Seeing Whales

June 25, 2023 Gary 2 Comments

Anyone that has walked along the Edmonds, Washington, waterfront is familiar with the “Seeing Whales” cast aluminum sculpture located at the south end of Olympic Beach Park.

Above is a photo of the “Seeing Whales” sculpture. Below is a 3D model of this sculpture. I created this model by shooting 287 photos with a GoPro Hero 5 Black camera mounted on a selfie stick. I set the camera to shoot an image every 2 seconds, then moved the camera around to get many different views of the sculpture. The selfie stick was so I could get the camera above the sculpture, and also more easily get the camera down low.

I then processed these 287 images with WebODM (Open Drone Map, web version) into a 3D model, then cleaned it up with Blender, a 3D editing and creation tool. The resulting model was uploaded to Sketchfab for viewing.

To view the model in 3D, click on the image below. It will take a little while to open the model. Once the model is open, use your left and right mouse buttons to spin it around to view it from all directions. Use your scroll wheel to zoom in and out on the model. For the best experience, view the model full screen – either click on the arrows at the lower right or press the “f” key.

If you are viewing this in your email client, you must go to the blog website or directly to Sketchfab to see the 3D model.

Seeing Whales by Gary Stebbins on Sketchfab

Uncategorized

ChatGPT – What’s That?

January 30, 2023 Gary 1 Comment

If you’re paying attention to the news or social media, you’ve almost certainly heard about ChatGPT. Do you know what it is?

I created an account to play with it and learn more. I asked ChatGPT to tell me about itself. Here are the unedited results. The headings below are my questions to ChatGPT, and the text is it’s reply.

If you would like to play with ChatGPT, go here: https://chat.openai.com/. I had to try several times to get signed up, as their servers are very busy.

What Is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a pre-trained language model developed by OpenAI. It is based on the transformer architecture and is trained on a massive amount of text data from the internet. It’s capable of understanding the context and generating coherent, fluent and human-like text.

ChatGPT can be fine-tuned for various natural language processing tasks such as text generation, language translation, text summarization, question answering, text completion and more. It’s mainly used in conversational context, such as in chatbots, virtual assistants, and customer service bots, where it can generate human-like text and respond to user input. It can also be used to generate content for websites, social media, and other platforms, such as product descriptions, articles, and blog posts.

It’s a powerful tool for natural language processing and has a wide range of applications in industries such as finance, healthcare, e-commerce, and more. It can help businesses to automate customer service, generate marketing content, improve search engine optimization and more

What is ChatGPT’s Purpose?

ChatGPT is a large language model developed by OpenAI. Its primary purpose is to generate human-like text. It can be used for a variety of natural language processing tasks such as language translation, text summarization, question answering, text generation and text completion.

ChatGPT is built on the transformer architecture, which is a neural network architecture designed for natural language processing tasks. It’s trained on a massive amount of text data from the internet and it’s able to understand the context and generate coherent and fluent text.

One of the main use cases for ChatGPT is to generate human-like text in a conversational context, such as in chatbots, virtual assistants, and customer service bots. It can also be used to generate content for websites, social media, and other platforms, such as product descriptions, articles, and blog posts.

It can also be used for other natural language processing tasks such as sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, and text classification.

Overall, ChatGPT’s purpose is to generate human-like text and make natural language processing tasks more efficient and accurate.

Photography

Low Tide in Edmonds – Beachfront Aerial Photo

November 14, 2022 Gary 2 Comments

On September 8, 2022, Edmonds, Washington, had a low tide of -1.7 feet. That happens frequently, so it’s nothing too exciting. Except this day we had sunshine and I had my drone up in the air. Lots of people were out enjoying the beach, and it seemed like the perfect time and place for a few photos.

The ferry was at the dock. At these low tides, it is possible to walk under the ferry dock without getting your feet wet (at least not very wet – wear boots).

Update April 22, 2023:

I have moved my website to a new host, and now have additional capabilities. Before, I could not embed a 360° photo in the page and had to link to a different site to display it. Now I can embed it directly here, as below. Click and drag in the 360° photo below, use your scroll wheel to zoom in and out. Or click the small square in the upper right corner to view it full screen (which I highly recommend).