I’m a photographer and artist (well, sort of an artist), among other things. While I am strictly an amateur at both, I’ve been using Photoshop for something like 20 years for editing photos, sketching, cartooning, etc. And I have some concerns about what’s going on in the world of photography and art. Let me give you an example.
Look at the photo over there on the left. It’s a fairly generic looking and pleasant image of an attractive young woman. A woman who doesn’t actually exist. That image was created a few minutes ago using Photoshop Beta with Adobe’s generative AI technology. As you can see, generative AI has become very, very good. Scary good, really.
Well okay there are still some “issues”, as they say. Let me who you the entire image that Photoshop came up with when I told it to generate a photograph of two women in a coffee shop.
See the problem? The young lady must really, really like her coffee. Or look at this one, which is another image generated using the same text description.
Generative AI may be very, very good, but it isn’t actually all that smart.
Let me show you another image. This one was generated with the exact same text description but this time I told it to produce a black and white line drawing. This is what it came up with.
Not the best artwork in the world but perfectly acceptable for a simple drawing. I’ve seen a heck of a lot worst human created artwork. And better still, no weird glitches with cups or hands. I got this one when I tried generating another line drawing with the same text description.
I’m sure you see the problem there. Adobe’s AI, and in fact almost all of the ones I’ve experimented with, all seem to have trouble dealing with hands for some reason.
Now, did you notice something else interesting about those images? All four images depict young Black women even though I did not specify a particular ethnicity in the description I typed in. I found this rather curious so I continued. Eventually I generated 20 different images using the same text description. Of those 20 images, 10 depicted Black women, 3 depicted women of Middle Eastern ethnicity, 4 were Asian, one was Indian and 3 were caucasian.
I found this rather curious. The same was true, although to a lesser extent, when I generated images of men. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not upset. In fact I find this rather refreshing because often we’re bombarded with images of nothing but white people in a lot of the videos, advertising, stock photography, etc. that we’re forced to endure every day.
But sometimes the images are a bit – well a bit disturbing. I asked it to come up with a line drawing of a couple sitting in a pub having a beer and this is what it came up with.
Oh, dear… Yeah, seriously. This is what it thinks a young couple in a pub looks like.
Just for the heck of it I added a specification that it should generate an image of a white couple and this is what it came up with.
Oh, dear again. Why does she have a pepper grinder glued to her head? Why is he dipping spaghetti in his beer?
But it also comes up with some stuff that is surprisingly good. I told it to generate an image of a grouchy old farmer leaning on a split rail fence watching a herd of grazing cows and it came up with this.
Not bad, really. Well, if you don’t look at his left had too closely.
For the heck of it I switched from photography to painting and it came up with this from the same prompt.
I actually like that one, to be honest. I would print that out in large format, put it in one of those overpriced tourists shops up in Door County and someone would probably pay actual money for that.
Which brings me to what I really want to talk about, and that is how AI generated artwork is going to effect society in general. We are already starting to see fundamental changes.
First, we’re going to see the end of stock photo providers ike Getty. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. Why would anyone bother to license stock images from companies like Getty when with a few words of description and Photoshop or one of the other AIs you can generate a generic illustration for your story or article? Let’s say you’re writing an article about vacations and you want to use a nice beach scene to illustrate it. So why go to a stock image company and buy the rights to use one when you can do this below with a few words and Photoshop?
Took all of about 15 seconds to generate that image from a one sentence prompt.
Stock image companies aren’t the only things that are going to come to an end. Would Normal Rockwell have ever gotten a job doing magazine covers in today’s world? I doubt it. I think illustrators in general are already losing their jobs, their work being done by AI. I’m seeing scores of images illustrating articles, fiction, even news stories, that look suspiciously like they were done by AI.
AI is already making inroads into the world of computer programming. There’s a very good chance that AIs are also already making significant decisions about you health care, not actual real doctors. The customer support person you chatted with on that website? Quite possibly an AI.
You may not like it. I don’t. Isn’t going to matter in the sightest. That horse is already out of the barn. Corporations can and will use AIs to replace human beings every place they can.
Covid For Christmas – The Great Pi Famine -Lettuce In December – Weather – Dreams
Covid
So on Dec. 23 MrsGF got an unwelcome Christmas present, Covid. Don’t worry, she’s doing fine. She still has a nasty cough but she’s feeling much better and has been testing negative for two days now so we’re hoping it’s all over. Somehow I avoided coming down with it. I took precautions, staying in the basement most of the time, eating our meals separately, wearing N-95 mask whenever I was upstairs, etc. But even so I figured I’d come down with it too. Well, I still might. She’s been testing negative for 2 days now. They say that the incubation time for the current strain is about 2 – 4 days, so I’m not going to be able to relax much for another couple of days.
And me… I’m a hypochondriac. All through the pandemic, every time I coughed or sneezed or my head got stuffed up, I was convinced I had Covid myself. And I have some pretty nasty upper respiratory allergies on top of it, so I pretty much have mild symptoms that could be mistaken for the early stages of Covid all the time.
The Great Pi Famine
RaspberryPi 4. I’m still amazed that they can squeeze a complete quad core computer with 8 gig of RAM, hdmi video, sound, 4 usb ports and WiFi into a package this small. Storage on this one is a 128 gig micro-SD card.
If you’ve been following this blog for a while you know I like to fiddle around with electronic gadgets and gizmos and tinker and build stuff. One of the mainstays of the electronic tinkerers out there as a controller of electronic equipment of all types has been a tiny little single board computer called a Raspberry Pi. They’re available in a variety of types ranging from tiny little units that are used as controllers for a variety of gizmos, to a full blown Linux computer that’s smaller than a deck of cards, the Raspberry Pi 4 and now the new, more powerful Pi 5. There are four things that make them attractive. They’re small. Very small. They are designed to make it easy to interface them to the outside world in order to use them to control robots, motors, actuators of various types, collect data from sensors, etc. And three, they’re relatively easy to use, easy to program and enormously powerful for their size.
