shinyhappyrainbows

Hallucination is something that's supposed happen when you get good drugs. It can be cathartic, spritual, inspirational or any combination of. The last thing you want, though, when consulting an expert, is for them to be tripping balls. AI has that problem too often. People are being encouraged to use AI for their job's tricky problems, to help them find different ways to communicate, for therapy, even to help them with their homework, this latter case, even at university, even for postgrad theses. Yet, ask one of these 'bots more than a handful of questions, and you'll start to get "hooky" answers. I shouldn't understate it - in my experience, every session goes "pear shaped" withing half a dozen to a dozen queries. Sooner in many cases. Have a really close look at my AI generated site logo... Some, ah, cute... shall we call them "artefacts." I borrow the term from my former profession as an audio engineer - those things we mishear...

Making a concerted, pre-spring cleaning effort in the studio/workshop at the moment. Was going well today until I got to my "inheritance," 4 big toolboxes worth of metric thread machine screws, nuts and assorted supporting hardware. I say "inheritance" because they were on a deceased estate, nature strip, hard rubbish pile and the brother of Splodgenoodles (not her real) name scored them for me. Once I find a proper home for the collection, I may never need to buy threaded hardware ever again. At least, not M4 to M10. But OMFG! I'm broken! Half, no, two-thirds of my day has been wrapped arounf sorting, collating, bagging-pending-a-new-home and stacking what feels like a hundredweight of ironmungery from buggeration to buggery and this ballast still doesn't have a permanent home. Sure, the M6 bolts are now sorted to length. AFTER 10 HOURS OF SODDING SORTING!!! M4 and M5 are yet to be sorted. M8 to M12 are sort of only a couple of handfuls, but I have no ide...

Go brought me to a shuddering stop. I think I may have had some environment issues because I had some early install problems. These seem to be tricky to fix, so I may come back to Go later. Meanwhile, I've been trying Rust, learning from " The Rust Programming Language ", AKA "The Rust Book." So far, the experience has been as easy as Arduino and C/C++ was when I started that journey 8 years ago. Challenging, but steady progress. And in sorting out a problem with my Rust installation, I may have hit upon the solution to my Go installation issues, too. Looks like Homebrew language installs might be a little problematic. Maybe my Homebrew install is buggered. Will come back to that, too, but after my Rust learning. So, I'm as far as Chapter 2, "Programming A Guessing Game," where the reader is guided through constructing a command line guessing game. It has been a surprisingly easy experience. Rust has a syntax like C but feels... "easier....

The AI experiment in my "laboratory" is over. I've been running Ollama locally on my laptop, as in:- an 8G, local, offline language model, running on local, offline command line software. Don't get me started about the carbon pollution environmental disaster being created by serverside queries to AI like, "Does my partner really love me." The local-only model seemed like an affordable and accountable approach and my M1 Mac is energy efficient fast enough that even really tricky queries were sorted way under 2 minutes. The thing is, I never got a single, useful response to a query. Not one, that was fit for purpose, anyway, out of Ollama's "mouth." I figured that between my ability to describe a problem, and its probable solution, architecturally and simply, might result in useful code fragments for my various microcontroller coding and OpenSCAD design tasks. Not one. The work required to make anything useful was at least as much as designing i...

I can't help it. The state of social media, its centralisation, its blatant disregard for all but the thinnest veneer of "privacy", the manipulation of the proletariat. I simply can't give up on creating some form of timeline-based microblog that is peer-to-peer, has persistant data for as long as the user keeps it live, serverless, securely encrypted and addressbook based. My programming skills need to level up a long way from where I'm at, though. Enter Go, Google's language, but open, standardised, apparently low-level capable and as cross-platform as C, yet simpler than C or Javascript. Early playing around with it has been very interesting, it doesn't break my brain, like JS, it seems to, by way of its module achitecture ("libraries"), less arcane and less aimed at professionals than C and seems to have broad support, but I still have a long way to go, and to that end, FreeCodeCamp just dropped a beginners Go course in in my inbox. Fingers...