I backed Supernova on Kickstarter, and I really like the idea of it: spaceships moving inward on a spiral path, harvesting energy cubes moving outward on the same spiral path. Loosely “inspired by the ancient Egyptian game of Mehen” (which did not involve spaceships). But Kam and I have now played it a couple of […]
This week in my family history project: Life updates and thank-yous, and a piece of kid art. January 22, 1974 Peter to George: “I’d very much enjoy listening to a tape of some of your [organ] repertoire; no matter what style you played, to me it would always be ‘pop music.’” …and other assorted notes […]
Way back in 2011 or so, I bought two sets of pro-quality bocce balls, paid for by work. My group at work at the time was starting to get into occasionally playing bocce, and I thought it would be nice to have a couple of good sets. So I ordered them and expensed them. Over […]
Oops, I forgot to post here last week. So here are two weeks’ worth of updates in my family history project. The first letter below is also the first substantive letter after a six-month gap, during which many things happened, including moving to Santa Rosa and starting a foster home. A quick overview of the […]
This week in my family history project: I spent a while yesterday and this morning digitizing a letter from Marcy that I had thought was from November, 1973—only to discover after it was ready to post that it must have instead been written in early 1974. So it turns out that the next substantive letter […]
Three recent AI systems that generate remarkable art, given text descriptions. (None are available for use by the general public yet, but you can see examples of what they can do, and you can sign up for the waiting list for two of them.) DALL-E 2 (made by OpenAI) If you ask it to generate, […]
This week in my family history project: Several undated “letters” that consist mostly of art by me and Jay with accompanying descriptions of what the art is intended to portray. …I’ve also now updated my meta entry from last week, because I realized that I left out an entire address! I think this six-month gap […]
This week in my family history project: Peter is unhappy about his work situation. Notes about what Jay and I want to be when we grow up and how Marcy’s garden is going. We suddenly shift course and start a foster home. April 16, 1973 In which Peter is unhappy about his work situation. “even […]
Deepmind has created a new “generalist agent” AI, known as Gato. “The same network with the same weights can play Atari, caption images, chat, stack blocks with a real robot arm and much more, deciding based on its context whether to output text, joint torques, button presses, or other tokens.” …Which is neat, but the […]
This week in my family history project: pinworms, Pinocchio, and puppet shows. Also, explanation of a drawing by me, discussion of what I was reading and Jay’s latest interests, some gardening thoughts, and a detailed discussion of Peter’s drama-filled salary negotiations. March 25, 1973 Peter sends a postcard to let George and Helen know that […]
Kam and I almost went to see Everything Everywhere All at Once last night. We’ve been hearing great things about the movie—in fact, such extremely great things that I’m having to discount them to set my expectations lower, because if I go into a movie with too-high expectations, I generally enjoy it less than I […]
Kam and I played the boardgame Maglev Metro today. We both liked it, and want to play it again. But there are two things that I find really disappointing about it: 1. The game description starts out: “Welcome to the future of train games! With the use of cutting edge magnetic levitation technology, transport passengers […]