And the fourth thing, they were cheap. Like really cheap. The Pi 4 which is basically a full blown Linux (using a variation of Debian) computer with up to 8 gig of RAM, built in WiFi, HDMI video, USB 2 and USB3 ports sold for about $40 or even less. If you ever wanted to play around with Linux to see if it could be a viable replacement for the ever increasing horror that is Microsoft Windows, a Pi 4 is an easy and cheap way to do it. Just plug in a monitor, keyboard and mouse, get yourself a good introductory book on the Pi computers, and away you go.
Sidenote: I was just reading an article the other day that illustrated just how much computing technology had advanced in the last few decades. Someone pointed out that the Raspberry Pi 4 is six times more powerful than the original Cray 1 “super computer”.
Note that I used the past tense there. They werecheap. Then the pandemic hit, supply chain problems hit, demand for Pis increased because people were stuck at home and were looking for things to do, and, perhaps most importantly, the profiteers struck. Scalpers, profiteers, scammers and the like snapped up every Pi they could get their hands on, and then turned around and re-sold them for three, four times their original cost. I saw Pi 4s, a computer that sold for about $35 – $40 originally, being sold for $250 or more.
Pre pandemic I had a half dozen or more of the things laying around the house. But I gave them to a friend who was an electronics experimenter and solar power experimenter before the drought hit. Get them back from him? Yeah, well, he lives in Barcelona half the year so that ain’t gonna happen.
After the pandemic, when I couldn’t get them for a reasonable price any more, I switched to using Arduinos for the fiddling around I was doing. But while they and other microcontrollers are extremely useful and fun to play with, they aren’t computers.
But now prices have finally started to settle down. They’re still over priced when compared to what they were before the pandemic, about $75. But that’s cheap enough that I’m willing to get one and start playing around with it.
To make a long story short the nice fellow from UPS dropped one off here (two, actually) and I spent a couple of hours setting it up, updating the software and fiddling around with it last night. So you might be seeing some more stuff pop up here concerning Linux and the Pi in the future.
If you want to fiddle around with one of these yourself and you’re new to the Pi I’d recommend you get something like this from a company like CannaKit in the photo below.
No, I don’t get a kickback from CanaKit or anything like that. There are a lot of disreputable vendors out there, but I’ve bought stuff from CanaKit several times now and they provide exactly what they advertise, ship quickly and their prices, while a bit high, aren’t horrible.
It includes everything needed to get the thing up and running. The Pi 4, a power supply for it, HDMI cables to connect a monitor, a case for it along with a tiny cooling fan, heat sinks for the CPU and two other chips on the board, and a micro-SD card with the operating system pre-installed. It’s more expensive than buying a bare bones Pi but it has everything needed to get it operational. Just plug in a keyboard and mouse, and a monitor.
Lettuce In December
From about the end of may through September we had fresh greens whenever we wanted them out in the garden. All we had to do was go outside, clip off some of the lettuce mix we’d planted, and graze to our heart’s content. I really missed that. And then I was in the basement doing stuff and saw the little portable green house we used to start seedlings in the early spring with the grow lights and heater and thought why the hell aren’t we using that to grow some fresh greens? So we did. And this is what we ended up with.
We didn’t put in a lot because we weren’t sure it was going to work, but as you can see it worked very well indeed. We got more than enough for a couple of good sized salads plus a bit more. And yes, it tasted very, very good. 😊
Other Stuff
The PreciseRF magloop antenna continues to work surprisingly well for me. I was concerned about it’s survivability when set up out in the weather but it’s been holding up well despite the rain, snow and colder weather we’ve had. But the real test is yet to come when it gets really cold here. It’s been abnormally warm here all through December. Even now, on Jan. 3 at 4:30 AM, it’s 35 degrees out there. We’ll see what happens when it’s -30 and blizzard like conditions.
Weather
If we ever get cold weather, that is. Temperatures have been running well above normal here. I vividly remember one New Year’s Eve before MrsGF and I got married. When we got out of the pub where we’d spent the evening it was -34F with a stiff wind and everything, including the car, was frozen solid. We spent the night at a friend’s house and managed to get the car started the next morning, somehow.
It was brutally cold for weeks that January. On Jan 1 after I got back to the farm I had to put a new alternator on one of the tractors. It was so cold that the insulation on the wires the old alternator shattered when I bent them. I managed to get the tractor running well enough to pull it into the heifer barn and then close everything up. 30 or so young heifers put out a lot of heat and it was warm enough in there that I could get the job done. The heifers thought it was great fun. They were all crowded around watching me.
What’s Coming Up
I got a woodworking project going. This is a joint project by ES (Eldest Son) and myself. One of his hobbies is doing stained glass so I’m making a backlighted frame for a piece he did. That promises to turn out to be pretty interesting. More about that when it gets closer to completion. That’s still in the planning stage.
One thing, though, dear sweet lord has good quality lumber gotten expensive! I’ve been spoiled. Years and years ago I bought a whole pickup truck load of very good quality, kiln dried, white oak about 1 1/4 inches thick, 6 feet long and of various widths that ranged from 6″ up to 13″. That’s pretty much run out now so I had to actually go out and buy wood and prices of good quality, furniture grade hardwood are absolutely nuts.
I don’t really have plans for the Raspberry Pi. It’s something I wanted just to be able to play around with Linux and mess around with. If something develops from that I’ll let you know.
Dreams
Dreams are weird. At least mine are. I was up at 3 AM this morning and just couldn’t get back to sleep so I came out here dealt with my email and then started writing this up. I do vividly remember the dream I was having when I woke up. I rarely remember my dreams, but when I do they are often extremely vivid and detailed. This one was like that.
MrsGF and I were having dinner at a rather fancy restaurant with a very nice young couple from India. I have absolutely no idea who they were or why they were in this dream. Nice people, though.
When MrsGF and I left we went out into the parking lot and the car, my Buick, was gone. We thought we mis-remembered where we’d parked it so I pulled out my phone to use the app that tracks my car. And my phone didn’t work. It had been infected with some kind of malware that just kept cycling through obnoxious ads over and over again.
