Ahhhh. Spring has sprung here in Southern Nevada. Ain’t life grand. The backyard critters are doing their Disney-cartoon-themed thing. Desert cottontails, jackrabbits, antelope ground squirrels, small lizards and gambel’s quail are darting in and out and hurriedly criss-crossing the yard. The chipmunk-like squirrels are particularly active munching on petunias, then climbing the ephedra and stripping away all of the tiny yellow flowers. Ravens are hovering in the distance. Roses, jasmine, iris, prickly-pear, lavender, penstemon, brittlebrush, letana, chaste tree, desert daisies, fairy-dusters, petunia, creosote bush, hedgehog cactus, autumn and cloud sage, desert merigold, lilac and blue elf aloe are all abloom or just about to be. The coyotes, hawks, falcons and roadrunners are out and about in the surprisingly verdant desert this year. At a town park the desert bighorn sheep have also gone missing. Something they tend to do when the enormous and empty Mojave is particularly lush. Dozens of songbirds and hummingbirds are moving back and forth between feeders or flowers, the small cobble-lined pond, the large and fully-leaved ash tree and several creosote bushes. These are house finches, goldfinches, a half-dozen species of sparrow and flycatcher, robins, doves and mockingbirds, and a few migrant visitors who only stay for a day or two: a Scotts Oriole and yellow and yellow-rumped warblers.
One particularly teeny hummingbird sits atop the same branch of a creosote bush at the same time, while I am having coffee and toast, every morning. She seems to wait until I have the binoculars in hand and then disappears while I am fumbling with the focus.
Warm days followed by cool evenings is a certain formula for paradise for me. And that is what southern Nevada has to offer right about now. What constitutes paradise, of course, varies from person to person. For me it is the glass of wine after dinner as the mild cool of evening sets in at a fire pit on the edge of the open desert, or the ocean or a mountain range. Even a small lake or vineyard would suffice.
It is, more so than anything else, about the quality of the breeze. Sometimes weighty and humid. Sometimes dry and crisp. Always cool and usually following a warm day. And like a good breeze, paradise is ephemeral and transitory, sometimes present when expected, sometimes not. It has almost nothing to do with how lavish the living situation may be. I could take to Jim Rockford’s seaside trailer just as easily as a palace.
And where have I found the perfect breeze. It is seasonal of course. The north shore of Oahu and Kihei and Hana, Playa del Carmen, Tempe and Tucson, Boulder City, Lamoille and the Las Vegas strip, Narragansett and Newport, Paris and Lyon, Arenal and Monteverde Costa Rica and Boquete Panama, Many Glacier, Chico Hot Springs and Jenny Lake, Chicago along the lakefront, Park City, Boulder, Escalante, and Moab Utah, Lincoln City Oregon, Ouray, Colorado, Barcelona and Granada, Grove City Florida, San Diego, La Jolla, Hermosa Beach, Monterey and Mendocino. Those are a few spots to which I tend to return and most often find something resembling paradise.
Now that artificial intelligence is all the rage. I’ve been playing quite a bit with it beyond the features of Adobe products that I’ve used for a while. Content-aware fill in Adobe After Effects for video is something I’ve just used recently and am happy to report that it works very well.
I’ve also taken a short deep dive into writing code, primarily python, pandas and matplotlib, and also some JavaScript and CSS with the assistance of Github Copilot. This is a Microsoft project based on the much ballyhooed Chat-gpt 4. My impression so far is that, although often unreliable, it is very useful if you know what you are looking for. They cite studies indicating a 50 percent increase in developer productivity using Copilot and I can see how that could easily be true. It takes away a lot of the stumbling around the internet and simply suggests solutions as you code. It is similar to many other code completion tools but seems to be much better.
Another way that it provides support is in recognizing patterns and suggesting next steps. For instance if you are doing the same six things to a variable and there are three variables it will figure that out and after the first one it will suggest completions for the remaining two. It often will guess what you are up to even before that and will suggest the right thing for the first variable also. It can also explain what a section of code does, and this appears to be both accurate and helpful.
Additional features such as the ability to ask it a code-related question are not quite as useful as the old-fashioned way of finding the same question already asked and answered on the internet. Other things that it does such as converting code from one language to another and writing tests for sections of code are things that I haven’t tried yet.
In terms of its impact. I think it will be substantial. Anything that increases productivity by that much has to be impactful. I like it because it is a boon to the remote work concept. It provides support similar to what could be found from one’s peers in an office environment. Also as an assistant it makes it possible for one-man bands to get a lot more done. I suspect I will be keeping it and using it on a regular basis going forward. At this point I would compare the likely impact to the introduction of the personal computer or the advent of the Internet. But I guess we will see. I could easily imagine governments outlawing it at the behest of lawyers, doctors, accountants and such. Any job that is based on knowledge of a large number of facts will be at elevated risk.
A similar copilot is in the works for the Microsoft 365 products. The productivity impact of that should be enormous because there will be so many people affected. Instead of fretting about the elimination of work that the widespread use of artificial intelligence will certainly involve, I choose to think about the vitality of vastly increasing the capabilities of everyone who uses it. Both PC’s and the Internet were predicted to eliminate large numbers of existing jobs and they did, but both also created large numbers of different, arguably better and less mundane jobs.
And still on the subject of artificial intelligence I’ve ended up with access to Adobe’s new Firefly project. So far the features which are available include creating images from word descriptions, modifying text to include images and recoloring vector drawings. I haven’t gotten around to using the last of these.
I have found the image generation from text feature really fun to play with and extremely capable. It generates large numbers of awful images for all sorts of reasons but a variety of good ones too. Professional illustrators should probably be a tad worried because publication quality illustrations or the seeds of publication quality illustrations can now be generated by anyone. Right now user supplied images can not be incorporated in the process, but that is coming. I suspect I will find the product substantially more interesting when that occurs. And I already find it pretty interesting.
There are certain things that I couldn’t accomplish even after a lot of trial and error. Getting a realistic rattlesnake with fangs for instance. None of my rattlesnakes have fangs. And trying to get Firefly to generate images where the textual description was too involved seems to be a problem. You often end up with more of a collage than a coherent image. I am also wondering if the generated images will become recognizable as AI-generated in style and or content. Also there is the matter of using copyrighted material in the assembly of the images. Adobe appears to have gotten around that question by only using images that they have legal access to for training of the software. The pending Supreme Court decision on copyright related to modified art should be of even greater importance because of these and similar AI tools.
The text decoration feature is quite nifty but sort of limited in terms of it doing just the one thing. There are also a large number of other features that are in development and mentioned on the Firefly site which are intended to find their way into the existing Adobe Creative Cloud products. I am extremely eager to see these as they develop. All of this will soon bring us to the point where a web site, for instance, can be designed simply through textual description, then modified and perfected with all sorts of new tools and capabilities embedded in Lightroom, Photoshop, Illustrator, and XD, and then coded in less than half the time with Github Copilot. All just like that. Boom. I am very excited.
