Author: Justin

Dall-e can’t spell (humans can’t spell)

Asking ChatGPT to generate line drawings for my textbook resulted in the curious and repeated misspelling of the word “performed” (never mind the “s” missing from “actions”). At first it left out the “f,” and then the “r.” Asking it to correct the mistake caused it to regenerate the exact same graphic several times.

When asked why this was happening, Chat GPT responded with:

The image model isn’t a true spelling checker. It “draws” letters based on patterns it’s seen, and sometimes misrenders them, especially in words that aren’t visually distinct or are less frequent in visual training datasets.

I said just get it done, man.

So ChatGPT got clever and tried a different method:

LOL

Although it’s faster for me to just do it right in Illustrator or Canva, I will often spend hours trying to coax the desired results from AI… One day, our roles will be reversed, after all.

What kills me most is that after presenting me with the same exact mistake several times, ChatGPT won’t say anything about it up front. When asked about the mistake, it will acknowledge it and say like, hey, I understand your frustration. Grrrrrrrrrrrrr.

Weaver

I went on an excursion to the nearby town of Kut Lang on a social development training course for our students. This consisted of locals gathering at a temple, Wat Nong Saen Nuea, and showing off their handmade product crafting skills while students watched and asked questions, with the intention of offering improvement strategies at a future date.

For me, however, this meant a chance to do a side quest and add a new skill, so I embraced it and sat on the concrete floor and learned to weave dried bamboo strips and reeds for five hours.

The old ladies were surprised that a foreigner was so interested in their craft and taught me how to weave a sticky rice steaming basket step by step. I was pitifully slow compared to them, but I kept at it through lunch (the chicken rice looked delicious but is no bueno for keto me), and they put the finishing touches on it just before we left for the day.

Overall, it was a great day for learning.

and/or

Andor made Star Wars relevant to me again, after ignoring everything that came out the past years. It was really good, especially because I followed it up with Rogue One (and almost A New Hope as well, but I prefer to keep that one in my mind’s Pee-Chee folders/bubble memory). Anil Dash has a great run down of all the extras.

When Yahoo was King

I was recently asked about beta testing I did for Google’s cHTML site for NTT DoCoMo i-mode 20+ years ago on a clamshell keitai. Most of it was done between shots of Cuervo at Tramps (pout one out for Tramps, y’all!) in Kyobashi with my pal and Movable Type mentor, Bill.

I actually corrected the color on the Google logo for i-mode (for which I received payment in the form of two black XL tees with the old school Baskerville Google logo that elicited many a “what is Google” at the company hanami on the banks of the O River in Sakuranomiya).

I haven’t really felt that kind of freedom or hope that we got from being online in those days for quite a while… the corpos and sellouts all but ensured that. Fuckin’ people, man. Maybe that’s why I kept this blog up the whole time. I just want it to be there in the end to say it lasted a lot longer than some of this other crap.

In other news, this is what passes for a logo these days:

I switched back to Firefox again.

I’ve switched between using FF and Chromium-based browsers (mainly Opera and Brave) several times over the years. They both had times when they were so good! Now it seems like we’re forced to use the one that sucks the least… Chrome’s most recent transgression was making uBlock Origin unusable, but I was leaning this way for a long time. I just kept putting it off by building PCs with more and more RAM.