There was a strip mall nearby and a T-Mobile store was there so we walked over there. They were about the close but a nice young woman kept the place open. She got me a replacement phone right away, restored all my stuff and got the phone working. We went back to the parking lot and activated the tracking app and yeah, the car was gone. We called the police and they found it, and the thief, rather quickly.
Elon Musk had stolen it. He’d been at the table behind us and had overheard me making disparaging comments about how utterly hideous his “cybertruck” looked so he’d gotten huffy, hacked the electronic systems in my car and took it.
Still, it’s better than the vivid, realistic dream I had about painting the garage. That was the entire dream, painting the garage. That was it. It was so boring that I bored myself awake.
I’m sure that you were just as excited as I was to learn that two of the richest and most hated men on the planet were going to beat the crap out of each other on live TV. Come on, admit it, you’d have even paid money to watch that.
Alas, it isn’t going to happen. After Zuckerberg accepted Musk’s ill advised challenge, Musk, who is in even worse physical shape than I am judging from some of the photos I’ve seen of him without a shirt on in the Daily Mail, must have realized that challenging someone who is actually physically fit, trained in martial arts and is reportedly very, very good at it, wasn’t such a good idea and suddenly came down with “neck problems” that would require surgery. After numerous jokes and comments about alleged cowardice on the part of the head Twit, he said he would livestream himself driving to Zuck’s house and fight him in Zuck’s backyard. When Zuckerberg wasn’t actually home, I should point out.
Sheesh. With Zuckerberg’s “metaverse” concept being pretty much a total failure so far, and Musk’s issues with Tesla’s that allegedly stop steering and allegedly lying about battery capacities, exploding spaceships and the collapse of the social media service formerly known as Twitter turning into another Myspace you’d think these guys would have something better to do.
Ooo, Brussel Sprouts!
We got Sprouts!
When MrsGF suggested we grow brussel sprouts I said sure, why not? We’d never grown them before. And they are one of the weirdest looking things we’ve ever had growing back there. They look like some kind of mutant cabbage plant that was grown too close to the Kewaunee nuke plant. But MrsGF assures me that this is indeed what they look like and I’ll take her word for it.
How About A Flower?
There you go.
What? You want another one? Oh, why not…
The New Solar Panels
As I said before I replaced the 8, HQST solar panels with 4 Newpowa 220W panels a week ago so I have 10 of them out there now. And well, damn, they work good. Whenever you see the power ratings of a solar panel you need to remember that those numbers are produced with the panels in laboratory conditions that you will rarely see out in the real world. Especially up here in Wisconsin. So if I get anything even remotely close to the rated output wattage out of a panel it’s doing pretty darned good. And these have been doing better than good. By about 9 AM with some of the panels still getting some shade they’re putting out about 400W. By 10 AM when they’re in full sun they’re putting out about 1,000W or more. And at midday, under near ideal conditions they’re pumping out close to a full 2 KW. Let me run down in the basement and check some numbers quick. Don’t go away, this will only take a minute…
Okay, yesterday the inverters tell me the PV system pulled in 8.1 kWh, and the panels were switched on for about 6 hours. So the average per hour would be 8,100 divided by 6 = 1,350 per hour over those six hours? Egads, that’s not bad at all.
Still More Smoke
Once again we’re under an air quality warning here in Wisconsin because of the out of control wildfires in Canada. I feel so sorry for those people up here. These fires have burned something like 34 million acres so far and it it doesn’t look like they’re going to end anytime soon.
DC Tries Again
Supposedly there is a new Superman movie in the works. Even though I’m a sucker for superhero movies because I’ve been a comic book fan since i was like 5 years old, I’m not exactly thrilled with the idea of them taking another run at a Superman flick. Let’s face it, DC hasn’t exactly hit a lot of home runs with its attempts to adapt their characters to the big screen. The Justice League movie wasn’t horrible but it wasn’t very good either. And Black Adam… Oh dear. I felt sorry for the Rock because he really wanted to make this work and he ended up with a script that was, frankly, pure crap. I haven’t seen The Flash yet. What it all amounts to is that nothing that’s come out of the DC franchise in decades has done anything to excite me. Marvel has put out its share of stinkers but at least it has also put out a few gems that have kept people excited. At best what DC has been putting out has been mediocre at best.
Supposedly the whole DC multiverse is being “rebooted” yet again. The Batgirl movie, already completed and ready to roll, has been flushed down the toilet and will never be seen. I have to wonder just how bad it was that the company didn’t dare to even release it. New people have been brought in and there is a whole new “vision” for the Superman movie.
Hmm, I distinctly remember writing a Black Adam review but I can’t find it in the archives here. Did WordPress flush it? Did I delete it and I don’t remember? Sheesh…
David and Goliath
How about some peppers?
The tiny red one is actually supposed to be a jalapeno. I don’t know what happened to it. The ones in pots up front are just funny looking. Taste good, though. I associate tiny, tiny red peppers with intense heat but that one up there was relatively mild, even sweet.
The bell peppers are doing crazy good this year for some reason. We’re getting massive bell peppers bigger than my hand. MrsGF had to stake some of them up because the weight of the fruit was making the plants fall over.
Anyway that’s about it for now. We’re bracing for heat right now. The latest weather reports are telling us that we’re going to be getting up to around 101F tomorrow, the hottest it’s been up here in ages. We are not looking forward to it.
House Insanity
Okay, so the house just around the corner from our place just went up for sale. It’s small, about 1,200 sq ft, 3 bedrooms, 2 of which aren’t much bigger than my walk in closet, just extensively remodeled. Virtually no yard at all. And they’re asking $350K for the thing. $350,000 for what is, I’m sorry to say, a 100 year old polished turd.
That got me and MrsGF talking about how utterly insane house prices have become in the last few years and speculating about what our place might be worth. We paid $85K for it about 25 years ago. The town appraises it now at $180K for tax purposes. Our insurance company claims it’s worth $500K. And if we look at real estate ads for houses with similar amenities, size and size lot in a nice neighborhood we’re seeing prices pushing up over $750K.
Alleged typical director of one of Wisconsin’s monopoly elecric utility companies.
