Today it’s piano day. Not really very interesting, except that Alex will be performing! On the street! We are really proud of him. We will try and make a movie of Alex’ mini concert, similar to some youtubers we subscribe to like daniele vitale (sax) and karolina protsenko (violin) we now have our very own Alex taking his very first steps into the world of entertainment and art.
Artificial intelligence is a thing we keep hearing more and more about, but what are we really talking about? Is it really something smart and intelligent. It is certainly smart, but sadly the intelligent part still needs to be created.
A few years ago we had various very good search engine. You could give it a couple of words, and it would use those words to really quickly give a list of results that were related to the words you provided. They improved this search by remembering where people clicked. More clicks meant a result was probable better, so it got a bit higher score.
Now OpenAI has added a new layer to this. It’s tool ChatGPT can understand text, and can tell you something in a natural fashion. You can ask it a question, and it will give you an answer back, just like a normal conversation. Understanding someone is a very complex task. You can ask the same thing in lots of different ways, and small details can be very important or meaningless. The ‘engine’ is trained to know what is important, and what is not. Instead of giving you a list of sites, now you can simply get a summary as an answer. The AI is not storing a huge amount of links, it is reading everything, and storing the information it finds, which is what it uses to answer your question.
We are not there yet, but it is a huge step forward. Understanding language is really difficult, and making it seem ‘natural’ is very hard, but it looks like they really achieved something here. Still, there is no intelligence. For now there is no curiosity, no initiative, no desire. The AI only responds to queries. It remembers what you asked it, but thats it. You can ask it things, and it can tell you things, but it won’t do anything else. It is really good, and clearly the current ‘AI’ is much much better then the ‘old’ search engines.
We can even ask it directly.
| Q: | are you really intelligent? |
| A: | As an AI language model, I don’t possess a conscious intelligence like humans do. However, I have been trained on vast amounts of data and algorithms to respond to various queries, so I can simulate an intelligent conversation with humans. I can understand natural language and can generate responses based on the information I have been trained on. My abilities are limited to what I have been trained on and what algorithms are available to me. |
| Q: | can you repeat the answer in dutch |
| A: | Als een AI-taalmodel … |
I have to admit that I did have some unhealthy habits the last few years. Almost every day I ate some sausage, or some cheese, or a couple of nuts. A few days a week I would also drink a beer (usually after running), and these habits were a bit to much. Luckily these habits were reasonably easy to change.
A few weeks ago I was still close to 80 kilos. I then set my target to 75 kilos (which is my usual weight), but as I am getting closer to my goal I am thinking that maybe it would be better to have an even lower goal of around 68. This seems to be the perfect average BMI, and it will leave me with some extra leverage and maybe even with some extra health benefits.
I somehow doubt that for me this is really an obtainable goal, because the last time I weight less than 70 kilos must have been literaly in the previous century but if I don’t try I will never know. If I manage to do it I must treat myself to a good gift. Maybe a new Dell laptop.
Too good to throw out. Toogoodtogo is an app that makes an effort to reduce waste. When a product is still pretty good a company can decide to toss it in the trash, or sell it with a big discount (or give it away, but that sometimes conflicts with the business interests). I installed the app and we have tried it twice!
First experience (4.99)
There were some left-overs available at a local Chinese restaurant. This felt like quite a risk, because what are you going to get? The left-overs from the buffet? Still we took a gamble, and what we got was unexpected. Four containers with freshly made Chinese food. Nothing to good to go, just normal Chinese food, with the only exception that we could not chose the menu. What we got was pretty good. White rice, rice with chicken, noodles with chicken and croquet’s. All very tasty, but not something that was at risk of being thrown away.
Second experience (3.99)
The second time we rescued a package from the trash from a big supermarket. This time we got lots of meat. Bacon, bacon pieces, sausages, yogurt (8x), and three apples. All the meat was from a pig. The best-before dates were all on the current date. Not bad, the products all looked pretty good, and we received a big amount of food. I spend the evening frying the meat and even though I would normally avoid pig-meat out of personal preference it looks like the next couple of days I’ll be having pig for lunch.
Conclusion
It is really a gamble. You don’t know what you will get, and you don’t know what state it will be in. I don’t think we will use this app a lot more. The food you get is cheap, and it can be a lot of food, but it is still a gamble. It is unusual to get something you really need. In our case it is much easier to simply pay a little more and get exactly what we want/need. As a game/gamble/surprise it might be fun to get something with friends.
For the company it is an easy way to achieve something. In the case of the Chines restaurant I think they used as a new way to advertise. A random menu for a low price, to maybe get some new customers. In this case I think there is a high probability I would try this Chinese place again, just to see what I will get next time. In case of the supermarkt the app clearly achieved its goal. Avoid throwing away food that was perfectly fine.
Companies that can really benefit from this app are companies that deal with perishable foods. Fruit, vegetables, bread, meat, fish, etc. These shops can avoid throwing away things and get some new potential customers at the same time. For the customer there is the potential for cheap food, but with a risk in not knowing what you are going to get.
A couple of days ago I made another cake and I wanted to share this extremely easy recipe. You use one yogurt cup for all the measurements, so there are almost no dishes to clean!
Ingredients:
– One small cup with yogurt (lemon or vanilla taste, or whatever taste you like)
– 2 eggs
Use the empty yogurt cup (no need to clean it) to measure the next items:
– about one cup of sugar
– about 3 cups of flour
– about half a cup of olive oil
Steps:
Throw everything together and mix with a spoon until it is a somewhat smooth mass. Afterwards you can optionally add some extra ingredients like:
– extra pieces of apple
– extra pieces of chocolate
– extra pieces of walnut
– extra pieces of banana
– extra pieces of rasped lemon peel
Put everything in the desired shape. Put in a preheated oven around 180 degrees for 45 minutes. Let cool, and you’re done.
Our birdhouse showed us we that we had set our goals way to high. Our objectives were unobtainable. Maybe it was caused by the heat, or the general lack of birds in our area. We don’t know, but it is clear that after more than half a year we haven’t seen a single bird getting near the birdhouse we placed outside of Alex’ room.
We needed to refocus to something a bit more realistic. There are lots of insects, so why not make them a home, and see if we can get some results here. An insect home should be easier to make, and insects are probably less picky compared to birds.
Step one: With a couple of pieces of wood we made the basic frame
Step two: We pained the basic frame the same color as the wall, so it will not stick out so much
Step three: We collected a couple of sticks and some bamboo, which we cut in lots of pieces of 3 centimeters
Step four: All the pieces were glued inside the frame.
Step five: Leave to dry, and hang outside.
Now we only need to be patient. Maybe some insect will find the hotel and visit it for a while. We shall see.
Sorry, this entry is only available in Nederlands.
As a test/hobby project I have been building a game similar to minesweeper, but with a completely different theme. Instead of looking for mines you will need to look for mushrooms. The game logic was easy because it is shared lots of times online. The entire app structure was for me, and was basically what I wanted to learn/achieve. What I was missing was the assets. Images and sounds to make it all look perfect. For this I used fiverr and I hired an indonesian guy to make around 20 images for me. Great to have such a huge international marketplace. What I am still missing it some soundeffects. I will probably try and convince the kids to help me with this, because Alex has already showed me he does this very well, like the shooting effect in our stopmotion.
The cops are dispatched to retrieve a case full of gold, but some bad guy also wants a piece of the action. A shootout is the result, and the bad guy bites the dust. After the cops depart the scene a stray dog checks out the aftermath.
A combination of playmobil toys, the Stop Motion app, some ketchup and lots of patience we made our very first very short film. Enjoy!