sangsara.net

Tag: Technology

  • Week 7.24

    Week 7.24

    We landed in Auckland, New Zealand Monday morning and immediately flew down to Wellington, and we’ve been driving our way back north for the past few days. I’m currently writing this while sitting beside a Buddha’s head in a poolside garden, in a small new hotel outside of Rotorua.

    Four hours ago, I was parasailing above Lake Taupō in my usual urban uniform of jeans and a t-shirt — if you know me, you’ll know that I don’t sign up for even remotely dangerous things, especially over large bodies of water; in the cringey words of Below Deck repeat charter guest, Dean Slover, I said “homie don’t play that!” But Kim convinced me to, and we survived. They played Maroon 5 songs on the boat going out, and so by the time we were lifted some 50 meters in the air to float in blissful silence high above the town, I was having a good time. Lake Taupō is a volcanic caldera that’s nearly the same size as Singapore, but because it’s all flat you can just about see from one end to the other from up there. New Zealand challenges the city dweller’s sense of scale like all good nature vacations.

    Since leaving Wellington, the road trip portion of the trip so far has been mostly measured in burgers, fish and chips, and winery stops, specifically in the Martinborough and Hawke’s Bay areas where the tastings have been revealing of each company’s nature: some overly commercial and strictly scripted, versus others more informal, just going on vibes the only way they know. I think the difference shows up in the wine, with wineries in the latter category being more playful with flavor, more likely to put better stuff in a low-priced lineup. But I would say that, as someone who’s now had a crash course in holding up his glass against the light to observe the color.

    I’m now lying in bed on Sunday evening having just finished the last leg of our driving tour, which took us to the famous Whangamata Beach bordering the Bay of Plenty, and Hunua Falls, where we did another little nature walk and met a nice dog and helped its owners get a photo together with their iPad. Old people really carry full-sized iPads around on hikes to use as large-screened cameras. Mind blown.

    A couple of observations on this road trip. So much roadkill! Easily a hundred little bundles of fur spotted spread across tarmac just today alone. Some decayed and washed away, little more than stains. Some still fresh, bloating, bleeding. We avoided making contact with all but a couple. A ritual evolved, mainly to stay alert but also out of pity for these bunnies or squirrels(?): upon spotting one, I would put my palms together and say “rest in peace”, and Kim would follow with “in all your pieces”.

    FM radio is still not a great experience; it’s a wonder how people survived on it for so long. Fortunately I had a lot of downloaded music on my iPhone, which also navigated us with offline maps. CarPlay is excellent, and Apple Maps was good enough for nearly every leg of the journey. We listened to Lorde’s albums, of course, as well as the Sunkissed Summer playlist she compiled on Apple Music, and other New Zealand legends like Bic Runga and Crowded House. At one point I put on some J Dilla but learnt that rhythmic music you can sort of nod and zone out to is NOT what a driver wants over long winding roads.

    As I mentioned last week, this itinerary was drawn up with ChatGPT and my custom GPT, AI-tinerary, but we had to fact-check everything and plot the route on a map before making bookings. It’s held up well so far, with a couple of impromptu detours and chance discoveries along the way. For one, we did not realize that while passing through Napier for one night that we’d be there for the Art Deco-obsessed city’s annual Art Deco Festival, the first one they’ve been able to hold since 2020. Vintage cars were out in force, there was a Warbirds air show, and a free concert on the beach. It was packed, every restaurant was booked out. We ended up eating dinner out of a food truck by the sea. I asked ChatGPT “what’s happening in Napier tonight?” and it confidently replied, “I couldn’t find any events tonight.” At the risk of sounding like a broken record, these tools truly are starting points and aids right now, and you must resist the idea that they are final answers.

    I’ll post the final version of our itinerary next week when we’re done, in case it helps anyone looking to do the same.

    All photos were taken by either a Ricoh GR III or iPhone 15 Pro Max. The extra 120mm equivalent reach of the iPhone came in very handy, but there’s no beating the image quality of the GR when it comes to landscapes. The light was so good that some photos taken with the Standard color profile, straight to JPEG, were surprisingly “finished” out of the camera. This year’s iPhone still wants to make everything bright and sharp, which fails to capture atmosphere and preserve highlights. I edited photos daily as quickly and lazily as possible, using RNI Films for most of it — at some point they added the ability to save edits on top of original files (non-destructively), which is a key consideration I look for in photo apps. I’ve also started using RAW Power again late in the trip, which is making me want to go back and redo some edits. Maybe on the flight home.