Wisconsin’s monopoly electric utilities are once again trying to do everything they can to make it as difficult and uneconomical as possible for us to put in solar power. They are required by law in the state to buy power from homeowners who have solar power systems but they try to do everything they can to make it as hard as possible for you to actually do it, they add in all kinds of junk fees to make it costly, and now they’re trying to cut the price they pay for that power to almost literally nothing.
One utility company in the state has already dropped the amount they pay to home solar owners to a whopping 4 cents per kilowatt hour, and two more have filed applications with the public service commission to do the same. And they will almost certainly be granted that new rate because the PSC will claim that it is “in the best interests of the consumer”.
Meanwhile the utility companies will gladly sell you all the power you want, at 16 to 28 cents per kwh depending on what company you’re dealing with and what plan you have. That means that if you have a solar power system and you’re selling power to the utility instead of using it yourself you’re losing anywhere from 12 to 24 cents per kwh for every kilowatt you sell them.
See why I don’t like grid tie systems?
Let’s Play Spot The Turtle!
Do you see him? Do you? I almost missed him when I was out on the bike and I stopped at the stone bridge to look at what’s left of the river. If he hadn’t moved his head I never would have spotted him.
This Sunflower. WTF? Seriously, WTF?
This is one sunflower plant. Just one. I counted 37 flowers on this thing. I’ve never seen anything like this before.
Personally I think its aliens.
Speaking Of Aliens…
Typical US Congressperson. Artist’s rendition.
Now I’m not a historian, but I suspect that our current Congress has to rank as the single worst and perhaps the stupidest Congress in the history of the country. In fact it probably ranks right up there with the top ten worst governing body in the history of the entire planet.
Why? California is on fire. Again. Wildfires are moving from Canada into the US. Large parts of the country are experiencing the most extreme heat ever recorded. Every other day there is another mass shooting somewhere in the country. Deaths from overdoses of illegal drugs have reached epidemic proportions.
And what is the U.S. Congress doing? That distinguished body is holding hearings on aliens. No, not the illegal kind. The space kind. They were actually sitting there, people who claim they are reasonably intelligent representatives of the American people, listening some “witness” claiming that “someone” told him that the US government has actual real alien spaceships, actual real alien bodies, and has been keeping it secret since the 1940s. And they’re taking it seriously. Did this witness have any actual, well, proof? No. No documents, no photos, no videos, no audio recordings, no first hand witnesses. Nothing. Just “A friend of a friend told me that someone he knows said that they overheard someone saying that the Army had a spaceship…”
Sigh… Like I’ve said before, the human race is going to be the first species in the history of the planet to stupid itself into extinction.
I wanted to take a look at the EG4 48V Chargeverter and I finally had a chance to try it over the weekend. I got in three more EG4LL batteries last Tuesday and before they could be installed they had to be at the same voltage as the existing batteries in order to avoid problems. So that meant they had to be charged up from about 54% to 99%. So this was a good opportunity to test it.
It’s that small yellow box on the floor. Not the best picture in the world, I know.
In the interest of full disclosure I should point out that I got the Chargeverter free from Signature Solar. They were running a deal where you’d get the device if you bought a package deal with two EEG6500EX inverters. Normally it sells for about $500.
So why does someone need this device? Well if you are really off grid or you are in an extended power outage, and you aren’t getting enough solar power to keep your batteries charged because of cloudy conditions, you’re going to need to recharge those batteries somehow if you want to keep your electrical devices working. And chances are good you’re going to turn to a good old fashioned gasoline powered backup generator to recharge those batteries. And that’s where this yellow box comes in.
Someone will point out that many inverters like my 6500EX already have AC powered battery chargers built into them. Just plug the 120V AC input on the inverter into the generator and let it charge the batteries. And you can, in theory, but there are some serious issues with that. There have been reports of people wrecking their inverter/chargers by trying to do just that. Apparently a lot of these inverter/chargers don’t work very well with backup generators. The problem is that a lot of these generators put out some of the nastiest, dirtiest, power imaginable with lots of voltage fluctuations. The inverter/chargers expect to see nice, clean, steady, pure 120V AC sine wave power coming in from the utility company, while the power coming out of some of these generators is so bad it can actually damage the inverter/charger.
The EG4 Chargeverter is designed specifically for these situations. It’s intended to plug directly into the 240V socket of a backup generator, convert that power to nice, steady 48V DC, and pump that into your batteries. Well actually 56V AC but I’ll come to that in a moment.
Yes, I said 240V. This thing can be rewired to work off 120V or you can get adaptors to let it do so, but you’re going to need at least a 120V, 30 Amp circuit power this thing if you’re going to try to use it off our house’s electrical system. If you have a 240V electric clothes dryer you might be able to plug it into that with the right adaptor but I don’t really care about that so I didn’t look into it. I’m interested in running this thing off a backup generator.
Since this charger can suck up at least 5KW of power to dump into the batteries, you’re going to want a fairly hefty generator to plug it into. You can use a smaller one but you’re going to need to adjust the power level of the charger to a lower amperage or you’re going to overload the generator. I’m using it with my big Generac 7.5 KW gasoline generator.
I bolted the plus and minus cables from the chargeverter to the battery. I started up the Generac….
Ah, the Generac… I have a love/hate relationship with that generator. It hasn’t been used much over the years, there are only a few hours on it and most of that is from test runs. It can be a real beast to get started. It has electric start, which generally doesn’t work because no one ever remembers to put the battery on the maintainer, so that means it either has to be jump started from an battery pack or started with the recoil starter. I will not describe the language I used trying to get that thing going with the pull starter. I finally found one of those jump starter packs used to jump start cars and used that to power the electric starter and got it going. Once it’s running, it’s fine. When the engine is warm, it’s fine. But starting it that first time…
Never mind. I got it started, plugged in the chargeverter and… And the engine immediately died. WTF?
I started it again. I plugged in the chargeverter and… And the engine immediately died again. WTF?
Oh… I forgot to turn the gas on. Sigh…
Now with the generator finally running, I plugged in the chargeverter. The display came on. I used the buttons on the front to set the voltage to 55.5V and the amperage to 50A, and flipped on the circuit breaker to start it up and, well, it just worked exactly the way it was supposed to.
