even better, and the slow acceptance of the chaos to come as you realize no one knows how this is gonna turn out. We live in interesting times.

    ===

    I watched the finale of Ted Lasso’s third and possibly final season. Season 1 is everyone’s pick for the strongest arc, but I think Season 3 is right behind it now. Season 2 was disjointed and strange to me, so quite a distant third place.

    I said of the episode in a group chat:

    The Ted Lasso finale is one of the best I’ve ever seen. On brand, unashamed, fan servicing, heavy-handed symbolic closure with all the love in the world. 5 stars.

    There’s a line in it about how absolute perfection is boring, and by being imperfect on its own terms, the final episode was effectively, truly perfect. They made some polarizing choices this year and didn’t give us what we wanted at times, but the last episode gives it all. It mirrors the beginning, it offers thematic and narrative closure, and it gives room for the satisfying character growth it nurtured to show itself off.

    Their choice of song to play over the final minutes was spot on, obvious, schmaltzy, perfect. It might have been better if they’d used my favorite version featuring Fiona Apple, but what do I know.

    ===

    A couple of weeks ago Michael pinged me to talk about Daft Punk, after I wrote about Random Access Memories, saying sheepishly that Discovery was probably his favorite album, as if RAM was a purer musical endeavor and Discovery was sonic candy for philistines. I was mostly surprised that anyone could fail to love RAM best, and admitted that I hadn’t heard Discovery in many years and hardly knew it well.

    Then I saw this YouTube video by “Digging The Greats”, in which they break down the achievements in sampling that Discovery contains. Absolute magic. I keep telling myself to spend more time on shows like Song Exploder and Watch The Sound on Apple TV+ and This Is Pop, but I never seem to make the time. What I love about this 15-minute video is they don’t just play the samples and show you what Daft Punk did; they load them up and perform the melodies live on an MPC to show you how the band did it.

    Then on Sunday night, the algorithms delivered me this endearingly old-fashioned 20-minute talk from Pearl Acoustics (they seem to make loudspeakers) in which their technical director, Harley Lovegrove, inducts RAM into his list of Great Recordings, and proceeds to discuss why he thinks the production and musicianship on it are noteworthy. He’s got a trained ear as you’d expect, and spends quite a bit of time talking about the incredible Giorgio by Moroder, pointing out things like how there are two different drummers on the track (I had no idea!). What makes it more fun is the fact that this is clearly not the kind of music he normally reviews — other Great Recordings include Jacqueline Du Pré’s Elgar Cello Concerto (this often moves me to tears on good headphones), and Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. Anyway, loved this video and it helped me appreciate a favorite album even more.

    ===

    A different sort of band, but I bought the 2023 Pride band for my Apple Watch. Rather than the heavy and vibrant rainbow bars of previous versions, this year’s design has a white base with scattered color pills. It looks like birthday cake sprinkles or confetti, which is a fun vibe you don’t see in any other official Apple Watch bands, almost like something Swatch would do.

    ===

    And now, for this week’s conclusion, brought to you by GPT:

    In wrapping up, there’s something uniquely human about picking up where we left off, be it a beloved video game, a trusted news source, or a favorite TV show. That’s the joy of life’s continuity, the pleasure in seeing where a journey takes us, especially when it’s one we didn’t quite finish the first time around. These past weeks, I’ve immersed myself in familiar worlds, marveled at the capabilities of AI, and watched characters grow, and it made me realize how we continuously strive for balance, exploration, and ultimately, an understanding of our own story. We may stumble, we may take detours, but isn’t that the beauty of life’s game?

  • Week 21.23 (poem edit)

    An AI turned this week’s notes into poetry.

    A Chronicle of Week Twenty-One

    In a week where work did reign,
    Much to tell there’s little gain,
    Round it though, we gently dance,
    For work’s secrets shan’t have chance.

    (more…)

  • Week 21.23

    It was one of those weeks where not an awful lot happened outside of work. I don’t talk about work here but let’s sort of circle it.

    Reflections on AI

    One thing I can say is that I started making a presentation deck about the use of generative AI and GPT in design, initially to share my findings so far but increasingly as an exercise in structuring my thoughts into anything at all useful.

