For a long time this blog has been black with some splashes of International Orange. The favorite icon and logo was some weird grid of dots (and yes, I give Google crap for Material Design). Now that Google has brought icons to the desktop search results as well as mobile I wanted a rounder favicon. Their direction is round icons all the way, and my weird dots don't look great in this format.

The new logo and favorite icon is a dynamic pie chart. This updates daily (the favorite icon will lag a bit due to caching) and shows the category distribution of posts over the last two years. The logo text is just a random permutation of the category colors. This is stupidly precise and geeky and also a lot more cheerful. I may add a few more splashes over time.

I started with some online tool for the palette and used International Orange as a starting point and its color wheel complement to pin the other end of the range. This looks terrible. I then had a long conversation with ChatGPT 4 and told it what I liked and didn't like about each palette it came up with. I was pretty high maintenance but the AI was patient and I'm pretty happy with the color scheme we ended up with.

Add your comment...

Related Posts

• Material Design 3
• The Secret Diary of a Xamarin Android Developer, Aged 48 1/3
• Where did that app icon go, Android?

You Might Also Like

• Sawmill Flats
• Expert
• Sunset sunset

(All Etc Posts)

Why Poverty Persists in America

"In 2020, Americans spent $1.6 billion just to cash checks."

Add your comment...

Related Posts

• New Scientist on Immigration
• 2020 Results
• Episode Four

You Might Also Like

• 4K One Year Global Cloud Timelapse
• TLOTW #7
• McCloud River Trail (Three Waterfalls)

(All Etc Posts)

Timelapse of some great clouds after the January storms in California.

Here's an animation of ten years of San Francisco 311 cases using photos and locations.

I've started a new more comprehensive review format that includes TV, Movies and Podcasts. Check out January and February.

My Echo Show is driving me nuts.

If you're into reading ESRI Shapefiles in .NET my library has migrated to .NET Standard and is now on NuGet. Read more. And enjoy this shapefile based zoom to my neighborhood.

Hikes to Phantom Falls and Shell Ridge Open Space.

Related posts are now way more related thanks to moving from Word2Vec to OpenAI embeddings. I've also been reluctantly moving to Google Analytics 4. Here are some API tips.

Analysis of OpenAI's risible blog post on how close they are to creating artificial general intelligence (AGI).

Previously:

• 2022: Monitor page index status with Google Sheets, Apps Script and the Google Search Console API
• 2021: Pandemic Gas Mystery
• 2020: EAT

Links for February 2023

Add your comment...

Related Posts

• Animation of a year of Global Cloud Cover
• Timelapse, Week of Jan 31 2022
• Timelapse of San Francisco Clouds After Various Atmospheric Rivers

You Might Also Like

• Methyl L-α-aspartyl-L-fucking-phenylalaninate
• Open Immigration
• #Resist

(All Etc Posts)

Open AI just dropped a pretty remarkable blog post on their roadmap for not destroying civilization with their imminent artificial general intelligence (AGI):

"As our systems get closer to AGI, we are becoming increasingly cautious with the creation and deployment of our models. Our decisions will require much more caution than society usually applies to new technologies, and more caution than many users would like."

Now, I'm around 98% sure that Open AI mostly answers the question: What if we allocated unlimited resources to building a better auto-complete? ChatGPT is an amazing tool but it's amazing at guessing which word (token) is likely to appear next. Quite possibly their blog post is just an exercise in anchoring - if they're 95% of the way to AGI then GPT4 must be pretty amazing and therefore worth a lot of money. If everyone realized that they're more like 2% of the way there, and the next 1% is going to be exponentially difficult, then some of the froth would blow off.

But what if they really are close to the singularity? After all, we have no idea what causes non-artificial intelligence.

Their ideas for keeping us safe are a little disturbing:

"We think public standards about when an AGI effort should stop a training run, decide a model is safe to release, or pull a model from production use are important."

Given the lack of transparency around the inner workings of ML models, and the lack of knowledge around what intelligence even looks like, this is a pretty risible idea. And:

"Finally, we think it’s important that major world governments have insight about training runs above a certain scale."

We are facing down the prospect of a second Trump term while the UK has a Prime Minister who thinks that a homeless person might be 'in business'.

The most concerning part for me is:

"...we hope for a global conversation about three key questions: how to govern these systems, how to fairly distribute the benefits they generate, and how to fairly share access."

Creating AGI would be an amazing and terrifying accomplishment. Treating it as a slave feels like the most surefire way to usher in the most terrifying possible consequences, for us and for the AGIs.

Full disclosure: I use Open AI embeddings for related posts and site search. The words on this blog are my own though. I do occasionally generate a post image using Stable Diffusion like the rather strange one above.

Add your comment...