It was really going to be that easy? Apparently it was. According to the display on the battery it was being charged with about 48.5 amps of current. Cool.
I kicked the amperage up to 80A which made the generator work a bit hard for the first time in its life and the battery reported it was getting 78.8 amps…
What can I say? It just worked exactly as specified.
I charged all three batteries from about 50% to 99% in about two hours total.
The only issue is that the case of that charger gets seriously hot, hot enough to be painful to touch but the manual warns of this so it wasn’t unexpected.
I like it when things just work.
EG4 6500EX and EG4LL Battery long term evaluation.
This is another rather dull report because the EG4 6500EX inverters have just plain worked. Something that was made abundantly clear when we had a power failure this morning about 8 AM that lasted for about two hours. First the power flickered out for about 10 seconds or so around 7:3o. And then at around 8 it went out completely and stayed out. So down into the basement I scurried, flipped a couple of circuit breakers and we were back to the electrical system running normally in about a minute. Furnace, sump pumps, furnace (weather changed from hot and dry to cold and wet so the sump pumps and the furnace have all been running), lights, microwave and, most important of all in the early morning, the coffee maker, all worked just fine and dandy.
The outage lasted about two hours and even the sump pumps weren’t a problem. By the time power came back on the batteries were still at about 95%. Granted we weren’t using a lot of power. The sump pumps only cycled once and the furnace only ran for a few minutes.
Anyway I’m quite pleased with the system. It’s nice to be able to just switch over like that with just a couple of circuit breakers and get back to normal.
I managed to injure my left leg when I was wrestling around with those massive batteries for the solar power system so my physical activity was seriously limited for a couple of weeks. Yesterday was the first day I felt comfortable enough to get out on the bike for an extended ride, and it was a great day to start. Was absolutely beautiful out with temps in the high 70s and a gentle breeze.
Phlox everywhere. They’re pretty but they’re an invasive species that spreads very aggressively in this area.
I injured my left calf pretty seriously back in the 1990s in a farm accident. Took me 6 weeks to recover from that one and ever since I’ve had to be cautious with that leg. Lugging 100 lb batteries down the basement stairs and into the battery cabinet didn’t do the leg any good. Neither did repeatedly kneeling down on the floor to work on wiring.
Out in the gardens the irises are coming into full bloom. They don’t bloom for very long but when they do that whole area is covered with these amazing flowers in brilliant blue, purple and yellow. When the sun hits them the colors are so brilliant they almost glow.
Alas the flowers don’t last long but by the time they fade away others will have blossomed to take their place.
More solar stuff: I really need to do some meaningful testing of the EG4 system to get some basic data about run times and things like that. I can guess how long the batteries will last when running the house off the EG4 system but I don’t have any actual operational data giving me actual run times under particular sets of circumstances and things like that. Two days ago I started it up, took the house off-grid and ran entirely from the EG4 system starting at 7 AM and ending at 3 PM, a total of 8 hours. At the end of that time the batteries were still at about 78% capacity because we had a pretty good day for solar production. While that was interesting I really need to see how long I can run the house just off the batteries, with no solar power at all.
The string of Newpowa panels have been peaking at around 1,000 watts, and the HQST panels at around 600 watts. That’s less their rated peak output which should be around 1,320 and 800 respectively. The HQST panels were putting out close to 700W earlier this year so I know they can do better than what I’m seeing. And the weather was clear with bright sunshine…
Or was it? The sky looked clear when looking straight up, but if you’d look towards the horizon it was a different story. The wind shifted again and we’re back to getting air quality alerts because of the forest fires in Canada. It looks clear and sunny but it really isn’t. There is a significant amount of fine particulate material floating around in the atmosphere that is cutting back on the amount of solar radiation that is reaching the ground. What it boils down to is that I theoretically have enough solar out there to take my batteries from about 50% to near 100% in one day of full sun. In reality, with variable cloud conditions and the smoke from the fires, I’m lucky if I get half of that.
(And I can sure tell there are air quality problems with my allergies, too. I was up at 3 AM this morning with my head so stuffed up I could hardly breathe. I gave up trying to get back to sleep. Since all of this air quality stuff started I’ve been having problems sleeping, stuffed up sinuses, etc. Makes it very hard for me to stay asleep. I’ve generally been waking up around 3 or 4 AM and find it almost impossible to get back to sleep again. Running on four or five hours of sleep is unpleasant. Sigh…)
This thing started out at around $500 but is currently selling for $399 over at Signature Solar. In the interest of full disclosure I should point out that I got this thing free from Signature Solar.
Speaking of battery charging I got one of these in earlier this week from Signature Solar, the EG4 Chargeverter, a 48V battery charger that plugs into a 240V AC power source to rapidly recharge LiFePo batteries. This thing can put out up to 100 Amps which means it could fully recharge my 15 KWh of batteries in just 3 hours. It’s only been on the market for a few months and I’m curious to see how well it works so when I get a chance to check it out I’ll talk about it in the future.
Now why would someone need one of these? After all a lot of modern inverters like my EG4 6500EX already have built in AC battery chargers. I could wire my EG4s directly to the house’s AC power and they would automatically keep the batteries topped up even when there is no solar. But a lot of these systems are sold to people who are entirely off the grid. They have no connection to the grid at all. (And my system has no grid connection.) If they don’t get enough solar power to keep their batteries topped up, they have to resort to using a gasoline powered generator to charge them up. And that’s where the problems come in. These cheap, gasoline generators often produce very dirty power that isn’t even close to a pure sine wave and which can damage electronics. This chargeverter apparently doesn’t care how dirty the AC power coming into it may be. So if you’re living entirely off the grid, or if you’re going through an extended blackout and there isn’t enough solar to keep the batteries charged, you could plug this thing into a cheap Harbor Freight generator to charge your batteries and not have to worry about damaging anything.
I have a 7,500W Generac gasoline generator sitting out in the garage and this thing should plug right into it so I’ll be testing this out in the near future. If it works as advertised it will probably be kept permanently wired up to the bus bars in the battery cabinet. I doubt if it will get much use but it could come in very handy if we have an extended power outage.
