Tag cloud graphic

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An earlier post featured two graphical representations (from Perplexity) of the categories I’m currently using on smays.com. As a follow-up, I uploaded the current list of tags.

At first glance one would think this blog is just about ChatGPT and it did capture a lot of my attention over the past couple of years. That will change now that I have deleted my ChatGPT account.

During recent blog maintenance, I moved ChatGPT from category to tag (along with Perplexity and Gemini). Artificial Intelligence is the top-level category for those topics (link below).

Along with all of the blog posts on this topic, I saved a lot of those conversations to my local Documents folder. This morning I prompted Gemini to analyze that “AI Bots” folder. Continue reading →

Crime Fiction Philosphy

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The #1 reason I started this blog was to have a place I could save (and later find) stuff. Lines from movies, favorite quotes from books, a photo, etc. Additionally, I save stuff in a folder in the cloud. AI tools like Gemini offer interesting and creative ways to look at these archives. Below are ten quotes of a philosophical nature from Crime Fiction novels I’ve read.

  1. “The memory is like twin orbiting stars, one visible, one dark, the trajectory of what’s evident forever affected by the gravity of what’s concealed.” — “O” Is for Outlaw, Sue Grafton
  2. “Integrity is not a conditional word. It doesn’t blow in the wind or change with the weather. It is your inner image of yourself, and if you look in there and see a man who won’t cheat, then you know he never will.” — A Deadly Shade of Gold, John D. MacDonald
  3. “Civilization seems to be something we choose when it fits our purpose.” — A Drink Before the War, Dennis Lehane
  4. “Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, dear man.” — A Murder of Quality, John le Carré
  5. “Sometimes it’s a dog-eat-dog world and the rest of the time it’s the other way around.” — A Dance at the Slaughterhouse, Lawrence Block
  6. “The whole legal system—if you think it’s just a big set of rules, you’re dead wrong. It’s really a bunch of people sitting around and talking to each other, deciding what they want to do with you.” — A Cold Day in Paradise, Steve Hamilton
  7. “Real power around the world does not reside with governments any longer, but with private interests. Real power is secret power.” — A Firing Offense, David Ignatius
  8. “I believe in God, but not as a he or she or an it, but as something that defines my ability to conceptualize within the rather paltry frames of reference I have on hand.” — A Drink Before the War, Dennis Lehane
  9. “Education is something which should be apart from the necessities of earning a living… the measured and guided study of the history of man’s reiteration of the most agonizing question of all: Why?” — A Deadly Shade of Gold, John D. MacDonald
  10. “Even our most arbitrary actions are the result of the trips we take down our mental highways.” — A Little Yellow Dog, Walter Mosley

Pretty sure my list would have been different but I see that as a feature, not a bug.

Category “tag cloud”

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AI tools like Perplexity and Gemini have proven to be invaluable at giving me a new perspective and understanding of my 24 years of blog posts. I’ve written about this frequently. This morning I provided a list of my categories showing the number of posts in each and prompted Perplexity to create a visual representation of the data. Took a little tweaking but I find the results interesting.

For what it’s worth, Gemini was unable to perform this task but did offer several explanations of what it was my fault and not the AI.

Bronco comes GoPro ready

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My new Ford Bronco comes with a dash mount for a GoPro camera. I assume this is a nod to the popularity of the Bronco for off-roading. I charged up the GoPro (it’s been a while) and recorded a minute or so.

The umbrella term for this kind of video is Car Vlogging (eww!) and covers everything from enthusiasts reviewing supercars to lifestyle influencers sharing their “morning thoughts.” Dashboard Confessional is a more colloquial term used by critics to describe videos where the driver treats the camera like a therapist or a captive audience for a rant.

The “Captive” Dynamic: There is a psychological effect where the viewer feels like a passenger. For the creator, the task of driving provides a “natural” distraction that reduces the pressure of looking directly into the lens, often making the speech feel more conversational and unscripted.

1984 Land Rover 90 resurrection

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From Land Rover guru John Middleton: Picked up a 1984 Land Rover 90 that was an insurance write off after apparently being in a building fire. It runs and drives. We are resurrecting as a 90 pickup.After cutting out some rot and welding in some new frame sections we installed the replacement rear bed.  It hauled its first load of hay.

The next ‘new’ Bronco at your Ford dealer could be an old one

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(From CARBUZZ.COM) Soon, classic SUV fans might be able to go to their local Ford dealer and drive away in a first-generation Bronco restomod. The buyer would even have the choice between having a modern V8 or a dual-motor electric powertrain. The upgraded Bronco builder, Kindred Motorworks, met with potential partner showrooms at the National Automobile Dealers Association conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, to expand the availability of its products.

Kindred Motorworks sells its combustion-powered Bronco restomod starting at $199,000. They come with a Ford Coyote 5.0-liter V8 making 460 horsepower. The engine hooks up to a 10-speed automatic transmission with an Atlas II transfer case, a Dana 44 front differential, and a Ford 9.0-inch rear differential with 35-spline axles. It also has power steering and four-wheel disc brakes.

Inside, there’s hand-stitched leather upholstery, heated front seats, a rearview camera, and a touchscreen infotainment screen that supports Apple CarPlay, Android Auto, and Bluetooth. In short, the old off-roader comes equipped with just about everything you’d find in a new one, save for driver assists.

