August 2024 – An Echo That's Reversing

I’ve stopped using ChatGPT.

Well, not entirely… but I haven’t hit it in several weeks after the month-or-so ago pledge that I made promising, personally, that I’ll only use it for absolute emergencies when search fails me. And I hesitate even in those situations. (The last time I used it was for a SQL query that confounded me. It answered perfectly and I now understand how to solve that particular RDB situation.) My Mastodon feed is full of LLM haters who arrived at their position primarily because they think it produces too much garbage. Of those haters, 99% just misunderstand or misrepresent the capabilities and limitations–likely because our society is the Wild West of over-promising new technology–and the haters have taken to quoting the most absurdly iconoclastic views. In a word: insincere. There is a reasonable approach to take to approach reasonably new tech that is out there.

While hunting for different editions of the Barbarella comic, I came across a rarity from Virgin Record Stores in the UK from 1981. Around that time, the second collection of Barbarella comics, Le Coleres du Manges-Minutes, was released in various editions internationally and Virgin Records printed a four-issue series in English under the title The New Adventures of Barbarella (this title was also used in the German Heyne editions a decade earlier with Die Neuen Abenteuer der Barbarella). Those Virgin Records publications had become my white whale in both their rarity and cost. Rarity being the biggest barrier because for a while I could only find visual records of their existence and none for sale. Eventually, I pieced together numbers 2, 3, and 4 for a decent and not embarrassing price. The cost of my collection as a whole is embarrassing, but only for a few editions am I actually uncomfortable confessing how much I paid.

But still the Virgin Records issue number 1 was elusive.

Month: August 2024

Generative energy

The Ballad of Barbarella the Smuggler