Today I decided to download and play with Meta AI but I didn’t use my Facebook or Instagram accounts. I used a brand new account with no connection to me. I don’t trust Facebook and the Meta “pattte blanche”, especially with AI, given how AI can manipulate us without us realising.
I asked it about Mindf*ck and genocide and it answered to both questions without skirting them. It did try to confuse me with a disambiguation question with the book.
Imagine that you’re out for a walk. You’re looking at the landscape and taking photos with your camera or phone. At the same time your GPS watch, or phone app is recording your location every second. What remains of the walk is a gps track that has a resolution of one set of gps co-ordinates per second, and photos when you took photos. Most of the walk is “lost” because to record video of the entire walk would be too consuming.
Nine to Five Mac wrote an article about “AI coding tools may be the end of freemium utility apps”. If the last three weeks are any indication of whether AI written apps can replace freemium apps the answer is both yes and no.
The Yes Illusion Let’s start with the illusion that AI can vibe code your app. If you’re doing something like a task list or snake, or similar then the answer might be yes, to some degree but in that case it requires preparation.
Last night and this morning I have been toying with the idea of the paid tiers and whether they’re worth it. In the proces I told Gemini about my context and it went from advising me the pro tier at 170 CHF per year, to going for the “free” Google AI studio option.
From Gemini to Google AI Studio I find the pivot interesting because you go from a conversational bot to something more powerful.
I chose to experiment with Le Chat by Mistral, the French AI alternative to Gemini, Claude and CatIFARTED (ChatGPT). For the experiment I copied my Photoprism photos from the drive I use that is connected a Raspberry pi to a laptop before running scripts to sort and remove duplicates. It worked well, with a nice little bonus which I’ll expand on later.
Goal: Clean Up Duplicate Photos My objective was to Remove duplicate photos from a large collection while keeping the best version of each file.
Let’s begin by saying that Flickr is not intended for video. It’s meant for photographers to backup and share their photos with like-minded individuals. When you use the Flickr app for iOS and Android it automatically backs up videos, and photos.
After some trial and error I was able to get the exif data attached to photos and then sorted chronologically into folders. In the process I noticed that almost 10,000 files were missing when the transfer was finished.
Recently I decided that I would backup my Flickr library locally despite having over a year left on my pro account. In so doing, when the decision comes whether to dump, or keep using flickr, I will know that my data is safely backed up locally. Of course I decided to play with the archive but came upon a snag.
E6 Microdegrees That snag is that Flickr uses the E6 Format, also known as Microdegrees.
A few days ago I was looking at MyAI and I was going to unsubscribe from the “Pro” account before they charged me, before realising that as an early adopter I have a year to play with MyAI for “free”. When I say that I can play with it for free I mean that I have been a Swisscom client for decades by now, so I paid for it through years of loyal custom.
Yesterday I had a chat with Google Gemini about mobile telephony. Specifically I was discussing Galaxus, Wingo and Coop Mobile. I told it that I was interested in a mobile plan in the same price range as Galaxus but using Swisscom as the mobile network rather than Sunrise.
In the process of telling it about the Coop plans it told me go for Wingo, and specific promotion plan, rather than others.
We are all familiar with the phrase. We learn better when we write things by hand, rather than when we type them on the keyboard. For decades people have been against typing, saying “It’s cold, it’s dead, it’s impersonal”. Those same people will then say “you have awful handwriting” and yet still feel nostalgia for hand written notes. In the age of AI more is being lost.
Ten Thousand Hours of Practice When people my age were growing up, if you wanted to sing, you needed to devote ten thousand hours to develop tone, timber and a good voice.