The body looks just like a classic Bronco but with some modern updates. The upgrades include LED headlights and retractable side steps. The doors are still removable, too. The options include a $15,000 hardtop and $1,200 for ceramic window tint. There’s also a $15,000 Trail Package that includes a Warn winch, different front and rear bumpers, a tow hitch, and a tire carrier.

Ford Bronco

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Six weeks ago I ready to buy a 2003 Honda Element. I was pretty jazzed up about this 23 year old car. On the day I was supposed write the check, the seller called to say he couldn’t find the title and it might take months to get a duplicate (?!) Hmm. 

I dropped by the local Honda dealership to see if they could find one. Nothing int he dealer network for Honda Elements (they stopped making them in 2011) but the salesman found one on Facebook Marketplace. I don’t do FB but friends messaged the seller asking him to get in touch. Nothing.

This was my Fuck It moment. The Universe was clearly telling me it was time to turn the page on old, used vehicles. I decided to do the unthinkable. Buy a new car.

To make a long post a little shorter I decided to buy a Ford Bronco and my buddy Paul Bandelier offered to introduce me to Judy, his favorite sales person at the local Ford dealership.

They didn’t have any two-door Broncos (my only must-have) but a nearby dealer had one in a color that Paul loved so we did the deal. It has some off-road features I didn’t think I needed (huge tires) but Paul and Mr. Wolf insisted on.

As I write this, I’ve had the Bronco for less than 48 hours. Can only describe this as a “life changing” experience. As I’ve done with my other vehicles, I’ll share this adventure here in coming months. But this is clearly a turning of the page in my automotive life. I’m selling the Land Rover but keeping the pickup and the Jeep. But the Bronco will be my daily driver, leaving the pickup for hauling big stuff and the Jeep for warm weather fun. 

My last new vehicle was the Mini Cooper in 2011. Twenty-five years ago. So I’ll be in ATS (automotive technology shock) for a while. Picture a New Guinea native who has never seen a white man taking his first ride on a Boeing 777. I am (delightfully) overwhelmed. Watch this space.

I deleted my ChatGPT account today

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[click through to post to see comment/update]

I’ve been playing with ChatGPT for more than two years. I’ve shared a bunch (143) of those “conversations” here. Initially, I planned to drop back from the $20 a month Pro plan to the free version. But decided to go nuclear.

I’ve been using Perplexity more and find Google’s Gemini as good or better than ChatGPT. But the tipping point was probably OpenAI’s decision to start selling ads on their low-end plans. The other AI companies might follow suit and I’ll probably ditch them if and when.

Anthropic (the company behind Claude) is having some fun with this in an ad that will run during Sunday’s Super Bowl. (Watch on YouTube)

The company says there are several dangers with including ads in chatbot conversations, including potential bias and incentivizing chatbots to keep users in conversations for longer periods.

Consider a concrete example. A user mentions they’re having trouble sleeping. An assistant without advertising incentives would explore the various potential causes—stress, environment, habits, and so on—based on what might be most insightful to the user. An ad-supported assistant has an additional consideration: whether the conversation presents an opportunity to make a transaction […]

Such ads would also introduce an incentive to optimize for engagement—for the amount of time people spend using Claude and how often they return. These metrics aren’t necessarily aligned with being genuinely helpful. The most useful AI interaction might be a short one, or one that resolves the user’s request without prompting further conversation.

So, you ask, are you going to stop using LLM’s all together? Doubtful. They’re just too useful. And the technology is going to be everywhere. (see my previous post on The Agentic iPhone)

If these AI tools had been around in 2002 when I started this blog, it would be a very different creature today. They know more and they write better. Maybe it’s like long division or cursive writing. I worked to hard to learn those skills and I’d hate to lose them. Don’t want some AI writing my blog even if it’s better at it. And, yes, Gemini and Perplexity get mentioned here frequently so torching ChatGPT is mostly symbolic.

The agentic iPhone

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Last month Apple announced a partnership with Google that will mark a fundamental shift in the iPhone architecture. The integration of Gemini into iOS means the system is pivoting from a collection of apps to an agentic operating system. It turns the iPhone into a more powerful cognitive lever, but it demands you trust the “black box” more than ever before. I prompted Gemini to show me what that might look like. Excerpts below, the full thread here)

I asked how a new, more powerful iPhone might change the way I write or research my blog posts:

When the operating system moves from being a “file cabinet” to an “active participant,” the boundary between your thoughts and the machine’s suggestions begins to blur.

  • The Loss of Serendipity: When the AI “fetches” the exact answer, you miss the accidental discovery of a different, unrelated factoid in the “wrong” folder. The “digital twin” optimizes for efficiency, but creativity often thrives on inefficiency.
  • The Echo Chamber of One: If Gemini is trained on your “Personal Context,” it will get very good at sounding like you. There is a real risk that your blog posts will start to feel like they’ve been “laundered” through an AI that is simply reflecting your own style back at you, stripping away the rough edges of original thought.
  • The “Privacy vs. Utility” Trap: To get these benefits, you have to let the “Campos” agent index your “private thoughts.” You’re essentially trading the sanctity of your “unrecorded” mind for a more powerful cognitive lever.

I’m sure I’ll find some uses for the new iOS but writing my blog posts won’t be one of them. Near the end of the thread Gemini gives specific instructions for how to disable some of these features.