Tales of Woe, but meeting a new friend

 After many trials and tribulations, so many, I’ve given up blogging about them/ I’ve had a whole series of older computers from my business die off one by one. The majority have suffered death by upgrade, so we’re starting yo fear those massive windows updates that never really worked. I guess one of the big problems was I had older hardware and it was stuck in Windows 10 land and not upgradeable.

I had replaced an old favourite PC in my studio with a slimed-down Lenovo box. It had a small ssd drive, supported by two hard drives, adequate memory, it was an i5 and it ran Windows 11, I love it. It did have problems running a large-screen TV in combination with the second screen/monitor or projector. But I do love the fact that I can have a large screen TV on the wall. Most of the tv computer gear sits on a narrow shelf and I have a couple of keyboards, one waterproof on my art table, tge  second wireless. The table is set up such that I can draw and paint on it or I can also use one of two easels standing up. I’ve also recovered an old sound bar so I can have good quality music as I’m painting.

I still use a Windows 10 HP pavilion desktop in my office as the master for my network and main computer. It’s also got a small ssd drive but has 2 internal and 3 USB hard drives hanging off it. It is currently doubling as my master media storage, (eg photos videos and music). Unfortunately, it is misbehaving a bit, I do miss my NAS storage, which no longer works on my upgraded LAN (windows 11 is implicated) , I really wish I knew why.

Quite a while ago the battery died in my beloved little HP Spectre. The little two in one that I took travelling, sitting on the couch or in fact all over the place. It was getting quite old and only had a small 11” screen but I still loved it and missed it dearly.

I had a corneal graft last year and struggled a bit when one of my two monitors on my main computer decided to go very dark, too dark to read. Taking the monitor off the computer and plugging it into something else showed it’s fine so I assume it’s the graphics card on the computer just another frustration with the Windows world. But I’ve really had a bit of trouble getting used to what appears fairly contrasty monitors and smaller text (OK it’s the same size text just harder to see without an update to my glasses prescription after the corneal graft] I can only get about one hour at the screen before my eyes feel strained. Usually not enough time when I’m playing with photos,

So I’ve been looking seriously at different screen technologies and decided I like TVs with OLED screens. I used to like the Apple iPhone style IPS format screens on my phone and Spectre. I has begun investigating screen type and size for my vision. When I noticed an advert on TV about the Lenovo Yoga Range, two in one style computers, checking the web there was a model based on an Intel EVO i7 processor with a 14inch  OLED screen. I was at Office Works on a different matter and so I checked it out it was very easy to read at a standard viewing distance. I didn’t take long to decide it was time to get an upgrade.

So welcome Slaty so named because it’s very thin and a dark gray. I look forward to you becoming a great friend.

Are LLM amazing or simply stupid?

I watched a very relevant TED talk by Yejin Chai “Why Ai isincredibly smart and shockingly stupid”, which opens with the quote “Common sense is not so common” which comes from Voltaire around 3  centuries ago. I totally agree that the current large language models {LLM}, which many call AI (but I call Artifically Intelligent), lack common sense. This should be very obvious if you he ever used them.

Still I am finding LLMs helpful. They're sometimes amazing for cleaning up typos, especially for folks like me who struggle with dyslexia.  They're also good for fixing the weird stuff that happens when you dictate and/or use predictive text.

I've been trying out a few of the most popular ones.  To compare them, I created an informal scorecard system that tracks how well they handle different aspects of text, like key ideas and paragraph sentiments.  Here's how it works:

• OK: This means I can use the text without any changes.
• Reword: Sometimes the wording needs a little tweaking, to sound less know-it-all.
• Fact Check: often some points get over-embellished
• Wrong: clearly made up or simply wrong
• Missing: important information left out (ignored)

So I recently was asked to speak and I outlined some ideas but in a rehersal it took 20 minutes. I recorded and timed it by dictating into a Word document (<windows key> and H) roughly 6 pages of rabbling text, lots of good stuff but… … So I asked each of ChatGPT, Claude.AI and Google’s Gemini (previously Bard)  each to summarize it into a single page.

Their score cards were not so good

I feel that it is the Dunning-Kruger effect that AI suffer most!  These AI Bots display a smug self-confidence that they know everything but show no common sense to realise how little human norms and values they actually understand.