  • Week 6.24

    Week 6.24

    It was Chinese New Year week and it’s not been the same for several years, partly because of Covid and because many key relations have simply gotten old. My uncles and aunties, for decades only known to me by honorary titles describing their places in the family hierarchy, are getting ill, weak, and unwilling to leave their homes or receive visitors. Several years ago I started to ask what their actual names were, because I grew up literally calling them names that translated to second son of third uncle, or eldest paternal uncle; I’ve often wondered why Chinese culture has mechanisms that foster emotional distance between children and adults, a tradition that feels increasingly out of touch with today’s world. But that’s how it goes.

    I remember the typical CNY reunion dinner for many years as something to get through with gritted teeth and withheld snarky jokes, and if you’d told me then that I would look back now on those as the good times, I would have despaired. Now they appear as charmingly awkward and well-meaning attempts to bond, by people I might never get to wish a happy new year to again. I always thought the idea of an annual reunion made more sense against the backdrop of a vast country like China, but now that it’s hard to connect for all sorts of reasons even across our tiny one, I see the real terrain is time and memory, and so many relationships die starving in those fields. That’s how it goes too.

    ===

    One of our friends lost his dad this week. He was by all accounts the kind of guy you call a ‘real character’. He went from a corporate career to a becoming writer in retirement, putting out three books in the last decade or so. Because we didn’t have any reunion dinner commitments at the usual time, we were able to attend his funeral wake and share in some lovely stories from the family. They managed the joke that this terrible timing right in the middle of festivities was the last prank he’d play on them. I learnt he had a regular blog, which he kept going even after suffering health setbacks — that’s dedication. Every week I wonder what I’m going to say here and always think the streak’s about to end.

    Even the funeral was remarkable for the fact that he planned it all himself, leaving behind detailed instructions on what he wanted, to the point of getting his own headshot taken and sealed in an envelope which his family only opened after he was gone, so they wouldn’t have to fuss over this stuff at the worst time — that’s love. It got me thinking that everyone should prepare their own playlists and slideshows too. I might get started on it this year. Don’t be surprised if you come to my funeral and hear that Chinese AI dub of Van Morrison on repeat.

    ===

    Other activity:

    • I’ve started on a new book and only read two short chapters but I already know this is something special. It’s People Collide by Isle McElroy.
    • We are back watching Below Deck and I’m still sure that this is one of the best management trainings you can get for your time. Every single season is full of unnecessary crew drama because people don’t communicate expectations, don’t provide clear feedback, and allow emotional reactions to escalate. I get that it’s not easy, and I’m not sure I do it so well myself, but the lines between action and consequence are so clear here; they’re literally edited together for entertainment. Another lesson: everyone is flawed. The people you root for because they’re usually sensible? Sometimes they fuck up! Working relationships are rarely black and white.
    • Kanye West finally released Vultures two months its initial release date, with a new cover and possibly a different tracklist. I haven’t heard it yet. But once again, Apple Music has not recommended me music I’m interested in, although I’m quasi-certain it will be featured somewhere in the app in the next few days. Right now the Singapore ‘Browse’ page is full of Chinese New Year related music that I definitely do not care about.
    • After working too hard and not getting enough rest, Kim’s sort of fallen ill now, with me feeling a milder version of it. The timing could not be worse: we’re off on holiday soon, the kind where sneezing and aching and feeling weak might derail a complex itinerary.
    • Speaking of which, I used ChatGPT to help plan this vacation, and I’ve taken those instructions and made a custom GPT called AI-tinerary which might help you if you’re going someplace new and want to create a multi-day schedule of things to do. It can work off your individual interests and transport modes, as well as answer other travel-related questions you may have. At some point I’ll be able to make it plot your route on a map (if you ask it now, it’ll generate some wacky DALL•E map drawing that you should absolutely NOT follow).
    • You should know by next weekend whether these AI-generated plans worked out, or if we tried to stay in towns that don’t actually exist.
  • Week 5.24

    Week 5.24

    Vision Pro and AirPods Max hypotheses

    Apple Vision Pro is out in the wild, and I’ve gone on the expected rollercoaster — from “of course I’ll get one, but only when it’s officially released here”, to “nah I think I’ll wait till the second iteration”, to the usual FOMO and wanting one as soon as possible.

