ChatGPT and my existential crisis

Last week I discovered that ChatGPT can write “In the style of Rob Miles”. I’m not sure if it will do this for everyone. The internet creates bubbles of personalisation so that our searches find the kinds of things that we like, and perhaps ChatGPT does that too. Perhaps if you ask for something “in the style of Rob Miles” you’ll get the version that fits with your interests. Even so, ChatGPT knows about a version of me.

ChatGPT knows me because I’ve been blogging and posting stuff for over 20 years. There’s a lot of Rob on the internet. Although I must admit that all those years ago when I decided to put up a blog post every day I didn’t think that it would be a step on the road to creating a computerised copy.

It is a tiny bit worrying. Do I need to exist any more, now that there is a freely available version online? People have been known to pay me to write things “in the style of Rob Miles” but now anyone can do it. Where will this lead? Folks might get ChatGPT to write horrible things in my style. Even worse, they might get paid instead of me. When I put my blog up I don’t remember ticking a box that said “I allow companies obsessed with shareholder value to mine this data and use it to create machines that can imitate me.” Oh well. Welcome to the modern world. It is a form of immortality I suppose. At least until ChatGPT finds a better Rob Miles

Double Covid

Number one wife has just tested positive for Covid. Now there’s even more of it about. But at least we can now sit together and compare symptoms.

Coding with Covid

I had lots of plans for the next week or so. None of which included catching Covid. But there you are. Apparently there is a lot of it about at the moment. I’m the only person in the family who has tested positive so far, which means that I’m confined to upstairs and can only eat things which can be slid under the door. Fortunately I like pizza. The good news is that I’m getting a lot of code written at the moment.

Chat-GPT Me

Good grief. That is truly scary. I’ll get my coat…..

Good Old Adobe

I’m doing some editing work on the pages of the book today. So, against my better judgement I installed Adobe Acrobat Reader to work on the files. I’m not particularly pleased to report that it behaved exactly as I expected it would.

Mudfall

Today was going great right up to the point where I fell on my back in the mud. I was just about to shout “Careful, it might be slippy” to our six year old charge when I illustrated this fact to great effect by falling over. Fortunately no lasting damage was done, although I did have to spend the rest of the trip walking round in a slowly solidifying coat and jeans.

Video payoff

I’m recording video walkthroughs for my Begin to Code Cloud book at the moment. I’m really pleased I’m doing this. Today I found an horrendous issue with a setting which broke a bunch of demos in the book text. Moral of the story folks: don’t just use your main machine for demos you want to give away; it will have configurations that make things work for you that won’t work for anyone else….

Smart Meter - Final word

Today, having queried E.ON about their policy of not upgrading Smart Meters I get this final badly worded response from the company.

..we would only upgrade your meter when your current meter started to fail, ie stops providing electric.

Oh well.

Smart Meter - Dumb company

Just got a reply to my request for a Smart Meter upgrade (so that I can have a smart gas meter).

Unfortunately, we are currently not upgrading SMET 1 smart meters. It is something that is in the works, but this would be in the future.

I think this means that E.ON are not in possession of a time machine. Otherwise they could upgrade my meter in the past.

You know you are old when....

…you get mistaken for a 92 year old. To be fair, it was at a distance and I did have a hat on.

Smart Meter - Dumb System

Today was going to be the day they installed our new smart meter so that we can watch our money go up in smoke in real time from the comfort of the kitchen. So I was up first thing in the garage throwing stuff into the car to clear a path to the meter ready for the swap.

The installer turns up, takes one look at the electricity meter and says he can’t fit a smart gas meter. Apparently my electricity meter is smart, but not smart enough. It is a SMET 1 when it needs to be a SMET 2. He leaves having done nothing and I headed off glumly to the tip .

I have really no idea why the installation of a smart gas meter is dependent on the electricity meter. I’m also annoyed because I deliberately waited until I knew that SMET 2 meters were being installed before getting our electricity meter done. Then they installed a SMET 1 meter anyway. I guess they had a warehouse full of the things.

Anyhoo, I’ve emailed the electricity company to ask for a meter upgrade. Let’s see how that turns out.

Pokemon TV

Spending quite a bit of time watching Pokemon TV shows at the moment. This might be something to do with having a 6 year old visitor to stay.