What I’ll probably do is run my batteries down to about 25% and then try charging them with the chargeverter connected to the Generac and see what happens.
The weather finally moved into a warmer, drier pattern here in east central Wisconsin and the plants responded by going nuts to make up for lost time. This is really the perfect time of year here, climate speaking. It’s warmer, sunnier, and the mosquitoes have yet to emerge to drive us back into the house.
We put #10 cans around new seedlings to protect them from wind and little creatures until they get well established. We’ve been doing that for ages now and it works quite well.
We made a lot of changes out in the gardens, but you can’t really tell unless you look closely. One thing we are doing again is putting peppers along the south side of the house. That narrow strip of ground between the house and the grass produced a fantastic crop of peppers of various types last year so we’re going to do it again.
We did something different this year with starting seedlings. We used to put a sort of mini green house in the livingroom in front of a south facing window to start seeds but the results were mixed. The seedlings were often spindly and weak and suffered from severe transplant shock. This year we set the mini greenhouse up in the basement with some inexpensive grow lights we got off Amazon along with a heating pad designed for seedling trays. That system worked amazingly well. The peppers, tomatoes and other seeds we started were all thriving in that environment.
Every year we like to try at least one new thing we’ve never grown before and this year it’s brussel sprouts. MrsGF and I both like them a lot so we thought we’d try growing our own and see what happens. They’re a late season crop, usually not harvested until after the first frost they tell me. Brussel sprouts have a bit of a bad reputation, but over the last decade or so the flavor has changed drastically thanks to new varieties that have been introduced. The new varieties have a milder, less bitter flavor, along with a better texture.
And it’s lilac season here in town. There are lilacs all over town, including in our backyard. It seems to be people’s favorite bush around here, and when they all come into bloom around the same time the whole town smells of lilacs. Another reason why I love this time of year.
Other stuff:
it’s hard to tell but if you look to the right of those factory buildings back there at the trees in the distance you can see how hazy it’s been around here.
–> We’ve been under air quality warnings for some time now because of smoke from massive forest fires up in Canada. Down at ground level it’s hard to tell but it’s especially easy to see early in the morning right at sunrise. Off to the east right now at around 6 AM it looks like there’s a thick haze up there. I feel sorry for those poor people up there. Huge areas of forests have burned off already, whole communities are under evacuation orders. It’s pretty bad.
The DNR hasn’t been helping air quality here either. They were doing this the other day…
They’ve been burning off marshes around here adding to the already poor air quality. I was told you could see the smoke from this one for 20 miles and could smell it over the entire county.
–> The biofuel industry is continuing to try to desperately to put off its impending demise as long as possible. We live in a world where it seems we are on an inevitable course to switch to electric powered everything, including transportation, garden tools and everything else that is currently being powered by the burning of some kind of fuel. And that means the entire biofuel industry is about to crash and burn because there isn’t going to be a market for its product any more. That hasn’t stopped them from trying to rake in as much cash as they can until the end comes. It looks like they’ve succeeded in pushing for an increase in sales of 15% ethanol blended gasoline and now they’re pushing for more mandates to blend biodiesel into traditional fuels. Diesel fuel is probably going to be the last gasp for this. Trying to make long haul trucks and trains to run off electricity has been difficult because of the huge power demands so those will probably remain for some time after automobiles and light trucks have gone full electric.
What they really need to be doing is trying to slowly and carefully shut down the whole biofuel system to avoid a massive financial crash that will ripple through the whole agricultural sector. Continuing to invest in biofuels at this point in time is sort of like someone heavily investing in horse drawn carriages right after Ford came out with the Model T.
I don’t often talk about computer technology and software here because A) it’s generally pretty boring, and B) there are far better sources for information about this stuff than me. But I want to talk about “artificial intelligence”, or AI as it’s known, because it has some serious implications for all of us as it comes into more widespread use. While I used to be a programmer I’m not so much interested in the technology of AIs as I am in the ethical and social implications of AIs, and that’s what I want to talk about briefly.
Take a look at that painting up there. It isn’t bad, really. Personally I’d like it if it were a bit brighter, but overall it isn’t horrible. It’s sort of a generic winter scene, peaceful, pleasant even.
Or what about this one —
Both of these paintings are originals that I just did in the last few days, but I didn’t make them in the usual way by applying paint to a surface or even a using a stylus on a drawing pad as I usually do. These were done by an app on my cell phone that is available for free on Apple’s app store called Draw Things. And as you can see it is pretty damn good. Well, sometimes. I will admit that about 8 out of 10 of the images it generates are, frankly, a bit, well, surreal. Like this one below.
I found myself wondering what kind of drugs my iPhone was on to make it produce something like this.
But that being said, that it works at all is, I think, a bit amazing. What’s even more amazing is that unlike some of the other art AIs out there which actually run on some massive server somewhere out there on the internet, Draw Things runs entirely on the phone, no external processing power required. You can try it yourself although I’ll warn you that your phone will need a lot of free memory (the libraries the software uses are a gigabyte+ in size and you need at least one for the program to work) and using the program frequently will suck up a hell of a lot of battery as well because it really makes that processor work hard.
When you run the program, what you do is type in words and phrases that verbally describe the scene you want painted. Let’s say you type in something like “A white cat sitting on a table with vases of flowers” as an example. What you get is something like this –
MrsGF thinks that image is just creepy but personally I think it’s kind of charming, but everyone’s tastes are different.
But these art AIs have also generated a hell of a lot of controversy as well, and for good reasons.
Yes, this one was generated by that app running on my cell phone.
First of all, artists, actual real world artists who create real world art, are very nervous about all of this and for very good reasons. There are thousands of artists out there who earn their living as graphic artists, illustrators, etc. for advertising agencies, magazines and the like. Publishers and corporations don’t give a fig about things like ‘artistic integrity’ or keeping illustrators gainfully employed. They only care about money. So if it comes down to paying an illustrator money to create a piece of artwork for them, or generating something essentially for free with an AI, guess which option they’re going to take? They’re going to go with the AI everytime.
