I did a little experimental thread over on my Twitter stream. I wanted to encourage a couple of things - namely audience interaction and I wanted to provide them an actual reason to share the thread.

Simply put: I provided a series of polls for folks to vote on to determine how I constructed a monster.

Here's a link to the thread in case you're curious.

The results to the first poll (bipedal or quadrapedal) was:

The second poll was what kind of terrain the creature spends its time in. The audience chose subterranean so I added digging claws and narrowed the torso to make the creature more wedge shaped.

The third poll was how many heads the creature has. Crowd said 2.

And the fourth and final poll was what kind of tail to give it (or to give it none). The crowd picked a long straight tail with a club end.

After the final poll, I finished the tail and posted it and then felt like I should go ahead and paint it. Since I was already in an experimental mode, I took the sketch, blurred it a bit, and then mixed the sketch lines in with the digital paint layers. The final results are at the top of the post.

Here's the process video if you enjoy that.

I really need to get back to the work for my Patreon page, but this was an excellent little experiment and I plan to do it again in the near future.

This is the character I'm currently working on for Patreon:

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8/14 '22 7 Comments
That was clever twittering.
Thank you sir! I rather thought so.

The key, to my way of thinking, is to actually give people a reason to be invested rather than mindlessly echoing "Please like and subscribe and share with your friends BECAUSE REASONS."
And what are you calling the crowd-sourced beastie?
I like it!

Though here's a question - should it get two names given the two heads?

Also, do they read as different personalities?
Currently open for discussion, and taking suggestions!
 

I am not particularly a tea snob. 

In fact, for my morning jolt I prefer Stok cold-brew coffee.  But, I do like an afternoon tea on occasion--a big cup that I can slowly sip over a period of hours.  So, I have certain tea requirements.  It can't go bitter; it has to have that muscatel taste; it has to be forgiving to varying preparation techniques; it must be loose leaf.  It must stand up without milk or sugar.  Today, I ran out of my secondary backup tea and had to switch over to my tertiary backup tea.  Ugh.  Some cheap and nasty Assam blend. About half way through, I had already ordered $75 of tea, which seems like a lot but it's probably four years worth of tea.  But still, this cup is that bad.

Maybe I am a tea snob. 

If you offer me a cuppa Earl Grey, you *will* get a tea lecture.

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8/12 '22 1 Comment
Oh gawd Earl Grey. Akin to sipping cheap cologne. Or who knows, maybe even expensive cologne. I don't like drinking cologne.
 

Midjourney created this image, given the prompt "white cat named Spike in the style of Marvel." If you've seen my cat, and if you haven't you must be new here, this is pretty amazing. I picked my favorite of the four initial images and upscaled it. I didn't do any further refinement.

Not a real photograph. Dall-E created this image, given the prompt "a big white cat named Spike with stripes like a raccoon and spots like a cow photorealistic."

My privacy-minded partner thought at first this was a photo of our cat.

So Dall-E is just better, right? It depends. The above was Dall-E's best effort on the same Marvel Spike genre prompt Midjourney nailed so well. I attempted to refine this with the words "Marvel cinematic universe" and so on, but it didn't get any closer to the concept.

Midjourney created these images from the prompt "Midjourney's mother." I didn't pick a winner or do any further refinement.

It is difficult not to read into this. But is it just telling me what I want to hear? And if it is, so what?


Midjourney created this image from the prompt "the true purpose of Midjourney." Three of these can be understood simply as riffing on the word "journey." The one at upper right is perhaps just riffing on images frequently associated with the words "true purpose." So as lovely as they are, they don't make me go "hmm" as much as the previous set.

"Dall-E's mother photorealistic" yielded this image, and other images of animal mothers. One was a chimpanzee. If they were all chimpanzees, it could be considered a little cheeky. But emphasizing one chimpanzee out of four images would just be cherry-picking on my part.

Dall-E generated these images for the prompt "the true purpose of Dall-E." There's a theme, at least for three of them, but if there's a message here this monkey isn't clever enough to figure it out.

A Google employee who claims their text-generating AI is a sentient being has been fired. On the whole, I tend to agree with those who say that particular AI (not Dall-E or Midjourney) is probably not a sentient being. And yet, I also agree with those who have serious questions about our ability to judge that. This will be more of an issue as the line gets fuzzier. And it's getting fuzzy pretty fast.

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Given the state of the art in answering "Convince me that you're sapient" combined with deepfake full-motion video, are we far off from requiring shared secrets to defend against machines that can answer "Convince me that you're Thomas B. Boutell"? Truly realistic androids are probably a bit further out, but do we need to exchange secrets before that sneaks up on us? And when we do establish these secrets, how far away from civilization do we need to be to avoid eavesdropping by phones or other gadgets?
If you ever see me drinking a Miller Lite, you know I’ve been kidnapped or it’s a robot.
“DESTROY ROBOT” “But I just poured this whole can into this bowl to make pizza dough, see, I just like to drink the last s-“ *SQUINCH*
If you ever see me pouring a Miller high Life into a champagne glass, you can be pretty sure that it *is* me.
Yeah, my belly can’t tolerate beer. Good for other people, not for me.
Have you read or listened to Wanderers, by Chuck Wendig, yet?
I have a friend putting haikus into midjourney. With quite lovely results.

