Learning

Yesterday I went for a half hour drive to do a favour, but in arriving where I had to do the favour I found that people were deeply focused and did not want to be interrupted so I went for a walk. I didn’t swap to the hiking shoes that were waiting patiently in the car. I wore my “recycled” shoes instead. I eventually regretted this because the ground that was frosty, also had deep puddles of water and I had to walk through them. Two or three times my feet got wet. While getting my feet wet I was also listening to a Linux Podcast, episode 56 of Linux After Dark and they were discussing whether people like to adopt a system and stick with it, or whether they like to experiment and try new things constantly.

For up to three months I was running my own instance via Masto.host and the experience was good. Setting up an instance is easy. Within a few minutes you can set up your own instance, post and perform administrative tasks such as accept trending hashtags and more.

No DevOps and No Code Required

Masto.host is great for non-technical people because it doesn’t require any specialist knowledge. You create a Masto.host account, and then you choose the cheapest server option. Bring up the instance it and you’re ready to go. It’s as easy as ordering a pizza, or in fact easier, because the choice is “Give me the cheapest option”.

According to Goodreads I am currently reading 97 books but in reality I am reading between three to five books consistently at the moment. I read several books at once because it gives me time to absorb ideas from one book whilst reading a second book, and then a third, and so on.

I, Robot

Although the book was written in 1950 it is still worth reading today. It shows the way people thought about computers back then. It shares the idea of huge robots, because of how big components were at the time, but it also theorises about how robots could seem irrational but have rational reasons for such behaviour. “Why are the robots dancing? I won’t continue down this topic because I don’t want to spoil the book for those that are not reading the book yet.

Roomba have been around for a long time. Every time I have the opportunity to experiment and learn from a roomba robot I do. I tell it to start vacuuming and then I watch as it explores room after room, gets jammed on a chair leg, a drying thing or even under certain toilets. I also watch with frustration as it throws a bit of dirt too far, and drives by it over and over, and doesn’t pick it up.

Every day or two I see people post about how the Fediverse should be simplified to welcome new people. It’s a shame. Signing up for a Fediverse server is easy. It’s the same process as for every site. The biggest difference is that you’re signing up for a privately owned, crowd sourced community instance. The instances vary slightly from mastodon to Firefish to ClassicPress to WordPress but at their core they are the same. It’s just the community that changes, but even that can be the same if you migrate from one instance to another.

Yesterday I played with Bing Chat, which is Microsoft’s AI engine and I noticed that I could play with generating images. I spent quite a bit of time generating a multitude of images, in part for fun, but also to get a grasp of the limitations of the opportunity presented by software like AI.

Faces

If you ask Dall-E via Bing Chat to generate a face then it can. It wanted to generate the face of a woman with curly hair so I did, and the image looks realistic. I then asked it to draw the face of a tired man and it did. It’s when I asked Dall-E to draw a woman cyclist exploring the Dolomites that I saw that faces are a mess. It’s fine with generating human faces, in isolation, but if you ask for a landscape, and a human with a face then the face is wrong. This is both great, and a shame. It’s great because it means that we still need to photograph real people doing real things, but it’s bad because if all we need is a face then AI is ready to provide us with some.

Yesterday I experimented with migrating my blog from WordPress to ClassicPress to see whether ClassicPress plays nicely with the fediverse. It does but there is room for improvement.

If you want instructions on how to migrate from wordpress you can find the instructions here. Summarised, you download the switch to ClassicPress plugin, you run it, it checks that you’re ready to migrate, you fix what needs to be fixed, and when ClassicPress sees that you’re ready it will allow you to start the migration. The migration takes a second or two. It felt almost instant in my case. You know it has succeeded because you see the “ClassicPress” message at the bottom of the admin section.

Two days ago I was given access to Google Bard and since then I have been experimenting. The key feature that sets Google Bard apart from ChatGPT is that it can answer questions about what is happening at the moment, rather than before September 2021. By being current you can ask it about yesterday’s news or the upcoming weather for a location, and it will give a useful answer. This is useful for time sensitive questions.

The Fediverse is great because people are experimenting and trying new idea. It’s also great because we can be there through every step of the process. This is also why things could be better. I am now writing my blog in Hugo first, and then moving the content over to Wordpress at the moment. I could just replace my Wordpress blog with Hugo but I don’t for two reasons. The first reason is that I’m experimenting, and if I change my mind about something, I can, without affecting Quality of Service. The second reason is that I believe that the production server should be in fine working order with as little downtime for users as possible. With one or two projects on the fediverse this isn’t the case. Downtime can be for hours, or even days at a time.

Transitioning from WordPress to Hugo

Transitioning from WordPress to Hugo is tempting because I don’t need an entire CMS for what I’m doing. What I need is a centralised system that checks for tags, titles and the theme, and updates the navigation as I add new pages. You don’t need a CMS for that.

The Good Old Days

If you go through the meta data for many of my static pages you will see that they were created with dreamweaver, frontpage 2000 and other solutions. The aim of these was to create an application that would prepare the html and navigation for pages, so we could concentrate on content creation. This was before the age of the CMS.