Another controversy is how these AIs are trained. Before these things will work properly they have to be trained by feeding them literally millions of illustrations. They do this by scraping the internet for every image they can get their hands on, whether those images are protected by copyright or not. Under a strict interpretation of copyright law some claim that this is an illegal use of those copyrighted images. Others claim that this use qualifies as what is known as “fair use” and is legally and ethically acceptable. I’m not a lawyer and I’m not even going to try to figure out whether how these things are trained is legal or ethical or not.
Then there is the question of who “owns” the artwork generated by an AI. That image over there on the right was generated by Draw Things. So who actually owns the rights to that image? You could argue that the image was generated by my phone, using an application that I own, so therefore the image is mine and I own all rights to it.
But it isn’t as simple as that. These days you don’t actually “own” the software you are using. You’re merely licensing it. Basically you’re renting it. That’s been the case for decades now. Under the licensing agreement you agree to, and which you almost certainly haven’t bothered to read because you’d have to hire an attorney to figure it out for you, the maker of the software can set any conditions they like, and it is claimed that your mere use of that software means that you agree to all of the conditions in the license, whether you read them or not. It would be entirely within the realm of possibility for the maker of the AI you’re using to claim any and all rights to any artwork generated by the program. Unless you carefully read the fine print in the license agreement, you have no idea what you are agreeing to.
Some people have started to claim that the AI that generated the image “owns” it. The people who are making this claim either need to find a new hobby or stop taking whatever drugs they’re on because this is just stupid. An AI isn’t an intelligence, it is a computer program. Period. It is no more ‘alive’ than the old Eliza programs people were playing with back in the early days of computing. They’re little more than a complex series of “IF-THEN-ELSE” choices pre-programmed into a computer. Oh, all right it’s a lot more complex than that, but what it boils down to is that an AI is just a computer program like the one I’m using to write this. It is no more “intelligent” or self aware than the calculator you use to figure out your taxes.
The other thing that makes people very nervous is the fact that these things can be used to generate images that mimic specific artists. Want to have your very own original Van Gogh to hang on the wall? You can. These things can easily mimic the artistic style of most well known artists, living or dead. Living artists claim that this reduces the demand for their original artwork. People who like their work don’t need to buy an original or, more likely, an authorized print of the original work, they can use an AI to generate their own in the style of that artist.
I would imagine that the companies that have become wealthy selling stock images for use in publications, companies like Getty, are terrified by this kind of technology because it would very easily put them out of business. Let’s say you’re writing an article about, oh, shopping malls, and you want to put in a photo of a nice looking mall. Instead of going to one of these stock photo companies and buying one, just make your own. Like the one over there on the left. It took Draw Things a little over a minute to generate that. My cost? Zero. So why would anyone ever need to buy generic photos for illustrating articles any more? So let’s just say that investing your pension fund in companies that sell stock images probably isn’t a good idea.
And these things can be used to produce some not so nice images as well. Pornography, s0-called ‘deep fakes’ that portray celebrities, politicians or other well known persons in, oh, compromising positions, let’s call it, can all be generated with nothing but a program like this and a few written descriptions of what you want to see.
Some of the developers of these programs are starting to put filters into the systems to try to prevent or at least limit their capabilities so they can’t be usfed for illicit purposes, but that is ultimately futile. The technology is now out there. A lot of it is open source, meaning anyone can tinker with the underlying code. And there are versions of these programs already out there in the wild, so to speak, tweaked to specifically crank out these types of illicit images. Let’s face it, my friends, that’s what human beings are like. As soon as human beings developed things like writing, painting and drawing, they started using it to make porn.
There are already people out there demanding that something need to be done. Right now. By someone. Somewhere. Congress needs to act now! Act how, though? Ban the software? Sorry, that horse is already out of the barn. Thousands of people are already using it and hundreds are tinkering with the code to make it work even better.
What it all boils down to is that we have a lot of questions, a lot of ethical concerns, a lot of legal issues, and no real answers.
Please feel free to leave comments about this. I’m curious about what other people think of all of this and if anyone has proposed solutions to the problems.
Copyright 2022 grouchyfarmer.com all rights reserved and all that legal stuff.
Dreams are weird things. I’m not sure if anyone has figured out exactly why we dream although it seems to have something to do with the brain sifting through things for some reason and if you aren’t permitted to dream, it can result in some serious problems. But I don’t want to talk about why we dream. I want to talk about what we dream.
I don’t run around asking people what they dream while they’re sleeping because that would be, frankly, odd and a bit creepy. But occasionally people have offered up brief descriptions of their dreams and they are almost universally far, far different from mine.
People seem to often share similar situations in dreams. Finding yourself back in high school, walking down the hallway, and you suddenly realize you aren’t wearing pants seems to be a theme that is fairly popular. Some people have genuine nightmares. They’re being chased by monsters of various interesting types. One fellow told me he dreamt he was being eaten, from the feet up, by a zombie unicorn. I thought that was a bit odd, but I let it go because he’s a rather odd fellow to begin with.
Some people have erotic dreams, sometimes rather intense and realistic ones, involving prominent celebrities and things like chocolate syrup and a very rude banana.
What about me? Certainly I dream as well but… But to be perfectly frank I think there’s something broken. Let me give you some illustrations.
The other night I dreamed I had to go to my wife’s sister’s place to feed her dog, Dash. I didn’t mind because Dash and I are great buddies and he likes nothing better than to sit on my lap and slobber over me. So I got in the car, drove out to her farm, took Dash out to go potty, gave him food and fresh water, and drove home. And…
And that was it. That was the whole dream.
Or there was the time I had a particularly vivid dream of painting the garage. I was out there on a nice Saturday afternoon, dipping the brush in the paint can, applying the paint, repeat and… And that was it. That was the whole dream. Painting the garage. It was so utterly boring that I think I bored myself awake somewhere in the middle of it just as I ran out of paint.
Then there was the dream where I went shopping. (Ooo0, the excitement!) I went down to Walmart, picked up a few things, pushed the cart down through the grocery aisles. They were out of my favorite brand of mustard but that was okay because they had another that I like so I got that instead.
