She will be 105 in September. She struggles to recognize her four children, let alone her countless grandchildren. Today, she said, "Nobody told me how to die." She has always wanted to die in her own home, an oversized place that has always had room for an endless parade of visitors. She has always been very "social." Although she struggles to remember the old friends dropping by, she chats happily "on automatic." There are a lot of relatives. She was raised on a farm near North Battleford, Saskatchewan, where her Russian parents raised 16 children. I asked "AI" - specifically Claude 3 Sonnet , to describe this situation in a short essay. I have taken the liberty of letting Grammarly , my AI writing assistant, make a few corrections to Sonnet's purple prose. This is the slightly edited version: She sits in the twilight of her extraordinary life, a living embodiment of resilience and grace. At 105 years old, her eyes, dimmed by time, still...
This may not belong in a blog about Second Life, but let's face it, real life is the most popular topic in Second Life. I have a bad case of Cassandra Complex ". It turns out that I am very good at seeing catastrophe coming. At least three times I have been fired from huge projects for predicting disaster. Once disaster actually struck, for some reason, nobody gets back to pat me on the back. When COVID struck, back in early 2020, my view of the future was very dark. I could see hundreds of millions of deaths, based on what we knew at that point. Back then, we did not expect a vaccine any tie soon. For a time, the mRNA vaccines seemed to change the math. At first, the news was dominated by epi curves . We all talked about 'flattening the curve", meaning driving down the exponential explosion of cases, hospitalizations and deaths. Once the vaccine started to roll out, the focus became on getting everyone vaccinated. Although you may not have noticed, that phase e...
A tornado made of sharks crashing into a skyscraper. Painting in the style of abstract cubism. The above "painting" was made by Google Parti from the caption . For the most part, what people now mean by "AI" is "deep learning", which is sophisticated pattern recognition - handy if you want to make a self-driving car or a phone that accepts your face to unlock. "Deep learning" was around in 1969 but needed vastly more computer power to make it work, plus a "tweak" to feedback results back into the decision matrix (you can think of this as a "guess" or "recognition"). Other than that, it's all very impressive but not fundamentally new. This is something different. It shows more "creativity" than what you see in 99% of commercial graphic art; It shows deep "understanding" from a massive database of tagged images - far more than a human would access; It shows an "understanding" of sty...
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