    But it might not be such a terrible idea to wait for the second iteration, if one believes that it’ll come some time in the middle of 2025. Why then? I looked at how quickly second-generation products were released in Apple’s recent history, and it ranged from 11 months (iPad) to a year and five months (Apple Watch). I think a 12-month release cycle is plausible, and putting out new ones at WWDC makes sense as they’ll want to emphasize the visionOS platform for developers.

    Which might then suggest the global Vision Pro rollout this year will start in June. So international early adopters will be putting down at least $3,500 to use it for a year before they need to upgrade. And we know that selling a first generation AVP on the pre-owned market is 1) a tough job, if the second generation irons out obvious wrinkles, and 2) not something early adopters want to do anyway, given the sentimental value of keeping your ‘first spatial computing device’.

    While we’re out here predicting future releases, I think I’ve cracked why the supply chain analysts believe an AirPods Max update is coming this year with USB-C and new colors, but without an upgrade to the H2 chips (currently only found in the AirPods Pro) which enable Conversation Awareness and Adaptive Audio modes. The reaction to this rumor has generally been: “that would be a lame update to the AirPods Max after four years”, but okay what if it’s not an update? What if it’s a new variant model?

    Specifically, it could be the lower-cost, lower-weight “sport” model with different materials and/or a swappable headband that was rumored to be “coming soon” back when the AirPods Max first released. Everyone assumed it would be released a year after, but because it’s been so long, we’ve forgotten that was even supposed to be a product. A cheaper non-Max/Pro headphone model without the latest features would make the same sort of sense as the iPhone 5c, which had all the features of its premium predecessor — but funner. Then the real AirPods Max update can come in 2025, and honestly, if you’re making them well, five years between headphones is the right cadence.

    Electric toothbrushes

    It’s been about two weeks since I started using an electric toothbrush again, and the difference in efficacy and convenience is so notable that I don’t know why I stopped when my last one broke during Covid. There are so many essentially disposable models on the market now in the S$20–30 price range that I didn’t see how the S$200+ models justified themselves. Bluetooth app connectivity? It seemed ludicrous.

    To my untrained eyes, there were two basic designs: an elongated brush head that vibrates (this is the dominant kind), and a small circular head that rotates back and forth. I used an Oral-B one of the latter sort for a little while once but it hurt my gums and I ended up throwing it out. I decided to give it another go with an Oral-B Pro 2 model, but with an “ultrathin” head with gentler bristles this time, and haven’t had any problems. It cost me about S$75, presumably on account of having a rechargeable battery and dock, and I was beginning to think I should have just gone for the Pro 1 model that runs on AA batteries and costs S$30.

    But of course it’s not that simple. After more research, I discovered there are actually three categories of motorized tooth cleaning devices: electric, sonic, and ultrasonic. The Pro 1 has fewer vibrations per second than the Pro 2, but both probably still fall into the electric class, which is to say they clean with brush movements only, and don’t produce sonic vibrations that interact with fluids and help to knock plaque right off your teeth. Oral-B now has a range of toothbrushes called iO that combine an oscillating head with sonic vibrations, 3D teeth tracking AI (no, really), and you guessed it, they cost S$300–400.

