Tue Apr 30, 2024
It’s been a hot minute since I’ve done a grab-bag post about nothing important. The last time was exactly one year ago last April. So, let’s make it a tradition, as making things a tradition is a tradition around here, after all.
No real narrative thread here, folks. I’m going to talk about music, games, tv shows, and books. To wrap up, I’ll check in with the AI scene. Given that it was so hyped up last year, what’s the status quo in AI these days?
And, needless to say, this bespoke post has been lovingly and meticulously handcrafted for you - the discerning reader, without the assistance of generative AI.
The real Queen of Grunge
To kick this off, I have a music recommendation for y’all: Kim Gordon’s new album The Collective.
Best known for forming the ineffable Sonic Youth in 1981, Kim Gordon has never stopped making unpretentious, unsaturated music that is completely devoid of all the typical music-industry bullshit.
The Collective is experimental, noisy, industrial, and bold - defying any stereotype of any genre. You’d think such an ambitious album was cooked up in some college dorm room by a precocious twenty-year old, Billie-Eilish style. But no, Kim Gordon is seventy years old. Seventy!
There are other grunge bands, such as Pearl Jam, who are still putting out albums. But where Eddie Vedder is comfortable rehashing the tired old “dad rock” sound, Kim Gordon is - and always will be - a breath of fresh air. She hasn’t stopped pushing the boundaries, even after over forty years, and she still kicks serious ass.
Forget the other contenders, I crown Kim Gordon the official Queen of Grunge.
Oh snap
I recently listened to an interview with Ben Brode on the Search Engine podcast with PJ Vogt. Ben is one of the creators of the mobile card game Marvel Snap and has an infectious laugh. The interview took a deep dive into the game mechanics used to keep the player coming back for more. Ben prefers the term “stickiness” to “addictiveness”. PJ ended the podcast with a warning not to download Marvel Snap, despite extoling its virtues as the perfect mobile game.
I heeded his warning. For a while. But, after losing a percentage point in Wordle after trying to reach 100 percent for over a year, I decided to quit that heinous game cold turkey. However, I soon started looking for another daily gaming fix to fill the void. I decided to give Marvel Snap a go and was hooked immediately.
Damn, Brode knows what he’s doing. The game is a narcotic. I also hesitate to call it addictive, although I could see those with gambling problems having a hard time. When you take a hit of the Marvel Snap drug, you’ll never experience a higher high when you win big. You’ll also never experience a lower low when you lose.
I have to complete my daily challenges. I yearn to climb the rankings. At night, I dream of playing the perfect deck. I should have listened PJ.
In other gaming news, I haven’t been playing my PS4 much. Partly because it’s hard to enjoy it when you know the PS5 exists. Every now and then, I spark up a game I bought a few years back - Watch Dogs: Legion. It’s alright. What I’m really looking forward to is the PS5 Pro - which is now all but confirmed!
With all the free PC games I’ve stockpiled over the years and with retro-console emulators now available on the iPhone, I’m spoiled for choice. But I’ll need a ray-tracing, overclocked beast to play GTA 6 on my OLED - and the PS5 Pro is just the beast I’m looking for.
It’s rumoured to arrive just in time for the Christmas holidays. Time to start saving up 😊
Speaking of games…
…TV adaptations of games are getting good. In particular, the new Fallout series on Amazon Prime Video is fantastic. Great writing, likeable and talented cast, excellent world building and special effects.
Admittedly, the only Fallout game I’ve played is Fallout 4. The show threw in a few easter eggs for the fans, which was neat. However, although I was desperate to see what was inside Vault 31, my knowledge of the game enabled me to make an educated guess before the season finale. It turned out that my guess was mostly correct, which was mildly disappointing.
Playing the game is not a prerequisite to enjoying the show. Indeed, the clearest indication of whether a TV adaption works is whether those who have never played the games dig it. Even better - if non gamers also give the show a (Vault-Boy) thumbs up, then it must be good. The show is renewed for a second season already and Amazon has even opened a merch store. Fallout has a wide enough appeal that everybody will have a (nuclear) blast.
I’ve heard that The Last of Us show is a great TV adaptation of that game as well, so I’ll definitely check it out sometime. The only show that has tempered my enthusiasm for game adaptions is Halo, the only show that reliably puts me to sleep. Yes, it’s that bad. Great way to get in a power nap though.
What to read, what to read…
I’m currently reading Brandon Sanderson’s The Lost Metal, which is book seven in the Mistborn series. I started reading the first book in this series back in 2017, so it’s been quite the journey spending so much time with these characters.
Oddly enough, the next slew of books on my To-Read list are mostly the conclusions of a few epic book series that I’m wrapping up: Book six of the Red Rising Saga, book three of The Age of Madness trilogy, and books eight and nine of The Expanse series, for example.
I’m just grateful that the authors finished the series and didn’t leave the fans hanging. It’s not easy, so mad respect. I’m just not sure what series to sink my teeth into next. But this is a very good problem to have.
(News flash - prior to publishing this post, The Three-Body Problem just went on sale for six bucks, so I’ll be reading that next. I’ve heard good things about this book - and it was made into a Netflix series as well.)
I’d love to read the next books in the Song of Ice and Fire and Kingkiller Chronicle series, but I’ve been waiting 13 years for those to come out. I think I’ll have to call it - they’ll never see the light of day. It doesn’t matter though - in another 13 years, AI will be able to finish the series for me.
Four horses of the AI-pocalypse
Speaking of AI, it’s embedded everywhere these days - from Adobe Acrobat to Windows to Google Search. And the latest rumours are that Apple’s WWDC this year will be AI-focused as well.
So, all the major players will soon have their answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. But in the current landscape, there are four competing LLMs: ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Meta.
I’ve tried them all, so I can confidently say that the best one is… Perplexity. Technically, Perplexity runs ChatGPT under the hood, but the way they search the live web with useful citations is just great. I was also blown away by the way it recently helped me with a JavaScript coding problem that would have taken me weeks to solve. The way it presented the code blocks along with contextual explanations was very polished.
Claude is not available in Canada anymore, but I used it a lot to write fiction before I lost access. It was the best for that use case. But, I also give Gemini top marks for writing creatively. Gemini has a fantastic feature where you can highlight specific text and re-generate, expand, or shorten the highlighted text only. That is really useful.
The worst one is undoubtedly Meta. I appreciate that they’re open-sourcing their (inferior) “Llama” LLM, but you have to sign into FaceBook to use it properly, which is a non-starter for me.
Who will be the ultimate winner? My money is on whoever perfects Multimodal AI (text, image, audio, and video input/output) and releases a free version to both consumers and the enterprise space. Whoever does this will take over the world.