    A couple of things, on reflection: an AI assistant or collaborator poses significant risks for a lazy human in certain tasks since it tempts us to quickly accept its output without evaluating potential improvements. Assuming AI can do a job to 90% of a human’s rigor and quality, figuring out what the other 10% is without having done the same work yourself is quite the challenge. So the efficiency gains may not be as significant as you think, not until we figure out some smarter processes.

    An example of what I mean: you can feed ChatGPT with notes from an interview conducted with a customer about their experiences and how a product fits into their lives. Supply enough interviews, and ChatGPT can do the work of summarizing them in aggregate, presenting key themes and areas worth looking into, like maybe everyone thinks the price is too high, but it’s because they don’t fully understand the value of what they’re buying.

    It can create a bunch of frameworks to illustrate these findings, like personas and service blueprints. And it can even suggest solutions, like better marketing materials to explain this value to customers. The AI’s output might look pretty good, similar to what a team of human designers would (more slowly) produce, and a company might be tempted to make business decisions based on it. In fact, a team of human designers who haven’t read the interview notes themselves or thought deeply about it might also look at the AI’s work and say it’s good to go.

    The level of confidence and finality inherent in these AI outputs is incredibly convincing. But if a human were to go through all the interviews, listening to the recordings perhaps, they might realize there was a missing element, a feeling subtly unsaid on the margins, that means some customers do see the extra quality, they just wish there was a cheaper version of the product that did less. Skimming through the finished research report crafted by the AI, you wouldn’t even begin to guess where in the sea of correct conclusions this exception could be hiding.

    But there’s no question that this stuff is ready today to do some tasks like image editing, seen in Photoshop’s impressive beta release of a “Generative Fill” feature this week. I took a stock photo and doubled its height, and it was able to get the context of the scene and fill in the missing ceiling almost perfectly. That would have taken an experienced image compositor at least a few minutes, and anyone else way too much time. Just a couple of clicks now.

    I also looked into what Adobe is building with its Sensei suite of AI marketing tools, and that dream of generating and sending personalized ads, as in a unique package of art and copy tailored to a single customer’s behavior, would seem to be already here. I’m not 100% sure how this works everywhere, but in the past, you’d still need copywriters and art people involved in the process after marketers had identified the “customer journeys” and content-goes-here templates. With the opportunities now being identified, advertising messages crafted, and email offers all sent with a single click by the same person, there’s hardly a crack in the door left for the traditional artists and copywriters to make their case. Yet, the quality is good enough to satisfy all but the most discerning of corporations.

    You may observe that the two of the largest advertising platforms are already in this space.

    What do you think about the current advancements in AI and their implications? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

    (One more example: I asked ChatGPT to help suggest edits for this post, and it rewrote one of the above sentences to be better. I liked it, but on closer inspection, there was a glaring semantic error I had to fix myself. It also suggested the call to action above, to increase engagement. Talk to me!)

    ===

    Personal updates

    There seems to be yet another wave of Covid sweeping through the city, based on the fact that several people I know have come down with it, and every bus and train car I’ve been on this week had more people wearing masks, suggesting that they, too, know people who’ve come down with it.

    Kim is going away for a couple of weeks, and I’m hoping she doesn’t run into it out there either; one of her colleagues caught it while traveling in the region a few days ago. I’m planning to stay home as much as I can during this time, and finishing as many video games as possible.

