I’ve been talking about (and playing with) ChatGPT a lot lately – the AI is an excellent tool for novice programmers to make things a little beyond their usual skill-level, and it can feed into a few neat applications. One I’ve dabbled with lately is an application that can take a Youtube URL,...

I recently finished reading Tiffany Schlain’s book “24/6”, which encourages taking a weekly “technology shabbat” where you abstain from your usual screens – such as your phone, computer, TV, and devices, for a period of 24 hours once a week. Persuaded that a little time away from the computer was...

When life gets you down, it’s worth remembering that anybody with internet access can freely download and read the entire Harvard Classics – thousands of hours of cultivated quality reading that would have been the envy of virtually anyone in history. In a spontaneous (and perhaps over-ambitious)...

It’s been a while since I dragged myself off of Twitter and its many cousins – for those who use social media frequently, the phantom limb of its absence is often keenly felt. Many people find, despite their conscious effort, that they’ve brainlessly opened up Twitter, Reddit or Tiktok, and had...

A few months ago, I wrote an introduction to my Notion ‘second-brain’ system – around that time I’d revised a somewhat messy conglomeration of different databases, and one I’d joked about was a Judo throw database. At the time I’d described it as something of an extraneous thing, adding some...

Anybody who had their ear to the ground regarding Artificial Intelligence for the last year – and many who didn’t – will know that the technology has improved at a dramatic and frankly startling pace, and in many domains we least expected. AI generated art – by tools like Dall-E and...

And yes, I used another AI, Midjourney, to generate this image! I’ve been playing a lot with OpenAI’s tools lately. OpenAI’s ChatGPT is amazingly powerful – frankly it’s scary. The day I installed its API I put out an article talking about some simple python scripts you can run with it, and this...

Lately I’ve been hearing a lot about ChatGPT, an AI that takes and answers prompts from a user. Perhaps the best way to describe ChatGPT is to just ask it, and here’s the answer given to me by the AI: “ChatGPT is a great tool for developers who want to create powerful AI-powered chatbots. It is easy...

As the new year approaches, many of us are planning the year to come. The old New Years Resolution is still a common practice, though at times the stats can seem a bit discouraging. According to one 2017 study, of the 41% of Americans who set new Years Resolution, only 9% felt like they’d successfully...

Many of us have an idea of morality and virtue, but if pressed to define it, I imagine we might struggle. Many of us have become disentangled from religion in the empirical modern world, and ethics can become fuzzy without the moral authority of religion to shape it for us. One should be wary of a nihilistic...