Black Hole

2023 04 02 day 283 of doing art every day for a year (mostly – I took sick days off). I’m doing a one art-thing every day challenge to take me from wannabe artist to something around beginner artist. I’m very much still learning and am self-taught. This series chronicles this journey.

I saw an image of a black hole on the Curiosmos site, linked below, and thought I’d do my own take. Here it is!

For more info, including seeing the time lapse, follow this link: https://lmashton.com/black-hole/

#ArtMatters #AYearForArt #Procreate #DigitalArt #WomensArt #ArtistsOnMastodon
An imagined vision of a black h…

We went to San Francisco Botanical Gardens yesterday, and I took photos of three new birds. These jays were my favorite.

#birds #StellersJay

Alien Landscape

2023 03 31 day 281 of doing art every day for a year (mostly – I took sick days off).

To clarify for those who weren’t with me at the beginning in May 2022, I decided to do a one year challenge to do some kind of art every day for a year so I could, hopefully, learn to do art. In the beginning, my art, or more accurately, “art”, wasn’t very good. I had not done much since finger painting in grade two or three. I considered myself a wannabe artist. But I figured that, if I worked at art seriously for a year, I could improve. I aspire to competence. So what you see here is very much that of a beginner artist learning to art.

On to the now. I seem to be developing a habit of painting otherworldly scenes. I must continue that with zero restraint.

For more info, including seeing the time lapse, follow this link: https://lmashton.com/alien-landscape/

#ArtMatters #AYearForArt #Procreate #DigitalArt #WomensArt #ArtistsOnMastodon
A digital painting of an alien …

Suppose I should provide a brief #introduction

- Background in #physics
- Use #datascience #machinelearning and #cloudcomputing to solve challenging problems in #insurance
- Live in #Madison #Wisconsin
- Organizer of our local #python meetup group -- see @madpy
- Perennially hopeful #WhiteSox #baseball fan
- Devoted #tea drinker
- Proud papa of two

For all their talk about #MachineLearning support on their latest Apple Silicon devices, you just can’t do any of the newer generative stuff on Macs easily, or fully.

So what’s the point of Apple touting their machine learning prowess except to be misleading?

Any time I try to do anything even slightly complicated/off the beaten track, I run into issues on the Mac side 😕 Even a few years after the introduction of Apple Silicon, it just feels as if Apple is just not ready for all the new stuff …

Makes you almost want to go back to using a PC full time … almost 😛

#MachineLearning #DeepLearning #AppleSilicon #Hardware

Friday Flyday! Here’s a portrait of a hanging-thief fly, Diogmites sp., photographed in Saint Louis.

#FlyDay #Asilidae #Insects #photography

I normally post these on Twitter, but it just occurred to me I could try doing so here: MIT Technology Review has an open call for pitches, for our upcoming issue on ⚖️ethics⚖️. We're looking for *big* swings: features, investigations, profiles, and sharp essays at the intersection of #ethics and #technology. Rates: $1-2/word.

Pitch deadline is tomorrow: April 20. Short notice, I know! If you have an idea, but need a day or two to write up a pitch, send me an e-mail (see https://www.technologyreview.com/how-to-pitch-mit-technology-review/)

@norcalgrandma I find the whole “you need to be educated to carry on an argument” stance a little ridiculous, to be honest 🙂

Educated according to whom? Wouldn’t the life experience of a person who’s lived 50 - 70 years be more useful in some cases than the book learning of a 20 year old in a field that is not even related to the subject under discussion?

It’s all subjective and everybody has something to contribute and everybody has different viewpoints.

Personally, I wouldn’t give the “you need to be more educated” argument much credence at all — unless of course, the subject is a specialized one and the other person actually has education in that field. Then, I’d hope that they’d actually explain things clearly rather than simply throwing up “education” as a defense 🙂

Take a moment to enjoy this unusually twisted and very big London Plane in #camberwell #southlondon #treesofmastdon

@eloquence Exactly 🙂

If we are worried about “existential” threats, then there are more urgent things that he (and others) can concentrate on … but since they are ready to colonize Mars, I guess threats to Earth don’t matter that much but the tech they can take to Mars with them matters? 😛 (OK, just for the sake of clarity, I’m kidding about Mars but I think that’s the level of thinking we are seeing … )

Apparently Melon Husk wants to start “TruthGPT” to rival OpenAI and Google. If this is going to be anything like his “free speech” efforts on Twitter, you know that “truth” is the furthest thing you’ll get from “TruthGPT” 😛

Also didn’t Melon-boy sign a letter asking for a pause on development of systems more powerful than GPT-4 for at least 6 months? So why is *he* going ahead with development of new systems? Doesn’t the pause apply to him?

Or was the pause only so that he (and others) can catch up? 😛

The way these people do u-turns is likely to give whiplash to people if anybody actually paid attention 😀

#MachineLearning #DeepLearning #GPT

@BenjaminHan You know that the ending (and most of the KGB stuff) is made up, right? 🙂 It was still an interesting story but not as highly dramatised as the Apple TV show made it seem …

I often warn people of the dangers of using LLMs as search engines and how you need to verify any fact provided by these engines yourself.

But on the flipside, what I’ve found Bing Chat (https://www.bing.com/) useful for recently has been to find out who plays a particular role in a TV show/movie 🙂

This is a game that my wife and I play — when we recognize somebody in a show, we either say “Oh, it’s so and so from this other show” or we just say “Oh, we know this person” and then try to figure out who it is.

Our old workflow used to be that we wait for the person’s name to be mentioned, go to IMDB, find the show, find the episode, and then search the cast for the person’s name. Or, go through the actor images till we (possibly) find the right person.

But with Bing Chat, all you have to do is simply say “Who plays <name> in <show>” and it generally find the info 🙂

In fact, recently I asked for a person by their shortened character name (since I couldn’t find them in the roles listing because they had been listed with the full character name) and Bing still found them.

So colour me (slightly) impressed 😛

#MachineLearning #SearchEngines #ChatGPT #BingChat

I’m home from my Channel Islands trip. Here’s a Santa Cruz Island fox.

I guess it’s time to start giving this more of a try. Twitter feels lonely now. I’m not great at #introductions, but I read this is proper etiquette here. I’m a librarian. I like #books #boardgames #swimming #starwars #janeausten

@BobWilliams I actually wrote a short story about this a long time ago — about how people don’t die but simply transfer over to a new universe when they die. So from the dead person’s perspective, they go on living but the people in the old universe think that the person died …

I often refer to this when things don’t seem quite right, or something I was sure was correct suddenly turns out to be wrong — it must be because I slipped into another universe, right? 🙂

Now I’m no #twitcher but when there are reports of a #Hoopoe just down the road I’ve got to try my luck.
What a bird..! 😲😎👍✅
These guys usually hang out in southern #Europe and occasionally appear in the south of #England causing a good deal of excitement.
But this one is in #Combee, #CountyDown, #NorthernIreland 😳

#nature #NaturePhotography #wildlife #bird #birdphotography #birds #rare #rarity #lifer #twitching #birding #exotic

#AmazingWorld
#ArtOfEasterEggs

Hennig Brand, who discovered phosphorus in 1669, found it while boiling down gallons of urine to try and make gold.