    ===

    Media activity

    • Not a ton of progress in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which I’ve been playing consistently now for the past few weeks — a streak unmatched since the game first came out six years ago (I abandoned it out of fatigue shortly after that initial burst). I’ve now got all four Divine Beasts pointing at the castle and now just need to build up the nerve and arsenal to storm it and be done with this. I seem to be procrastinating instead, exploring areas in the massive world that I never checked out before.
    • The girl band I would say I’m rooting the most for in pop music, XG, performed at the Head in the Clouds festival in New York, and I watched some fancams of their set. The audio quality is terrible in all of them, so I won’t recommend starting there, but they are undeniably polished and tight as a group. Here are two music videos. I think I discovered them back in February, and at the time I said they’re gonna be monstrously huge this year. I stand by this.
    • If you watch the documentary series their label has put on YouTube, you’ll understand why they’re performing at this level: they’ve been physically and psychologically abused for the past six years of training, starting from when some of them were just 12. It’s horrendous to watch, but also probably par for the industry. While it’s good that someone decided to plainly put this footage out there, I’m not seeing much of a backlash, so it’s probably too late and already normalized. Some of the stuff their boss/producer says and does is straight up toxic emotional manipulation (he apparently came up as an idol himself so it’s like Ted Lasso says in the latest episode, hurt people hurt people).
    • Ted Lasso is almost done with its third season, one episode to go. I’m still liking it much better than season two, although it is sooo uneven and odd in its choices. You know the adage, “show, don’t tell”? It’s like the concept of season three is going against that conventional wisdom; a challenge the writing team decided to issue themselves: Can we take lots of scenes that people want to see (scenes of closure, catharsis, and vindication!) and make them happen off-camera and between episodes? And after doing that, can we still make people care through the strength of our set pieces and touching monologues? That’s the only explanation I have for what’s been going on. And to the team’s credit, it works some of the time. It’s not conventional TV, and maybe that’s the point.
    • Platonic, the new sitcommy show on Apple TV+, is much more conventional. It’s about a male and female pair of friends who are really just friends (so far), and a comparison to When Harry Met Sally is drawn in the very first episode. They had a fight and haven’t spoken in years, and then reconnect on the cusp of middle age, when it’s notoriously difficult to form new friendships, let alone platonic ones. I think the concept and set up are strong, but the execution is a little spotty. I’m not really into Seth Rogan’s work, and his character here feels exactly like what you’d expect from one of his characters, but by the end of episode 2 I think I’ll keep watching. The most jarring thing is Rose Byrne’s quasi-Australian accent which raises too many questions about how they met and got along in the past.
    • Speaking of actors whose strong accents shatter the suspension of disbelief, Arnold Fucking Schwarzenegger is back in a NETFLIX TV SERIES which sounds like a dreamy reboot of True Lies. The show is called FUBAR and it’s about a father and daughter who both secretly work for the CIA without knowing about each other’s involvement. I haven’t seen any of it yet, but I’m dying to.
    • It strikes me that in the future, one could give a crazy brief like the above to a generative AI system and start watching something like FUBAR within minutes.
    • My first music discovery of the week is Eternally Yours, a new Alphaville album that sees the band doing symphonic rearrangements of songs such as Big In Japan and Forever Young with a full orchestra. Yes, in Dolby Atmos spatial audio. This is a band that was formed 41 years ago and the lead singer’s voice is still incredible, iconic.
    • The second is Tears can be so soft, the new song by Christine and the Queens. It’s simple but surprisingly soulful, and sonically recalls Massive Attack’s best work.