    ===

    Media updates

    • I’ve never been into Grimes’s music because the few songs/videos I’ve encountered were awful, and of course her association with Elon Musk is a major turnoff. But I saw a tweet saying her breakthrough album “Visions” was turning 10 years old, with words to the effect of it being so great that the rest of her career was doomed to never top it — so of course I had to check it out. I’m pleased to report that it’s actually pretty good, maybe even great. For an electronic album, I didn’t expect it to sound so influenced by R&B? This whole separating the art from the artist thing is pretty wild.
    • That whole album was recorded in Garageband, and while I’m no musical talent, I wrangled it this weekend to finally clean up and join up the bootleg recording I made with my iPhone’s Voice Memos app back in Chiang Mai in December. It was 50 mins out of an hour-long solo piano set played by Joshua Lebofsky, amidst cafe noises of steam wands, fridges slamming shut, and people chatting. It starts super strong, with him singing an uncommon medley of Tears For Fears’ Everybody Wants to Rule the World and Lionel Richie’s Easy. I’m very happy to finally have it in my music library, ready to be revisited at any time.
    • I had a cab driver one night this week who sang along to songs on the radio. He was no great singer, but I loved the joy of it. The station miraculously queued up three great songs in a row — the aforementioned Tears For Fears song, followed by Sheryl Crow’s cover of The First Cut is the Deepest, and Phil Collins’s In the Air Tonight — which I remarked upon, and we got to talking. He told me he was really into Tears For Fears back in the day, and that they asked Phil Collins to play drums on their song Woman in Chains, wanting some of that magic touch. I promised him I’d listen to it again over the weekend, and I did.
    • It was decided (in my brain) that Easy might be my favorite song, and so I programmed our HomePods to play it throughout the entire apartment every Sunday morning at 10:00 AM as long as someone is home.
    • I was glad to hear from Michael that he loved the Slow Horses TV show, and binged three years’ worth (just 18 episodes, really) in a week. He also discovered that the theme song isn’t some Rolling Stones deep cut they licensed, but an actual new Mick Jagger song commissioned for the series!? I finally finished reading the first book but found the experience such a close retreading of the first season that I’ve decided not to read any more of them. It would just be like rewatching the existing seasons and spoiling the ones to come.
    • We got a chance to go and see the new Apple TV+ film Argylle at its local premiere. It’s an action-comedy about spies directed by Matthew Vaughn, who also directed other action-comedies about spies such as the Kingsmen series. This one primarily stars Bryce Dallas Howard, Sam Rockwell, and Henry Cavill, and is a fun enough time that I can recommend it. One thing that surprised me: the “new” Beatles song Now and Then features heavily throughout the film, with its melody forming a major recurring theme. I looked it up and they had the song for over a year before it came out and had to keep it a secret. Check out the symphonic version with a choir on the soundtrack.
    • Amazon Prime Video has put out all eight episodes of their new action-comedy series about spies, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, with Donald Glover and Maya Erskine playing reimagined Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie roles. We’ve seen two so far and it’s going very well.
  • Week 3.24

    Week 3.24

    I have come down from last week’s AI overpositivity and retaken control of this week’s update. I don’t know what came over me, especially when it’s so easy to see the issues that this current gen AI fever,this onslaught of enshittification, has yet to unleash. We’re poisoning a well, or maybe an orchard, that many people have spent decades building and many more depend on even if they don’t know it. I had two conversations on Monday, one about the disadvantageous state of jobs for 20-somethings and another about the Apple Vision Pro, and found myself in both of them articulating a deep pessimism that I haven’t been able to shake. Even if you buy into accelerationism, there’s clearly a risk of multi-decade spoilage here that future generations will hate us for.

    On Apple Vision (which is what I think the overall product family is called), I mentioned to Brian that I’ve been seeing a lot of Meta’s Quest 3 TV advertising whenever I tune into programs on the UK’s Channel 4, and how they’ve gone from selling immersive VR experiences with the Quest 2 to AR use cases like learning to play the piano — the same territory that Apple’s staking out. And how it won’t be very long before the Android equivalents of the Vision Pro will gain market share, on account of being several times more affordable, but hoovering up eye movement data revealing customers’ intents, attention, and probably physiological info because none of these other manufacturers will take pains to deny developers access like Apple does. We’ve seen these playbooks before.

    Brian and I have also previously discussed the ability of conversational AI products to deeply profile their users, not just by knowing what you want to know about, but how you think, react, speak, and write — what kind of person you are. A conversational interface with generative AI, trained on large amounts of data, is nothing short of a profiling machine that sees you at a behavioral and psychological level. Combine that with knowledge about what draws your eyes and sets your heart racing, and an ad-supported AR headset with built-in AI assistant is a nightmare product that will inevitably be a hit at $499.

    Thinking of the battles that ethically minded designers will have to fight and probably lose, deep in organizations intent on deploying AR/VR dopamine and AI-powered enterprise doodads without question, is what makes me tired these days.

    Later in the week, Jose shared this update on the Fujitsu postal service software debacle in the UK, a case of irresponsibly deployed technology that literally ruined and ended human lives. And that’s just the legacy stuff without any newfangled AI.