Golfing for real

I’ve played a lot of golf recently. Or something. Most weeks you’ll find us firing up Walkabout golf for nine holes of fun and games. Today I got to find out if any of my Oculus Quest skills have transferred to the real world when we met up for a round of real crazy golf at Puttstars Leeds. I think my practice has made me a bit better, I can swing and hit the ball at a repeatable angle, which is nice. The major difficulty was that the greens played a lot slower, so lots of my shots fell short.

But it was still great fun. I can recommend Putstars Leeds, the folks there were friendly and they also had a whole bunch of video games. Great fun.

Mystery innards

I took this to pieces today to try and fix an issue with it. This is as far as I got. My nerve failed and I had to put it back together. But what is it?

Stealth postman

Our postman is lovely. Great bloke. But I think he has a bit of ninja in his soul. I think he may have perfected the art of stealth knocking. That or our doorbell is broken. This lunchtime we were having lunch (what were the chances eh?) and I received the message. “We have tried to deliver your package but nobody was home”. I hate it when that happens. I’m not in a particular hurry to use what’s in the package now being “returned to the sorting office” but this all delays the closure of actually getting the thing to my house, which I hate.

Fame at last. Or not.

A while back I wrote a little post about ChatGPT. And then, in yesterday’s Observer I found one of their technology correspondents echoing my thoughts. “Aha!” I thought as I entered a comment on the piece making this point and linking back to my article “This is my chance to be recognised as a great seer with thousands of readers hanging off my every word”.

I checked my traffic stats this morning. They had gone down a bit. Oh well.

Master of the bulbs

Today we had two bulbs fail. So I went to my little drawer full of different types, pulled out a couple of replacements and fitted them. I love it when that happens.

Wobbly network

You know how it feels when you try to make something better and end up breaking everything. Well, today I went there. For a while I’ve been perplexed as to why the eero router next to where I work doesn’t connect to the wired network. The wire is plugged in and everything. I’ve been blaming lots of things, but today I thought I’d try to get to the bottom of the problem. So I unplugged the eero from the wire to see what happens. The answer was a bit of a surprise. All of the machines in front of me fell off the network. Everything was suddenly cut off from the internet. A quick check of network status from the service provider confirmed that things were still working (I once had all the networks in Hull fall over as I was doing some network changes at home. That was hilarious.) so it was definitely my fault.

Such is life. All the machines around me were definitely plugged in, but none of them could see the network anymore. I plugged the eero back into the network. And the machines all came back on line. Have you figured it out yet? Turns out that a cable in another room (I have a fairly tortuous home network arrangement) had become disconnected and taken the little network in my room offline. The eero in my room had noticed this and promptly reversed the way it was working. Rather than working as an access point hanging off its network connection it turned into a network connection for the tiny network in my room. That way the machines in my room stayed online, although they are now all running over WiFi. This explained the fairly appalling network performance of my computers and why the WiFi was always so busy. As soon as I fixed the broken connection everything came back to life and things got a lot faster for me, which was nice.

It would have been nice if something in the eero app could have told me what was going on. The information I get is very minimal and not that useful. It seems that to get a proper view of the network I have to pay Amazon a subscription. Which I’m far too mean to do.

Taxing Day

I’ve spent today doing my tax. All day. Working out how much I’ve spent and how much I’ve earned. I’ve been very careful to get the numbers right. Unlike senior members of government.

Serendipity in the waste bin

I decided today that the blog needs to be updated. I keep a diary of what I’ve been up to and the every now and then I sit down and write all the posts. I’ve no idea why I do this, it is just that I feel happier doing it than not.

Anyhoo, today I was creating the posts and I thought it might be fun to add a picture of the bottom of the boat that I tried to print earlier. It came off the print bed as it was printing so that all I had was a small chunk of the bottom of the keel and what looked like a ball of wool. Beautifully printed though. I’d dropped it in the waste paper bin so I had a little look to see if I could find it. I didn’t find it, but I did find an Aibo memory stick for the robot dogs that must have fallen off my crowded desk into the bin at some point over the last week. I’m really pleased I found this, they are quite hard to get hold of and very expensive. Plus it contains a tiny bit of “dog personality” that I really don’t want to lose.

So at least my blog is useful for something.