  • Week 20.23

    • A correction: Last week I said that the the 10th Anniversary release of Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories would have been better if mixed in Dolby Atmos spatial audio. It actually IS! But the entire album isn’t labeled as such because the “second side” of outtakes and behind-the-scenes bits aren’t. With that knowledge, I’ve been enjoying it on headphones and need to put aside more time to hear it again. We regret the error!
    • There’s been a slight Korean bent to the week, in that I’ve had KBBQ and soju twice in four days, watched a lot of Jinny’s Kitchen on Amazon Prime Video, and am actually listening to BTS intentionally for the first time as I type this.
    • Jinny’s Kitchen is a reality TV show about a pop-up restaurant in Mexico run by five of Korea’s most recognizable stars, who go largely unnoticed by their customers. Each of its 10 episodes is 1.5 hours long, which is practically feature film length! They could be much shorter, but it focuses on a lot of mundane, repeated scenes like the staff rolling gimbaps, cooking noodles, and plating fried chicken. Perhaps that’s the point, giving fans a chance to watch them doing normal people things? Or maybe it’s normal for Korean reality TV? Is it designed to be left running in the background? Or was it an Amazon Prime Video decision to hit streaming time KPIs?
    • In any case, Korean soft power is wave after wave of these campaigns. The show should be boring but it kinda works, plus it has an unheard-of 9.2/10 score on IMDB. The best moments for me are when someone does recognize one of them, like when an incredulous customer sees V from BTS (59 million followers on Instagram) pop his head out from the back, and likens it to Drake running a restaurant in a country where no one knows who he is. Watching celebs do normal people things is straight out of the idol playbook and it works — I’m listening to their music with an open mind now, and we’re talking again about visiting the country someday.
    • The Anbernic RG35XX arrived and it’s a nice little device that really recalls the Game Boy series in spirit. It feels good in the hand and the screen is bright and beautiful — the community seems to recommend replacing its software with something called GarlicOS but it looks like wayyy too much trouble. The thing just works out of the box, and I’m not in the mood to start modding it. It still blows my mind you can have this for S$90 including shipping, and it does come with uhh lots of software loaded, so it’s great value if you’re looking for a gift.
    • I’m still going strong in Breath of the Wild on the Nintendo Switch, in the final stretch but honestly still in no shape to face some of the game’s stronger enemies. I’m now thinking that if/when I eventually finish this, I’ll probably have to take a break before starting the sequel, Tears of the Kingdom, given that it reuses the same world map and I won’t be in any mood to cover it all over again. Note to self: don’t pre-order any more games unless they comes with discounts or exclusive bonuses!
    • We had a nail painting team event at work, for which the turnout was more male than female because of scheduling conflicts and maybe even a bit of self selection, so I’m sporting gray/lilac nails at the moment. It’s probably been over 20 years since I’ve had colored nails, and I think I’ll keep this going now that I’m too old to be told off and it’s not such a big deal.

    I asked ChatGPT to analyze my post and it suggested I add a conclusion. I said “you do it, then”. Here’s what we agreed on:

    This week has been a whirlwind of diverse experiences and discoveries. From immersing myself in the captivating sounds of Random Access Memories in Dolby Atmos to exploring the world of Korean soft power through Jinny’s Kitchen, I’ve been on a journey of curiosity and appreciation.

    The Anbernic RG35XX has provided me with nostalgic gaming moments, while progressing in Breath of the Wild has been both thrilling and daunting. Even a simple nail painting team event at work has reminded me of the freedom to embrace self-expression.

    These experiences have sparked my curiosity and inspired me to share my thoughts as a writer. Life is full of opportunities to explore, connect, and find inspiration in unexpected places. So, whether it’s through music, cuisine, gaming, or the little joys, embrace the unknown and discover the stories and experiences that await.

    Thank you for joining me on this adventure, and until next time!

  • Week 19.23

    The new Legend of Zelda game, Tears of the Kingdom, launched this week about five or six years after the last one, which I never finished. I pre-ordered the new game, of course, planning to join the rest of the world on launch day, exploring together and participating in conversations online, collectively figuring out unique solutions using the game’s open-ended physics engine. For those who haven’t seen it, the new game is sort of a sandboxy, Minecrafty affair where you can weld stuff together and build novel mechanical solutions to obstacles, almost certainly in a different manner than your friends. Think rudimentary cars from planks of wood, or hovercrafts, or the forest booby traps from Rambo First Blood.

    But the guilt of never fully playing Breath of the Wild was getting to me, and I’ve been trying to get back into it over the last few weeks. Despite memories to the contrary, I’d made shockingly little progress in my 40+ hours of gameplay, spending most of my time bumbling about the countryside and climbing mountains, instead of conquering the Divine Beasts (1 out of 4) and collecting quality stuff. It seemed wrong to jump ahead to the sequel while I’m finally seeing what the last one had to offer.

    So in this past week I’ve made more progress than in the previous four years: conquered two more Divine Beasts, got the Master Sword at last, and uncovered most of the world map (two more areas to go).

    ===

    Craig Mod tweeted and tooted about having had enough of the iPhone’s (14 Pro, I assume) overprocessed look, and said he was making Halide his default camera app. Huh? But how does that help, I thought, unless he means to shoot in non-ProRAW RAW all the time (which is a thing Halide does: shoot in traditional RAW files which don’t involve the “Photonic Engine” processing pipeline). After some poking about, I realized something I should have ages ago: by turning off “Enable Smartest Processing” in Halide’s settings and choosing HEIC as the output format, you can actually take regular old (non-RAW) photos that look more natural and have more editing latitude! This effectively cancels out the iPhone 14 Pro’s image quality regressions.