    ===

    • I’m finding the first Slow Horses book to be less enjoyable than I expected, mostly because it feels like I’m just rewatching the first season of the Apple TV+ show, nothing less and nothing more. I sort of expected more side story or entertainment than was possible to film, but it’s a rather straightforward procedural. The TV series might be the rare adaptation that’s on par with its source material, in which case I won’t read the rest after this one and will wait to watch Gary Oldman fart his way through them instead.
    • The second season of Reacher fell into the sequel trap, going for more action, more teamwork, more humor, more repeated catchphrases (this did NOT work), and losing something of its charm in the process. They decided to portray him as a sort of humorless Arnie-type killing machine who doesn’t understand normal people’s thoughts, and that doesn’t seem right to me based on his characterization as an astute detective/observer of human nature in the books. I was also hoping they’d go the Slow Horses route and just make the books in order, but they instead jumped to the 11th novel, Bad Blood and Trouble, for this season. Reading this interview with showrunner Nick Santora though, I got the feeling that making Reacher indefinitely is not something anyone on the team takes for granted, so why not go for broke while the Amazon money is flowing? Still, the thrill of seeing Reacher with his team is a payoff that has to be earned, and it’s not the same if you haven’t seen him wandering America solo for ten seasons beforehand.
    • We’ve started season 3 of True Detective, and I’m really liking some of the things they do with blending the recollections of an old man fighting a fading mind, with the disorientation and terror of his present life; they are literally blended and linked with match cuts and unifying objects — in one flashback a full moon disappears above the detective, and we come back to the present to see a fill light has gone out during the interview, and he’s shaken out of his memories.
    • I’m new to the music of Claud, but their superb album Supermodel would have made one of my lists in 2023.
    • I fired up Lightroom to see what new features they’ve added, and there was a new Denoise tool that seems to use AI to generate missing detail — fine, it’s unavoidable — and AI-powered preset recommendations. With one click, I applied a dramatic preset to an old RAW file which made it extremely noisy, and with another click removed all of it and landed on an incredibly sharp and clean image. I’m a little sad about how hard it is for small indies to compete with Adobe on this stuff. Photomator has an ML-based auto enhance feature that really doesn’t work well, often overexposing and making white balance look worse, whereas the Auto button in Lightroom makes improvements 90% of the time.
  • Week 2.24

    Week 2.24

    This post was partly written by my blog assistant GPT from notes I gave, and partly transcribed by a Whisper-powered dictation app I’m testing, so it’s just dripping with that AI filth (but the human did edit).

    I’ll probably remember this week for feeling like the future finally arrived, thanks to three long-awaited developments taking up headlines.

    1. Apple Vision Pro – The Dawn of Spatial Computing

    • The Apple Vision Pro got its pre-order and launch dates. Sadly, it’s US-only for now, leaving me and many others on the sidelines. It promises to usher in a world where computing isn’t confined to screens and devices, but blends seamlessly with our physical spaces. Along with AI, we may see a new era of interface and interaction design land sooner than expected, alongside new levels of realism and intelligence I don’t think anyone is ready for. But as a sure sign that this early adopter is growing old, I’m feeling surprisingly wary of and unready for such a transition.

    2. A Milestone for Bitcoin: Spot ETFs approved in the US

    • In a historic move, the SEC approved 11 spot Bitcoin ETFs and they began trading on Thursday with a record-breaking amount of volume. Although against the original ethos of decentralization, this is still a big deal which legitimizes the cryptocurrency for audiences who want some exposure but can’t self-custody for some reason. After a decade of anticipation, this decision bridges the digital world with traditional finance, making a fully digital asset accessible through familiar investment channels.

    3. OpenAI GPT Store Finally Launches: A New Playground for AI Enthusiasts

    • As someone who’s been creating custom GPTs with ChatGPT, the launch of the OpenAI GPT Store is particularly interesting. Originally scheduled for last November, it finally went live but hasn’t set my feeds on fire just yet. To make things worse, the promised revenue sharing model won’t start until later, and again, only in the US at first. Still, this could be the App Store for a fast-evolving space. I’ve already seen a few advanced applications on the front page and will be keeping an eye on it.

