Lori M Olson OPED — Lori’s Unvarnished Opinion
I feel like everyone is weighing in on AI these days, so what could I possibly have to say that is new?
Maybe that I’m both excited at the potential of AI and LLM (large language model), while simultaneously being horrified at the wholesale layoffs of all the large company’s staff groups working on the ethics of AI?
I’m enjoying the benefits of having ChatGPT input some of my own content (a PDF called Six Vital Steps to App Success), and regurgitate it into focused, bite-sized, social media content. But I’m both peeved at the endless reams of fake images popping up everywhere, and outraged at the wholesale theft of IP from artists and photographers that OpenAI and Midjourney are indulging in to train their models that are being used to generate these fakes.
I’m intrigued by the ability to have boilerplate code generated for my projects, and horrified at the idea of people using such code without really reading or understanding it.
But most of all, I’m deeply disturbed that people are using ChatGPT and ilk as search engines. Because they are quite provably just making shit up on the fly, and those same people are taking these AI generated responses as gospel.
Interesting times. If you’d like to play with it in your own projects, check out RubyAI and these other related AI-related articles:
- [A Beginner's Guide to Prompt Engineering with GitHub Copilot](https://dev.to/github/a-beginners-guide-to-prompt-engineering-with-github-copilot-3ibp?utm_source=dragonrubydispatch.com)
- [Computing Pioneer Criticizes ChatGPT AI Tech for Making Things Up](https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/computing-pioneer-criticizes-chatgpt-ai-tech-for-making-things-up/?utm_source=dragonrubydispatch.com)
- [OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour to Make ChatGPT Less Toxic](https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/?utm_source=dragonrubydispatch.com)
FITS — Featured in the School
Shoes was a super cool little Ruby toolkit for creating GUI’s. This was helpful in any number of cases, but for me, it was especially fun for teaching. Especially teaching little people how to program. But Shoes (Shoes3?) has been languishing, without any updates for years.
Enter Scarpe (Italian 🇮🇹 for shoes 👠) by Noah Gibbs, Nick Schwaderer and others. Scarpe is Shoes in modern Ruby and webview. I’m looking forward to seeing how far along they get, because teaching Ruby to kids is a topic near and dear to my heart! I’d love to have a Scarpe workshop available in the WNDX School, specifically aimed at kids.
We’re cheering for you Scarpe team!
TALK — Talk of the Tech
Here are this issue’s selections from a couple of the busier RubyMotion/DRGTK chat spaces:
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Discord — As we head into another political season, we’re not above a little campaigning. Amir recently reported the DRGTK was “only 26 ratings away from passing Pico8 on itch.io”. Actually since he said that, the number is even smaller…a mere handful of votes in the category Top Rated Tools Tagged Game Engine. Come on DragonRiders! We can do this—so vote now and vote often.
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Slack — And in other news, also from Amir, RubyMotion 8.12 has been released. 🎉
APP — All Things App
You likely already know that here at DRD, we’re dog people. 🐶 So you could have knocked us over with a feather when we came across Color Doggy from Adrian Nier. It’s “your loyal color helper”. It’s a super simple app while still scratching an itch for a lot of people—almost always a winning combination.
To that end, what super simple app could you start building today?
SPOT — Spotlight On…
We have an admission to make: we use Markdown for just about everything. Writing this newsletter, recipe notes, that screenplay we keep scratching away at—it’s truly the hammer when everything else is nails. So it always catches our eye when something new shows up on the Markdown landscape, such as Versatil Markdown which is a fully featured Markdown app for Mac. Hey, and lookee here…it’s written using RubyMotion (AKA the DragonRuby App Toolkit!)
Also, Amir is once again sharing the all the cool things on social media. It’s an easy way to enable you to share your cool (DRGTK) things out there to the world at large, and make sure you tag @wndxlori so she can feature it here in DRD.
GAME — All Things Gaming
Now, without taking anything away from how clever and original the idea is, we can’t help but think about where 🚽 the core concept of the game was squared away before it was finally rolled out.
TWIL — This Week I Learned…
“This week I learned that I don’t learn something every week.” ♾️
HAHA — And They All Laughed
Oh…yeah.
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“Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.” — Terry Pratchett (credit: Luigi Novi via Wikimedia under CC BY 3.0)