Steve: I rarely see anyone under the age of 30 without a tattoo. Could be any number of reasons for this: location; my age; etc. Wasn’t that long ago that you didn’t see that many people with tattoos. Bikers, Navy vets, the occasional free spirit. But sometime in the last 15 years (?) I started seeing them everywhere. I’m wondering if there has been some reputable academic research on the cultural causes/significance of this trend.
ChatGPT: The explosion of tattoo culture in the past 15–20 years is a striking cultural shift. It went from fringe to mainstream with remarkable speed. What was once associated with bikers, sailors, punks, and rebels has become almost a rite of passage for a lot of younger people, and yes, there’s been a fair amount of serious academic and sociological attention paid to the phenomenon. Here’s a summary (PDF) of what that research tends to say, along with a few respected sources.
Editors Note: Following description by ChatGPT. Screencast below is a brief look at my BookBuddy collection.
BookBuddy Pro is a mobile app for cataloging personal book collections, designed primarily for iPhone and iPad users. Developed by Kimico Ltd., it offers a clean, intuitive interface and a powerful feature set tailored to readers who want to organize their libraries without the noise of social features or community input.Continue reading →
Editor’s Note: In the two years I’ve been playing with AI I’ve shared what I thought were some of the more interesting “conversations”, always being careful to distinguish something I wrote from AI output. ChatGPT frequently offers to compose a blog post and the drafts are as well written (better?) than mine. But they’re not mine. ChatGPT wrote (or plagiarized ) the following.
MovieLens is a free, non-commercial movie recommendation website developed by the GroupLens research lab at the University of Minnesota. It’s designed to help users discover movies they’re likely to enjoy based on their individual tastes. The site uses collaborative filtering algorithms to generate personalized recommendations, improving as more ratings are added.
Getting started is simple: users rate movies they’ve already seen using a five-star scale. The more films you rate, the better the system becomes at understanding your preferences. MovieLens then offers tailored suggestions that can be filtered by genre, release decade, popularity, and more.
One of the key strengths of MovieLens is its clean, ad-free interface and its emphasis on transparency. It doesn’t promote content for profit, and it doesn’t track users for advertising purposes. The recommendations are driven purely by user data and academic research.
Users can view their own rating history, create custom movie lists, and explore trends or themes in their viewing habits. While it lacks the social features of some commercial services, its core focus is accuracy and simplicity in recommendation.
MovieLens is especially useful for cinephiles who want to keep a record of what they’ve seen and find new films aligned with their personal taste, without the influence of box office hype or crowd-sourced noise. It’s also a valuable tool for researchers and students studying recommendation systems, as its algorithm and structure have been used in numerous academic projects and publications.
I couldn’t find authoritative data butI assume millions of copies of William Gibson’s novel, The Peripheral have been sold. And many more millions share my interest in Eastern spiritual traditions (specifically the illusory nature of the self). And the subset of those who fall into both groups is probably large… I just don’t happen to know any of those people. So I fired up my ChatGPT app fully aware of the bullshit risk.
“I’d like to get your take on one of the plot elements in William Gibson’s novel, The Peripheral. Before I get to that, I’m curious about how you know what you know. For example, were you trained on the full text of that novel or would your “understanding” be based on reviews or other sources?”
Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI is a book by Karen Hao released on May 20, 2025. It focuses on the history of OpenAI and its culture of secrecy and devotion to the promise of artificial general intelligence (AGI). The book includes interviews with around 260 people, correspondence, and relevant documents. The title makes reference to colonial empires of the 1800s.
Hao visited OpenAI’s offices and covered the company for the MIT Technology Review two years before ChatGPT was released. Her experience there and reporting on topics of AI for seven years led her to write Empire Of AI. (Wikipedia)
Given how much time I spent “conversing” with —and gushing about— OpenAI’s famous chat bot (ChatGPT) this seemed like a book I should read. About half way through and not sure how much of the book I will share here. Continue reading →
Following is a list of Apple apps that I use on a regular basis: Files, Notes, Mail, Photos, Numbers, Reminders, Weather, Maps, Contacts, Music, Journal, iMovie, Health, Calculator, and Voice Memos.
My prompt to ChatGPT: Assuming Apple develops and/or acquires state-of-the-art AI to run on all Apple devices… and every Apple app is able to access and understand the data contained in all of the other apps… give me five useful scenarios that AI will make possible. Continue reading →
ChatGPT made lots of promises aboutwhat it could do with the notes from my book archive. (See “bellyflop” post) I gave it another little test yesterday.
Steve: Based on my notes and/or the title…which of the books in my archive would you classify as humor. A simple bulleted list of titles will be sufficient.
I’ve tagged 19 of the books in my library with “Humor.” Most of which are obvious from the title (and the cover!). ChatGPT found five and only one of those might be considered humor.When I pointed this out the bullshit started flowing… Continue reading →
I was what we called a “middle manager” during much of my working life. Hired a fair number of people, fired just a few. And got to know a lot of different “types” of employee. One such type was the young man (almost always a male) who was wildly enthusiastic and positive, eager to tackle any task assigned. (“I’m on it boss! Consider it done.”) But it usually was not done or at least not done correctly.
Lately I’ve been having similar experiences with ChatGPT. Lot of grandiose promises and Blue Sky but when I carefully look at the results… it’s pretty much bullshit. (Big Sigh)
I think the reason it has taken me longer to discover what a lot of users have been talking about for a long time is most of my interactions have been long chin wags about books or philosophy. Rich bullshit territory.
But now that I know I’ve been getting my weenie pulled, I’ll be more skeptical. More discriminating. And that’s a good thing.
While I’ve had very mixed results, I prompted ChatGPT to summarize the salient points on nonduality from those two books (see below). What I found more interesting was the process by which ChatGPT chooses passages to quote [PDF]. Continue reading →
I recently posted about a project I submitted to ChatGPT. She made a lot of ambitious claims about what she could do (and help me do) with my archive of notes taken while reading books. (120+ books, fiction and non-fiction) Her reach exceeded her grasp and her indexing of my notes didn’t turn out to be as useful as she promised (I’m hoping that might change with future versions).
I’m still playing with this and I prompted her to summarize what my reading has taught me about reincarnation. She suggested drafting this “into something you could share in a blog post, a letter, or even as a thoughtful reply to a curious questioner.” [see comment at bottom of this post] Here’s what she came up with: Continue reading →