    These advancements in computing, finance, and AI aren’t just incremental steps; they’re giant leaps in their respective fields. The Apple Vision Pro is set to literally put technology everywhere, the Bitcoin ETFs are proof that a “digital gold” can be taken as seriously as the real thing, and the OpenAI GPT Store shows how generative AI can let anyone become a “developer”. It’s like watching history being made in real-time.

    By the way, I made a fun new GPT called How We Got Here.

    ===

    So I’m watching this show, True Detective, which you may remember from like 10 years ago. The first season starred Matthew McConaughey and it was a huge hit for HBO that I liked a lot.

    But then when the second season came out, before I could get started, a lot of reviews came out calling it like the worst show ever. And even though Rachel McAdams and Colin Farrell were in it, it just wasn’t a hit the way the first one was. So I never got around to watching it.

    And here we are years later and Season FOUR is about to come out today with Jodie Foster and a whole new showrunner/director/writer involved and it’s getting a lot of buzz. People are excited for it.

    That’s when I realized that there was a Season Three, like I didn’t even know that it existed. So now I’m spending my weekend binging seasons two and three to get ready for four.

    Now this is not strictly necessary because every season is a completely new story with its own set of characters, but I just feel like the need to be complete about my True Detective experience.

    If you’re wondering how I have the time for this, it’s because Kim is again away on business, which also means that I can’t watch this week’s episode of Reacher. So I guess we’re going to watch the final two episodes back-to-back next weekend. I can’t believe it’s already over — reading the rest of the books will have to tide me over until next year.

  • How We Got Here

    Reverse engineers images to uncover the chain of events that led to them.

    Available with ChatGPT Plus

    I’ve seen a lot of GPTs that do interesting things with image recognition and DALL•E, like analyzing an image to understand the scene and then recreating it from scratch as a painting.

    But I wanted to do something different, like, “what if we could guess the stories behind the pictures?”. Obviously it’s for laughs, so this GPT is called “How We Got Here” and it theorizes a possible chain of events that took place before the picture to result in what you see. It works for any given scene or an object, but because of OpenAI’s restrictions it will refuse to comment on images of famous people.

    Here’s an example:

    1. A parliament session started with the introduction of a controversial bill: The Mandatory Karaoke Performance Act.
    2. The opposition leader, known for his baritone renditions of “My Way”, vehemently opposes the bill, fearing unfair advantages for tenors.
    3. During the debate, an amendment is proposed: All speeches must be sung to the tune of popular folk songs.
    4. The finance minister, a secret shower-singer, is thrilled and immediately begins to belt out budget allocations in A-minor.
    5. The amendment passes by one vote, thanks to a swing voter who misunderstood the motion, thinking it was about free concert tickets.
    6. The session escalates as a counter-amendment is suggested: All sung speeches must be auto-tuned for fairness.
    7. Chaos ensues when the auto-tune machine malfunctions, making everyone sound like rogue robots.
    8. In a bid to shut down the malfunctioning device, a scramble erupts, with one member accidentally broadcasting his vocal warm-up scales live on national television.
    9. The image captures the exact moment when the tech-savvy intern is summoned to fix the auto-tuner, while the rest try to cover up the incident by looking deeply concerned about fiscal policies.

    Try How We Got Here with your own photos.

  • Zine: B’Fast

    I mentioned last week that I’d started making a zine about breakfast using AI tools to write all the text and make the pictures, leaving the final job of laying it out to my own (inexperienced) human hands.

    Well, here it is. It was a lot of fun to put together, and I got a crash course in print design while trying to evolve it from a word processor document into something a little more creative and fun. You can sort of see the gradual improvement from beginning to end, as things become a little neater and more coherent — much like the mind in the morning as you make your way through breakfast.

    I’d say the final content is 98% AI generated; I made some cuts and changed just a handful of specific phrases: in one place to avoid possible offense, and most of the others were in a poem at the end, to make it suck less.

    I did it with the help of my custom GPT: InstaZine, which I encourage you to check out if you want to do something like this. It will brainstorm a bunch of different article ideas for your approval, then write them in a range of different authorial voices, hopefully giving the final product more diversity and interest than if you just did it the normal way with ChatGPT.

