Good morning. Hello. How are you? #778
Kit Kat proliferation, Pedal fabrication, AI disappointments.
Good morning! Hello! How’s it going? All well? I hope so. Have a good weekend? I do hope so. Mine was lovely, thanks for asking. Friday I did some errands, who doesn’t love errands? I went to World Market for some gift buying and came away with a bunch of new Kit Kat flavors. Combined with the ones I just purchased off of the internet, I now have ten new flavors, which is very exciting. I am a bit disappointed in the gingerbread house flavor (which is American!), which is a bit too coffee flavored for me. The cheesecake one is delicious. Man there sure is a lot of innovation in Kit Kats, it is definitely one thing that is going right with the world.
Also went to Lowe’s hardware so I could purchase a router so I could finish the toilet pedal project, which took up most of the weekend. Deceptively complex project, adding a wooden food pedal to this contraption. Firstly, the pedal, in its un-depressed state, is at an angle, 45° or so, pointing up at you. So when you press your foot to it, if you are pressing into a piece of wood, sitting square on the metal pedal, you’d be pressing into the hard edge of the wood. So I needed to smooth that off, which I did with a router and a 1” roundover bit. I haven’t used a router since junior high, so I was very proud of myself, that was very fun. I don’t have a router table, and the little self-guide on the router is made for thicker wood than I was using, so I had to eyeball it. Only took two tries.
Next I had to rout out the part of the wood which will rest on the metal pedal. You want the pedal recessed into the wood, to give the whole thing a bit more strength when you’re pressing it, because you’re not pressing exactly vertically, and there will be some sheer force, so you don’t want all that just on the screw. In theory, I could have done this with my new router, but I was stupid and only bought the single 1” roundover bit I needed and bought a larger set of bits on Amazon cuz it was cheaper, only they hadn’t arrived yet. So I did this with my Dremel rotary tool, and its little router add-on contraption, which worked really well but was very slow. Took about an hour. Then I did the bolt hole and did a little countersink for the bolt head.
Then I painted the thing black and while that dried I turned my attention to drilling a 5/16” hole through the 1/8” steel of the pedal, which took forever. Seriously. I was using three drills to keep them from overheating, keeping the thing lubricated with 3-in-1 oil, drilled my pilot hole (and broke a bit doing it), and just going slow and steady. Took about two hours. Unpleasant. Smelly. Steel shavings everywhere. but I got it done! Look at this thing!
The next and final step is Emma’s gonna give it some upholstery with some faux, self-adhesive black leather, to give it a little added layer of softness and some water (yeah, water) protection. But I am very into it!
This whole contraption really is exciting. I mean, it’s solving a decades-old problem in my life, it was brought about by the collective help and thinking of the GMHHAY readership (thank you again!), and I got to make something on the workbench with wood, which is something that is so, so satisfying. Did it take all weekend? Mostly, but it was so so worth it. Great way to spend a weekend.
I also managed to get my podcast done this weekend. I was kind of convinced I wasn’t going to make it, given how long the pedal was taking, but I finished up the pedal at about 12:30 Sunday, so that left the afternoon for the podcast. You can find it on iTunes, here, or wherever your finer podcasts are purveyed, except Spotify, cuz that is a hassle and not worth it, I think. But what do I know. Drop a line if you are a Spotify podcast listener and yearning for more Webb Chatham Report in your life, I suppose it could be fun to tinker around and work that into my workflow.
I played around some with the various AI models people are going gaga for this weekend and I gotta say… I am mostly unimpressed? I mean, okay, first, hats off to that Prismatic Labs company and their new Lensa. My god, they must have made so much money this weekend. My entire Instagram feed was Lensa illustrations. At $8-12 a pop that is a lot of money just from my friends, let alone the whole rest of the internet. The app itself seems pretty similar to their previous app, Prisma, which I was really impressed with. I have a deep desire to use some sort of AI like that on Timehop memories, I think it would be huge.
But Lensa does not seem a huge leap forward over Prisma, just an incremental improvement, and a brilliant business plan. That said, I’m a sucker as much as anyone and I ran it on myself, and mostly the thing just gave me more hip glasses and thicker, more luxurious hair, with far more body, thank you Lensa, for reminding me that my hair is thin and stringy.