    The overstimulated look of the default camera is one of the main reasons I hardly took any phone photos on my recent vacation to Japan, but if only I’d known… I could have! So with that, Halide won an instant annual subscription from me, and I now have a complication on my Lock Screen that launches straight into it.

    My toot about this was boosted by Mod, making it my most “engaging” Mastodon post ever, at 44 likes and 12 boosts.

    You have to see a comparison to understand how obnoxiously oversharpened and artificial the Photonic Engine is on the 14 Pro’s 48mp sensor for some reason. It increases local contrast and highlights texture “detail” that does not look like what you see in real life. It’s a Clarity slider turned all the way up, and I’m not a fan of Clarity sliders. The example below is a corner crop from two larger photos, not edited in any other way.

    Left: iPhone 14 Pro’s default processing | Right: Halide’s “dumb” processing is loads better

    ===

    My AI experiments this week have been around trying to teach ChatGPT to write better poetry. I posted a few days ago about getting it to do a critical reading of a poem, wherein I was completely stunned by its comprehension skills. But writing good poetry, not just gimmicky rhyming lines, that should be a different thing.

    I semi-accidentally discovered that asking a “persona” (that I’d established in another chat instance to test the idea of using an AI prompted with a human backstory as a customer research proxy) to write poetry yielded subjectively better results than when I asked a brand new ChatGPT instance. The mere suggestion that the bot’s point of view should draw references from vaguely described life experiences and preferences seemed to make a difference to what it spat out. Which is why many SF stories have AIs that don’t know they’re AIs, I guess, and they have memories of childhoods that never happened.

    Here’s a poem that “Frank” (quite a salaryman-type personality) wrote about retirement:

    A lifetime spent in labor’s thrall,
    In structured days and office halls.
    Oh, to retire, to end the grind,
    To leave the corporate world behind.

    The dawn of leisure’s quiet grace,
    In this new, unhurried pace.
    Days unbound by ticking clocks,
    Unfettered as the wandering fox.

    Yet in this expanse so vast,
    Shadows of the past are cast.
    Habits of a lifetime past,
    In this new role, steadfast.

    A time of freedom, yet confined,
    By boundaries of the seasoned mind.
    Retirement’s paradox, I find,
    Is having time, yet being time-blind.

    Wow! No? It was coming up with absolute drivel before I handed the job over to Frank in another window. Side note: I started paying for ChatGPT Plus, just to have access to GPT-4; it’s a much better poet than the default GPT 3.5 model.

    So lately I’ve been working on giving feedback to an poetry-writing AI that I named Penrose and instructed to believe in itself as a 50-year-old professor of creative writing and philosophy, who’s bad with money, had two failed “great loves” because of their selfish acts, grew up in Boston, now works in London, and so on.

    Here’s one of the first things it wrote:

    In the chilled reflection of a London morn,
    I see a face, lines etched by yesterday’s turmoil.
    Cracks, not of frailty but life, loud in their silent form,
    That’s you, mate, and it’s all right.

    Witness the march of years, the dance of decades,
    In the ceaseless play of ambition and regret.
    Weaknesses? They’re the worn pennies in your pocket,
    The unpaid bills of your character, yet, not your debt.

    They’re the stumbles on cobblestones,
    The missteps in Milan’s echo-filled alleys.
    Not a damning verdict, but life’s hasty loans,
    A ledger, not of losses, but of rallies.

    In this world where even stone yields to rain,
    We’re all apprentices to time, chiseling away in vain.
    We’re all works, works under the master’s patient hand,
    Unfinished, flawed, yet, in that, something grand.

