November 21, 2023
It was a chilly 14 degrees F this morning at 6:00. I miss those warm days we had last week. Today we went grocery shopping for Thanksgiving and had a nice pre-birthday lunch with our son at The Peddler’s Daughter in Nashua. It has good pub food and a great atmosphere. Matt and I ordered the fish-n-chips which is served wrapped in newspaper. Ginny had a corn beef sandwich. A few Irish tunes played in the background. It was delightful.
Birthday Lunch
Artificial Intelligence
My wife is a descendent of Chief Maquinna of the Nuu-chah-nulth people of Nootka Sound. My son decided to use that information to create an AI image using the Microsoft AI image generator DALL-E-3. The results were interesting but not at all accurate
AI Generated Photo of Chief Maquinna
Although this first photo looks somewhat authentic, the ornamentation is completely wrong. Also note that AI has real problems with hands. Sometimes they have extra fingers or the proportions are wrong.
AI-Native
In the second image, the artwork is close but my wife pointed out the beads were completely wrong. It seems that AI needs some diversity training.
Sticker Shock
The grocery store was packed as one might imagine two days before Thanksgiving. People tend to complain about the price of food, but I’m thankful that food is plentiful and affordable. Someone pointed out how expensive a stick of celery was and it took a moment to decipher the true cost.
Social Media
Threads
I have mentioned before that I collect social media apps. One complaint I had about Zuck’s Threads was that it had no web app. However today I noticed that i was able to access it on a browser. This was where people went to when they left the hellscape formerly called Twitter. If you are on Threads, look for me, my account is https://www.threads.net/@johnpoltrack.
Bluesky
Another “Twitter Killer” was the social media app Bluesky. It is in Beta and available only by invitation. I had an invite so I signed up. You can find me at https://bsky.app/profile/poltraxx.bsky.social. They just sent me an invite to share and if anyone wants that, leave a comment and I’ll send it along.
Daily Picture Theme – Perfect
I participate in a daily photo challenge on the social media site Spoutible. Everyday there is a different subject announced as a Daily Picture Theme. I select an appropriate photo from my collection to share. I have been sharing these exclusively on Improves With Age, my Substack newsletter. However since I have untaken the task of writing daily entries, I decided to introduce a daily picture theme photo to this website.
The Picture theme for November 21, 2023 is PERFECT. This was a hard one for me, but then I remembered one of my few PERFECT scores with the online game WAFFLE which a mashup of WORDLE and a crossword puzzle. It is hard to solve it in only 10 moves but I was able to do it.
Perfect
On Last Thing
I’ve been trying to keep up with posting something on a daily basis, an online daily journal. However tonight the technology let me down. The images are hosted by Flickr but their website is down. I was able to work around that by using plugins which make direct API calls. These are problems never anticipated by the journal writers of the 19th century, I hope you are finding these entries interesting.
You’re my bluesky, you’re my sunny day
Aw shucks, what a nice thing to say. Have a great Thanksgiving.
I do find your posts interesting, John!