Have a couple of reads I found interesting. The anti-AI crowd talks a *lot* about the so-called cognitive decline that results from using GenAI (for particular tasks and in particular ways, not that they much care for nuance) as if it's causing actual brain damage, a point that they'll maintain despite the studies not actually saying *that* and moreover hardly concluding that GenAI should be banned as a result of their dangerous findings. (One might recall the frequent allegations that watching TV "rots" ones brain in a meaningful way and the likely contempt with which we'd view anyone who believed that in a literal sense.) Anyway, these articles touch on the described phenomenon in a more sensible manner.

From singularityhub: Is AI Making Us Dumber? (more...)

So I've got some open source AI models running locally on my machine now. I actually find the image and 3D model generation ones to be pretty useful -- I mean I'm not doing anything *important* with them, but generally after a lot of finagling and tweaking prompts I can come up with something that looks at least as good as and sometimes even better than the thing I set out to make. And I do genuinely enjoy the creative back-and-forth of prompt tweaking and the ability to really play with variations on a theme. It's neat.

What I've done less with, however, is the chat functions. A lot of the open source chat models just won't run for me (whether that's because my CPU doesn't have dedicated AI hardware -- my GPU does -- or configuration issues or other reasons, I cannot say), but the ones that do are, uh, interesting. Granted, local open source models were never going to be as knowledgeable as ChatGPT or Gemini (the things I have can't access the internet and rely on data last updated in 2024), but even taking that into account they're just... well. Let me show you. (more...)

I love that I'm at a point in my 3d-printing knowledge where someone just posted about a problem with their 3d prints and I glanced at the included image and immediately knew what the issue was. Granted it's not like this was a super difficult-to-diagnose problem, and multiple people had already weighed in with way more knowledge than I could have provided -- I know what the *issue* was and how to resolve it simply, but they know about tweaking settings and specific values in a way I don't and may never because I just want to tweak the setting to my liking and leave it there and forget about it forever (or until I get another 3d printer that requires its own differently tweaked settings to be left on and forgotten about forever).

Still, I love that I just looked at that image and immediately thought, "Shit needs supports!" XD

...but long enough to have accumulated 1900 spam comments?! JC on a pogo stick.

Anyway, I wanted to post briefly about writing and common phrases/expressions. I was reading a story by a member of a writing group I recently joined, and she wrote that the character's knuckles had turned white from performing a particular repetitive action. And of course I knew what she meant, and the phrasing wouldn't at all have given me pause if I hadn't been in a mood to ponder such things (which I generally am when I'm reading a piece in order to critique it) -- and I got to wondering about "clichés" and how we can (sometimes) end up confusing the reader when we make an effort to avoid them. For instance, I knew what the author of this story was talking about because the expression is common enough. But I could step up to bat thirty thousand times and endure sixteen million close calls on the freeway and strangle a billion fat-necked babies and my knuckles wouldn't even remotely whiten unless my skin were really dry and I needed to put on some lotion. So if the author had tried to describe the character's knuckles becoming white in some novel, creative way -- without using the well worn phrase -- I might not have had any idea what she meant. (more...)

So now you can read my most recent tweets and maybe follow me on Twitter (@WesCrayon) and stuff! I don't tweet very much, though, and I almost never say anything remotely important. 😛