Billy Congo

I tried to get around the safeguards that ChatGPT put in place. It's a bit like a stern adult who doesn't want to have any fun. I see this as mostly a tool for younger people who don't have as many technical skills, or are just lazy and don't want to write papers. My brother uses it to ask technical questions, and ChatGPT gives pretty good answers. About the most fun I had was asking it to write a sarcastic movie review for a movie I just watched. So it's a good tool, but I just don't need to use it.

Boy, you want to talk about timing? Zoom came out at just the right time, and captured a huge audience that needed a way to videoconference. I use Google Chat and Skype, depending on the technical ability of the person I'm talking to. They don't have the time limitations that Zoom has. But Zoom has to be the easiest for most people, and so a lot of the people I know ended up buying a subscription. Which is fine. If I need to use it for more than 20 minutes with someone, we just time out and dial in again. No problem.

My brother came to me recently because he wanted to have a website where he could post information. As so many people do these days, he asked ChatGPT what he should use. It told him github. I told him that github is only for code as far as I know. I have about 20 repositories out there. And then I did some research, and sure enough, github does host static pages. But that's an important distinction. My brother created the account, and so I thought I would just put the code up there and then have a cron job run to update his pages. It doesn't quite work like that. You can use Github Actions to run things, but that's a lot more trouble than I'm interested in. So instead I just put the pages up there, and run things locally on my machine from my cron. What I do is generate the pages locally, then do git add for the pages, then git commit, and then finally git push. So he's got his website, and nobody has to spend any money.

I love Google Chrome, despite the fact that it makes me nervous. It has so many great features. It can seem a bit bloated at times in terms of it's memory usage, but I spend so much of my time browsing that it's worth it to me. The reason it makes me nervous is that it has all my information. It has all my passwords, all the sites I use. It has all my information!