Conveying the original narrative and criticisms in a clear, balanced, and professional manner…
33 minute read
February 26, 2025, 11:45 PM
Recently, when talking to a friend from college, they mentioned that they had used ChatGPT in order to make some of their correspondence sound more professional and even-toned, i.e. they were using ChatGPT as a tool to refine their writing. I had never thought about this as a possibility before, so I played with it a little bit. I’ve never used the service for any serious purpose and do not intend to, but seeing as I have a very large repository of text content, i.e. this website, I decided to take it for a spin with some Journal entries that I had written in the past year and put them in the blender to see what it would come up with as far as rewriting them. My requirements for selection were that they needed to be recently written so as to feature my current writing style, they needed relatively few photos (so no photo-heavy entries), and on a topic that would be less likely to become dated (so no political entries). For each one, the prompt was, “Rephrase the following page to sound more reasonable and professional,” followed by the direct URL for the entry.
I like to think of this in reference to a scene from The Cosby Show where Rudy’s teacher compares various students’ papers about the American Revolution to Rudy’s paper with Cliff. While the other children’s papers sounded typical for fifth-grade work, Rudy’s sounded much more adult, referring to “the harrowing campaign of 1777,” and “the ubiquitous melancholy that descended on the downtrodden warriors.” She then goes onto explain, “When Mrs. Huxtable helps Rudy with a paper, her eleven-year-old capabilities come shining through. And when you help her with a paper, I get ‘ubiquitous melancholy’ and ‘downtrodden warriors’. When is Mrs. Huxtable coming home?” In other words, it’s time to give these Journal entries the “ubiquitous melancholy” treatment, as ChatGPT rewrites a few of my entries to sound more businesslike.
One thing that surprised me when I went into this was that ChatGPT now has a “reason” button that you can select, which outputs the bot’s own internal monologue as it goes through and contemplates on what I fed it. That was interesting to see what the bot’s own process was when it output the information. I did not expect to get that sort of insight.
Continue reading…Categories: Artificial intelligence, Schumin Web meta
The trend of redacting anything and everything whether it needs it or not is getting really old and needs to stop…
14 minute read
February 12, 2025, 2:38 PM
One of the things that has bothered me about online content for a while is when people will redact portions of an image whether it needs it or not, often the faces of bystanders, license plates, or otherwise. They’ll do it either by the electronic equivalent of scribbling something out like one might do with a pen on a physical image, or by placing goofy oversized emojis over people’s faces. The problem with this behavior is that it draws attention to the very thing that the people doing the redacting are ostensibly trying to make disappear. In other words, these various redactions draw the focus off of whatever the person wants us to see, and the first thing we notice is this big smear of color that shouldn’t be there.
While this behavior has annoyed me for quite a while, there was recently some discussion in a group of fire alarm nuts that I’m part of after I posted a photo of the alarms in my old elementary school, Bonnie Grimes Elementary in Rogers, Arkansas. Late one night, I decided I wanted to check up on Grimes and see how they were doing. No one that worked there when I attended is still there, and that’s been the case for a while (and I suspect that a lot of the present-day teachers there are younger than me), so I really was just checking on the building itself, since I don’t know anyone in any of the photos. So I went to their Facebook page and went for a dive. I commented on a few photos. One photo that I commented on was about the spelling bee, about how I had done the same thing on that same stage three decades prior. Another one was about the addition of a second set of glass doors at the main entrance to form a vestibule. There was no vestibule in the front before. Just go through the front door and that was it. I also commented on a photo showing a metal play dome on the playground, mentioning that it was installed when I was a student there in the early nineties and that I was glad that it was still in use, and also about the absence of a wooden play structure next to it that they had built later. All in all, I had a good time doing a virtual visit back to my old elementary school. Based on the photos, the school has been maintained very well over the years. The walls have been painted, and the floors have been replaced, but the place looks amazing, and does not look like a 38-year-old school. My middle and high schools looked far worse back when I attended those schools than Grimes does today, and those schools were half of Grimes’ current age. I also checked up on the fire alarm system, and found, to my dismay, that Grimes finally got a new fire alarm system last summer, and so the Wheelock 7002Ts of my childhood are gone. Though I’ll say that 37 years is a pretty good run for a fire alarm system. It served the school well, and so while I was sad to discover that the alarms that I knew were not there anymore, that old system had more than done its job, keeping thousands of students safe and announcing the start of hundreds of fire drills over the years.
Categories: DC area local news, Elementary school, Fire alarms, Netculture
Winter in Harrisburg…
8 minute read
February 2, 2025, 1:54 PM
On January 24, while Elyse was at MAGFest, I went up to Pennsylvania for some wintry fun. Most of the fun occurred in the Harrisburg area, as I had a few things in mind that I wanted to photograph, mostly with the drone. The trip was inspired by my friend Andrew Reams, who recently flew his own drone over Three Mile Island, and got some shots that I was not able to get when I flew around that site in 2021 due to DJI-imposed geofencing that was in place at the time (I have complained about this on here in the past). Now, after verifying that the geofences were indeed gone, I wanted to give it another flight and get the shots that I had wanted to get before but was locked out of getting. I couldn’t justify an entire trip just for Three Mile Island, though, so I did what I usually do, and came up with other photo targets to fill out an entire day. The final result wasn’t necessarily the most efficient trip, but I thought it turned out well, as the snow on the ground made the landscape look different than it usually does.
My first stop was fairly random: the interchange between the Pennsylvania Turnpike (I-76) and I-83 in New Cumberland.
Interchange between I-83 and Limekiln Road in New Cumberland.
Categories: Harrisburg, Photography, Winter weather