Related Posts

• Can I move to a Better Simulation Please?
• Sod Searle And Sod His Sodding Room
• Upgrading from word2vec to OpenAI

You Might Also Like

• 2017 Total Solar Eclipse from Madras, OR
• Twin Peaks Loop
• Crushing PNGs in .NET

(All Etc Posts)

Fuck You, You Fat-Headed Roald Dahl-Censoring Fuckers

#RoaldDahl

--

Full Dianne Feinstein Resignation Speech

#DianneFeinstein resignation, worth watching in full.

Add your comment...

Related Posts

• #Resist
• Google Trends for 'impeach supreme court justice' This Week
• 25th Centuary

You Might Also Like

• New Scientist on Immigration
• Pulling the plug on Facebook and Twitter, Tweet Archive
• Catfood Weather 2.30

(All Etc Posts)

ITHCWY just migrated to a new server with more capacity. From clouds to pollution to covid monitoring there is a lot going on under the hood here these days. I can already see that search is a lot more snappy.

Man, moving Windows servers just sucks. Internal GDI error - that's a permissions issue obviously (not my first time). Can't publish? You must need to install Web Deploy twice and then uninstall it and install it one more time for luck. Web.config error at startup? Of course Windows Server 2022 still doesn't come with URL Rewriting and you need to install it from some corner of the MS website like an animal. Yes, I should use something else but my custom CMS is probably reaching the same level of complexity as an F16 and I'm just one person. Enjoy the fast search!

Add your comment...

Related Posts

• CodePlex Shutdown: Shapefile, Orb, StackHash and Blogger2BlogML Migration
• Migrating from Blogger to BlogEngine.NET
• Updates were installed...

You Might Also Like

• Congress: instead of breaking the Internet how about fixing child identity theft?
• Time Zone Time Lapse
• Full Outlook Web Access on Chromebook

(All Etc Posts)

This animation shows a random sample of 311 cases that have a photo and specific location. It covers July 4, 2013 to January 5, 2023. Created using the 311 dataset plotted over a street map of San Francisco.

Add your comment...

Related Posts

• San Francisco Crime 2003 to 2021
• Assassination Coordinates
• San Francisco New Year's Eve Timelapse 2020

You Might Also Like

• Twin Peaks 360 4K
• Rapids
• Enable GZIP compression for Amazon S3 hosted website in CloudFront

(All Etc Posts)

Testing out some shapefile code with a zoom into San Francisco. This uses five different shapefiles:

Country borders are from Eric Muller's fips-10 shapefile.

States and US Counties come from the United States Census Bureau.

San Francisco 5 foot elevation contours from DataSF.

Finally the street map for San Francisco is from data.gov.

These are almost all based on different projections and I did my best to actually line everything up but if you're heading over for coffee it's probably best to stick with Google Maps.

Add your comment...

Related Posts

• San Francisco 311 Cases Animation
• San Francisco Street Tree Datalapse
• San Francisco Crime 2003 to 2021

You Might Also Like

• I Voted!
• TLOTW #6
• StackOverflow DevDays

(All Etc Posts)

In November ITHCWY reached 1,000 posts. Here are 17 of the best.

What happens if you ask Stable Diffusion to generate a typical person from every country in the world?

WebCamSaver 3.30 is available to download. Also Android Fortune Cookies 1.30 and Catfood Earth 4.30.

Timelapse of a plane landing at SFO. Also some more Bangalore Sunsets. And one from SF.

Get rid of the unhelpful word robot.

Animation of 20 years of shifts in the US Presidential vote.

Does anyone know why San Francisco felt the need to redistrict the Pacific Ocean?

You can now follow both ITHCWY and me on Mastodon.

Previously:

• 2021: The Secret Diary of a Xamarin Android Developer, Aged 48 1/3
• 2020: Accessing Printer Press ESC to cancel
• 2019: Winter Solstice 2019

Links for December 2022

Add your comment...

Related Posts

• Winter Solstice 2015
• Winter Solstice 2017
• Animation of a year of Global Cloud Cover

You Might Also Like

• Winter Solstice 2018
• Shiti
• Coho Salmon in Lagunitas Creek

(All Etc Posts)

What does Stable Diffusion think a typical person looks like from each country?

This image is composed of 248 faces generated with the following prompt:

"photo of a typical person from Vietnam, highly symmetrical face, portrait photography, highly detailed Vietnam background, 4k, 35mm, sharp focus, amazing photo, portrait of the year"

Using seed 960604, 50 iterations, 7.5 scale, and just varying the country name in the prompt text.

There is no gender implied in the prompt but it certainly seems more likely to generate a woman. It seems to find something distinctive about most countries. The region that surprises me the most is Eastern Europe which ends up being very similar. Click the image above for a larger version.

Add your comment...

Related Posts

• Stable Diffusion Animation of Scale Parameter
• Stable Diffusion Watches a Security Camera - a short horror movie
• New Scientist on Immigration

You Might Also Like

• Jupiter from Casini Ranch
• Milky Way and stars over Redding
• California 2014 Propositions

(All Etc Posts)