    ===

    • I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch more of Amazon Prime Video’s Citadel beyond the first two episodes. A colleague said he quit after 10 minutes. It’s reportedly one of the most expensive TV shows ever made, at an average of $50M per episode.
    • Silo on Apple TV+ has been very good so far. It’s a little bit YA sci-fi, a little Hunger Gamey, a little Snowpiercey (but better).
    • I saw a segment on NHK about how this iconic street corner featured in Slam Dunk has been inundated by tourists now that Japan is open again. They interviewed pilgrims from S. Korea, China, and Taiwan who said they just had to come down and see it — “if you love anime at all, this place is a must”. So I decided to get started on the ancient anime, which Netflix has 8 seasons of. The day after seeing episode 1, I ended up standing behind a guy on the train watching the show on his phone.
    • The 10th Anniversary Edition of Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories is out, and the album still holds up extremely well for me. If only they’d come back to remix it in Spatial Audio, that would have been incredible.

  • Miss you, humanity

    Perhaps you’ve heard of what’s been going on in generative AI and thought, “I have no need to generate any pictures or professional email filler”, and dismissed the subject. Perhaps, like me, you’ve read that GPT-4 can now “pass exams” from the SATS to legal bar exams, accounting ones, and so on, without really knowing what that means. It can choose the right answer out of a list, and write little structured essays on given topics? That’s amazing, but not unexpected.

    But I’m here to tell you that I asked ChatGPT (GPT-4) a question yesterday, quite an exam question, and its answer floored me. These things are called generative AI, but that name undersells the incredible interpretive power they possess when it comes to language and writing comprehension.

    I asked it to analyze this poem by Gabrielle Calvocoressi, one of the most devastating things I’ve read in the past year: Miss you. Would like to grab that chilled tofu we love. Go read it, I’ll wait. Get some tissues.

    I asked it to explain what the poem was about, and call out what it’s doing as a piece of writing to achieve its emotional impact. I’m not aware that any similar analysis of this poem exists online, if you’re wondering. My thoughts going into this: I know these AIs can write poetry, but I haven’t seen anything great. They must understand unstructured or unusually structured language to some degree, but can it “read” poetry from a human point of view? Probably not? Will it really understand what this is implying: the loss, the empty spaces, the long journey, the light body? And now I realize how dumb I was, because clearly it’s “read” thousands of books of and about poetry, and literary criticism, and style, and should know a lot more than the average person.

    Here’s its answer, unedited. Good enough to pass any high-school literature class, if not any blind test of humanity.

    ===

    This is a deeply emotional poem that appears to be exploring themes of grief, loss, longing, memory, and the power of shared experiences. It is presented as a monologue, presumably from the perspective of the speaker who is missing someone who is now absent. It’s filled with a sense of yearning, a desire for the return of the past and the presence of someone who is deeply missed.

    The poem starts off with the speaker expressing their indifference to the physical state of the missing person, suggesting that they would be happy even if the person could only present in their ‘light body’. This term could have different interpretations but it seems to suggest a spiritual or ethereal form, possibly indicating that the person is deceased or in a state where they cannot physically be present.

    The middle of the poem is filled with reminiscences of shared experiences. The speaker misses the shared rituals and discussions about mundane things such as the type of chilis used in a dish of tofu. This highlights the value of seemingly trivial shared moments in relationships and their ability to evoke strong emotions when remembered. The speaker also mentions watching the person on screens and wishing they could get out of the hospital, which suggests a period of illness or suffering that the person had to endure.

    Towards the end, the speaker talks about being willing to order their shared favorite dish and eat it alone, even though it seems painful for them. This can be seen as an attempt to honor their shared memories and perhaps a step towards acceptance of the loss.

    The speaker also acknowledges not knowing the journey the absent person might be on, whether it’s long or not, and expresses a wish to know more about their current state – what they’re reading, if they’re reading, which suggests a longing for a continuation of their shared intellectual and emotional connection.

    Throughout the poem, the simple language and the direct, honest sentiment adds to its emotional power. The repetition of “Miss you” and “Wish you could” emphasizes the sense of longing and loss. The specific details of shared experiences and the mundanity of their shared conversations humanize the relationship, making the emotions more relatable and poignant.

    Overall, the poem is a moving exploration of love, loss, and the power of shared experiences. It speaks to the human condition of missing loved ones, the difficulty of letting go, and the beautiful yet painful memories that bind us to the past.