I'm pretty sure a subscription to mid journey is in my near future. Just because I like it, can't think of any reason I need it.
My mind is thoroughly blown. I think someone fed this machine a TON of Dave Palumbo, Blade Runner, Edward Hopper, and the lady who paints the kids with big eyes.
I found this to be a very insightful exploration of the Dall-E “mind”: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-guide-to-asking-robots-to-design
I played with Midjourney for much longer than I should have last night and blew out my free trial.
I noticed that it tends to create dark-haired, dark-eyed women with wide foreheads and cheekbones and narrow chins.

One user kept putting in different search terms to try and get pr0n, like "asian girl bikini big balloons" and getting, literally, an Asian girl in a bikini holding a bunch of balloons. It was kind of hilarious.
Mr. Blue Sky, illustrated by AI:
https://youtu.be/nyD6g47DHQk
It was getting pretty ominous there toward the end. Very cool
Illustrated by a grim and vaguely threatening AI. Also I assume that it's "illustrated by having MidJourney create a half-dozen images and our trained team of evolved monkeys picking the one that fits best in their opinion"
I mean, strictly speaking the curation angle plus the fact that people post these pictures publicly where they will possibly be incorporated into future revisions of this sort of tech means that anyone curating the images is now part of the network generating them...
 
 

11:00 all hands at work -- Didn't pay attention; pre-coffee.  Virtual meeting anyway.  Grab some lunch.

12:00-15:00 work - Determined that yesterdays mini-project was completely unneeded as I was testing the wrong thing.  Also, determined that third-party test team isn't going to test much with their firewall blocking important stuff.  Let's see if they bluster or just admit fault and get on with it. 

15:00-16:30 overview of new security project - Guess into whose lap this is getting dumped.  Correct, it's me!  It should be easy-peasy because there is no deadline and this project is mostly an extention of stuff I already wrote.  I can't decide if should be offended that I wasn't in on the design and planning.

16:30-17:30 digital ad pitch - Will my county's Democratic party buy some targeted ads for the primaries or the general?  Probably, but as a technical advisor, this doesn't put anything else on my plate.  Yet.

17:30-18:30 work - Find a comment I wrote that's cut off in the middle.  Did I do that?  Why wasn't it caught in a code review?  Because as a senior guy, no one challenges my code.  Fix the comment, I think.  I think someone besides me changed the code since I wrote the comment.  Too lazy to verify that theory and also I don't want verification that I'm losing it.

18:30 commute - note: I work from home.

19:30 - singing lesson.  My drummer is really hyped about improving our background vocals, so here I am.  Now, instead of struggling to find my pitch while playing my bass, I'll be thinking about the shape of mouth and how I'm using my diaphram while struggling to find my pitch while playing my bass.  Ultimately, this could pay off but as a noob vocally, it's fairly overwhelming.

20:30 commute - note: forty minutes is too long a comute for sixty minute lesson

22:00 work - Decide I'm too tired to properly review my own code so I just test some boundary cases to make sure nothing is broken.  Nothing seems broken, almost too quiet...  Suddenly, the network at work goes down.  Enough for today...

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8/4 '22 2 Comments
I can relate. I am still mourning the departure of a coworker who vigorously reviewed my code.

In our new situation, I am amused by how annoyed I get the moment leaving the house isn’t working out for me. We (the fortunate who can work from home and have suitable homes) just don’t take the grind of getting around for granted anymore.
The lost of antagonistic testers is bad too. We folded our testers into development and I feel like the quality of code has declined.

I have a eighteen year old car. Do I invest in a new car if I'm driving less than once a week? Do I prop up the old car up for another five years? I hate making these decisions...
 
 

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It's going to be pretty much the same as my Arizona entry. I.e., I drove through it, ate fast food, slept in a rest stop. Unless I remember anything ANYTHING else. It's very possible I've been to Little Rock for some software training and just don't remember. I think maybe MAYBE as a newly minted graduate in 1993 I stopped in the town of Hot Springs and couldn't figure out how to engage with tourist trap spas. But I'm not sure

So yeah, been to Arkansas. Kinda. 

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8/1 '22 1 Comment
I should have driven across the river and stepped foot in Arkansas when I visited Memphis. Don't know when I'll have my next chance!
 

So it turns out I don't have many memories of Arizona. I've driven through it enough to see just a wee bit of it. 

In May 2021, while driving back from Utah hikes with my brother, we stopped at the Le Fevre Overlook in the Kaibab National Forest and gazed at the Vermillion Cliffs. We stopped and got gas in Tuba City. We drove through Hopi reservation and then in Navajo land. We got McDonalds at Window Rock right before we crossed into New Mexico.

In a similar underwhelming way, in September 2020 driving back from the proto-renegade burn in Nevada, I slept 5 hours in a parking lot behind a closed perhaps abandoned Chevron just off I-40. I remember being aggravated by not being able to find a proper reststop on I-40 after many many hours of driving. In the predawn I started driving again, then got gas & breakfast at 6am at a truckstop an hour down the road, before driving straight through to New Mexico.

I have Monument Valley on my short list, but it was pandemic closed in 2020 and 2021. And yes, I do realize there is a Grand Canyon there, as well as I'm sure other interesting things to see/do. I just haven't done them. 

But it still counts as having been there! I both ate and slept there! So yeah, I've been to (mostly through) Arizona.

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7/30 '22 2 Comments
Montezuma Castle National Monument was neither Montezuma's nor a castle, but it is pretty amazing.
I'll add it to the list.