    You can read the zine below in the embedded Issuu viewer, or download the PDF. Let me know how you like it!

    bfast-compressedDownload

    Some additional tips for using InstaZine: Start by telling it what the subject of the zine should be, and describe what it should be like if you know. Ask it to create a list of article ideas — it should suggest a bunch of titles with a short abstract of each one, usually with a fictional author’s name and some description of the style and approach it will take. If you’re happy with this list, you should copy it off to the side in your own notes and play these descriptions back to the GPT before asking it to write each one. The reason is… the context window still isn’t great with ChatGPT as of Dec 2023, and it won’t necessarily do a great job if you don’t remind it of the brief after 20 messages of writing other articles and generating the images for them. By default, it creates colorful minimalist illustrations suited for a certain kind of magazine I like, but you should override this with whatever style you want.

  • Week 49.23

    Week 49.23

    As usual, I find myself in disbelief that another year is nearing its end. My Goodreads Reading Challenge count stands at 11 out of 12, and I’m halfway through a book right now, so I guess I’ll just make it before New Year’s. Which, incidentally, I’ll now be spending overseas thanks to some last minute plans. I’ll say where and post some photos after I’m back.

    On reflection, it’s a bit of a shame that almost all the books I’ve read this year were just 3-star affairs. It’s like I’ve held back from tackling the big names on my reading list, choosing lighter and more inconsequential fare. In some ways, this has been a calmly chaotic year, with instability in the wider world putting everyone on edge, and that may have influenced my need for soothing, low-stakes entertainment. I saw a mention somewhere that the self-care industry is “sedating women”, making them focus on trying to fix something in themselves instead of fixing the problems out there. I can relate.

    The holiday overeating has begun (although I may have forgotten to stop after last year), which I think is linked to a feeling of letting go and treating yourself in the evenings as work slows down (or seems less important) at this time of the year. We ended up eating out a fair few times, and as I write this I’m looking forward to another trip to Maji Curry this evening.

    It’s not just fat cushioning my bones — while at Tokyu Hands this week (now simply called Hands), I saw a $75 wavy seat cushion and decided I had to have it for all the sitting around I do when working from home. Does it do anything for me? I don’t really know! But I’m treating myself. And then on the weekend we wandered into some kind of fancy organic bedding store and walked out with a pair of new pillows. Kim unfortunately may have chosen the wrong height/density for her sleeping style, but after one night I can cautiously report that mine cradles my noggin just fine.

    ===

    Where’s the usual AI garbage, Brandon? I can hear you thinking it! Well okay, so Peishan mentioned she’d made a new zine, which reminded me of a project idea I’d written down and filed away. It was to make a zine on the subject of “Breakfast”, but using only AI-generated words and images.

    If you’re thinking that sounds like a pretty mediocre zine, then you understand the challenge here. We’re now at a point where generative AI’s infinite supply threatens to drive down the perceived value of all but the best; content vs. art. So I’d like to see if my human labor of directing an AI worker to deliver above-average quality and packaging its output as a coherent product, can create something worth looking at. The only way to find out is to make it! And now that we can do custom GPTs, I decided to start by making one that acts like a diverse team of writers and artists, with a range of different styles, which can then be applied to a zine on any topic you like.

    I’m still testing it out, but so far I’ve gotten a handful of articles. And in doing so, I’ve realized that I know nearly nothing about print layouts or how to design an attractive zine. I’ve read my share of mags, of course, but without effectively taking in their details. I’m making it with Pages on my Mac, and using its “Free Layout Mode” has been the best approach I’ve found. It’s sort of like a digital version of making a physical zine: I’m moving chunks of text and cut-out imagery around on A4 canvases; almost like scrapbooking. I just need more fonts and more imagination and more time.

    ===

    • I listened to no new music this week.
    • I didn’t turn my Switch on once.
    • I haven’t seen any films.
    • We did start Season 2 of Bosch Legacy though, and that’s still as great as ever. Not just the modern noir vibes and great jazz soundtrack. It’s a show that respects its audience and their time, without overelaborating on plot points or explaining every term or acronym that comes up. We’re already on episode 7 of 10, and I’ll be sad when it’s over. Thankfully a third season has been confirmed!

    (This week’s featured image was taken while walking around Tiong Bahru, edited with a Ricoh GR Positive Film effect simulation preset I made.)