Also I swear I gave it a bunch of selvies with other poses but this seems to be the only one that ended up looking any good.
Mildly regret spending that $11. I could have bought a cool box cutter that does a cool flip move into a scraper instead.
Turning to that other supposed AI revolution-of-the-week, GPT Chat. Okay, first, I signed up, read the docs, and the AI is not supposed to give advice, which is deeply reassuring and somewhat mitigates my concerns from last week where Dmitry asked it to summarize Apple’s ATT policies and… GPT chat gave advice. But it was doing so in the context of “writing an article in the style of…” which I guess… means the rules don’t count? I don’t know. It is confusing. I have seen this a couple times. Seems a weird workaround.
For my own use of it, so far, it has been a bore. I can’t get it to do anything. I think this is because I am not asking it to write something in the style of someone else, which seems to be the most common use case where it’s impressive? But I do not consider that particularly impressive because it is very easy for me to write in the style of someone else, and also utterly not fun or useful, because writing in the style of other people is boring. I keep asking it for, like, advice or help or information or just to chat with me, and it keeps just giving me the same response over and over again, that as a large language model it can’t do these things. It can’t give me information on specific products, which is deeply weird. It can’t tell me about specific movies, also weird. It won’t tell me how it’s doing.
I guess I will keep at it, see if I can get it to do something interesting. I can see how it could be really useful for coders, especially (ahem) those who don’t like to write their documentation, which is definitely a useful thing.
But as a writer, I’m not particularly worried about this thing taking my job. If anything, it is illustrating the glory of GMHHAY, which is form-free and idea-heavy. There’s not really some horrible risk of an AI imitating the style of GMHHAY, because it is mostly style-free, just written in the manner of a human being talking. It is just a long litany of mildly interesting ideas, not fleshed out, one after the other. I suppose maybe I could take an idea I have here, that I usually write up in a paragraph or two, and tell Chat AI to flesh it out. Hrm actually I will try that today with that paragraph from a few issues back about Mark Fisher’s Capitalism Realism and the dedcline of call centers.
Eh, never mind.
We also had a lovely, 2020-style, old-school Zoom with some friends on Friday and it was… super fun? I mean, it’s weird to be nostalgic for that time, but it was quite pleasant to sit on Zoom and shoot the shit with some friends, I’m not going to lie. I suppose this is a circumstanc of us a) living so far from most of our friends and b) still, you know, being covid cautions, but it was quite nice. I like my friends.
Spent a lot of time with my daughter, I don’t know if you know this but I have a daughter, she is five, she is great. She likes to snuggle. Yesterday Emma and her cleaned the floor and Jane pretended she was picking up a bunch of love off of the floor. “Oh here’s some more love over here!” It was super adorable. She also drew me a very nice Hello Kitty picture. Maybe I’ll show you that tomorrow. We talked about how she’s going to go to school in ten months and she said that seemed fun, and she liked to learn, and she didn’t mind that she was going to leave mommy and daddy for a few hours each day. She is great. This is a good age. She still freaks out and yells at me about absolutely nothing but she gets it under control pretty quick usually. Still a little bit bossy but not too too bad. Some woman at the playground told Emma that Jane was “remarkable” so hey that is nice. We are looking for more chapter book series at the second/third grade level if anyone has any nice recommendations.
Justa mix for you today, old and new, tall and short, narrow and wide. Some old local boston gems, some new tracks from beloved oldies — like this excellent new Wedding Present single. Also very into “David Lynch Has a Painting Made of Flies Eyes,” no idea what’s up with that fine tune. Good stuff, good stuff.
ALL RIGHT. A new week. No problem at all. No case of the Mondays nosiree. Let’s do this. Talk tomorrow.
For chapter books have you all read the Ada Twist series (they made chapter books with the characters from the picture books) or Zoey and Sassafras? Both are girls solving mysteries through science. Zoey and her cat Sassafras help solve problems for the magical creatures who live in the woods behind their house. Marlowe is currently hooked on the Magic Treehouse books. I've also heard the Mia Mayhem series is good but we haven't read them yet.