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).

Drone, Photography, Useful Things

Drone Photos Without a Drone

September 25, 2022 Gary 1 Comment

Last year when we were in Tucson, staying at the Lazy Days KOA, I wanted to take a decent photo of our campsite. The best shot would have been from a drone, but I didn’t think the KOA would allow me to fly my drone there. Not to mention that campground is in the airspace of a commercial airport and two(!) military airbases. There really was no chance of getting permission to fly a drone there!

So, what to do? I did some searching, and found photos that looked like photos from a drone that were taken without a drone. How did they do it?

One person that had some pretty interesting photos had taken the photos with a 10′ “Selfie” stick. That’s right, 10 feet! That sounded great to me, so I purchased one. Click here to get your own from Amazon (this is an affiliate link).

OK, it’s not really 10 feet. It’s actually 3 meters, or about 9.8 feet. It’s a carbon fiber pole that extends in sections, so you don’t have to extend it to the full 3 meters. When collapsed it’s only about ~18″ long.

When holding this pole up over my head, the camera is about 16′ above ground. Perfect for many photos.

I attached my GoPro to the end of the pole and used my cell phone to control the camera. I could see what the camera was seeing through my phone, and snap the shot (or shoot a video). It takes a little practice to hold the pole steady and aim it where you want.

The pole seems to be made well. It locks into position and stays there until you want to collapse it (a slight twist at each section releases it).

Using this pole, I was able to get some pretty nice shots of our KOA campsite, as seen below.