Those are just a few examples of how utterly dull my dreams are. Other people get man eating unicorns, monsters, sex dreams with B list celebrities, etc. Me? I paint the garage.
I’ve stopped telling MrsGF about them because her eyes sort of glaze over and midway through she sort of wanders away. Don’t blame her.
One fellow I know tells me that what’s happening to me is not dreaming at all. He claims that we live in a multiverse, an endlessly repeating series of universes, each one just slightly different from the other. According to his theory, what’s happening is that while I’m sleeping I am really mentally connecting with other versions of me, living in other universes, and that in all possible universes I am just as boring as I am in this one. But since he also picks wild mushrooms that he finds growing near the nuke plant north of Two Rivers I tend to just nod and mumble and then point and cry out “Look! A duck!” and then run away while he’s distracted when he gets like that.
Now I am trying desperately to come up with some pithy, witty conclusion to this rambling nonsense and I’m having problems doing so, so let’s try this…
I’m going to go wandering off on a tangent so if you were expecting more photos or info about drones or amateur radio or farming you’re going to want to skip this one. I want to talk about the so-called metaverse. And I should warn you up front that there may be satire. Maybe even sarcasm.
Here we see Zuck plucking a pretty VR flower in his little metaverse. He is not, as some wags have indicated, fondling the testicles of a goat.
And I can’t really talk about the metaverse without also talking about Facebook, The Great Satan, We’ll Sell Your Children If We Can Get Away With It… Oh, hell, what’s the name of that company now? Oh, I remember now. Meta. That’s it. Meta and it’s chief overlord, Palpatine… Oh, dear, that’s not right either. Zuckerberg? Is that it? Yeah, that’s it. But I’ll come to that later.
One of Meta’s problems with the whole metaverse thing is that they aren’t really very good at explaining just what it is. Zuck’s “vision” of the future, the metaverse, is a bit complicated. Let me see if I can explain. Please bear with me because this gets a bit complicated.
In his metaverse we will all be wearing something like those silly goggles he has on in that photo up there. In case you haven’t seen those before, that is a VR (virtual reality) headset that you strap over your face that contains cameras, microphones, and two high resolution video screens just an inch or so away from your eyeballs. The idea is that the headset tries to trick your brain into thinking you are actually inside of a different environment, the one being displayed on the video screens.
Now these have been around for a while. Some gamers use them, some drone pilots use them, sometimes they are used for training. You can think of them as, oh, sort of a video screen that completely surrounds you. The headset tracks the movement of your head and eyes so the scene you see on the video shifts perspective as you turn your head. They’ve been around commercially for, oh, must be ten years or so now. They’ve never been all that popular because they have a variety of problems. People who wear glasses can’t use them at all unless they have special lenses made to correct their vision when wearing them. A significant number of people, as many as 25% or even more, suffer from serious motion sickness when using them for any length of time. (I’m one of those people. Just a few minutes wearing these things makes me so ill I can’t function.)
The new models, especially the new “flagship” model Meta’s company Oculus came out with recently, include sensors that can track your movements so those movements can be mimicked inside of the game or world being displayed. Not just your hand and arm movements, but even track your facial expression. Eventually they hope to make the systems sophisticated enough so they can do away things like hand held controllers so that your movements in a game or whatever environment you’re in can be controlled by your gestures.
Now this can actually be kind of fun, if you can tolerate wearing them. Imagine playing Call of Duty or some other video game, only instead of sitting there staring at a flat screen, it looks like you are actually inside of the game itself. When you turn your head, your view of the world changes just as if you were physically there. Flying a drone that’s tethered to one of these headsets is absolutely breathtaking. You’re seeing the world through the drone’s “eyes” so to speak as if you were actually flying yourself. DJI actually makes a drone specifically designed for this purpose, complete with all the hardware and software to make it work and it is absolutely amazing.
Virtual Reality
But so far this just concerns things like gaming. We want to move into something called VR, Virtual Reality. VR doesn’t actually really need the goggles. Technically whenever we’re playing a game we are engaging in a kind of virtual reality. Even something like watching a movie or a video is, in a way, a kind of VR. We are engaging with an environment that doesn’t actually exist. We sort of, oh, lose ourselves in the drama we’re watching, projecting ourselves into the world we’re seeing on the screen.
In a way people have been engaging with virtual realities, well, forever, really. The difference today is that we now have the technology to make it seem as if you, personally, are actually in that world yourself and that you can actively engage in that world, moving through it however you like – walk, run, fly, crawl, whatever. You can manipulate objects that appear in that world. It’s like you can reach into that movie or video and move objects on the screen, engage with characters in the movie, as if you were there yourself.
In these virtual realities you can have a physical presence in the form of an avatar. An avatar is a physical representation of yourself and the other persons also inside of the virtual world you are in. These avatars can range from very realistic representations of human beings, even ones modeled on your real physical appearance, to simplistic cartoonish forms. You can be human or animal or fantasy creatures. You can change how you appear to others with a few keystrokes or mouse clicks. Feel silly? You can be a cartoon cat. Want to look respectable? You can appear as a human in a three piece business suit.
What do you do in these virtual realities? Why would you even want to bother with any of this? I’ll come to that in a moment. But I want to touch on something called AR first.
Augmented Reality
AR stands for Augmented Reality, and this is one of the directions Meta seems to be moving towards. With AR what you see through the goggles is the actual real world around you. Cameras in the headset project an actual image of your real environment. But you are still seeing a computer generated image, so that means it can be, oh, tampered with. AR lets you project objects that don’t actually exist into your real world.
Let’s say you need to have a video meeting with someone. Instead of seeing them on the screen of your computer or phone, you see the person (or their avatar) sitting in your living room on your sofa. Or the system can project information about objects you focus on, with text appearing to float in mid air near the object. Or if you’re walking through town and wondering where the hell you are, you can see the route you need to take projected onto the sidewalk in front of you as you walk.
Now this all sounds actually pretty neat, even fun. And it definitely can be. But it’s nothing new. None of it. Specifically created virtual realities, virtual worlds that can be “inhabited” by people, have been around for a very, very long time. Perhaps the first real attempt to create a VR experience could considered to be Microsoft V-Chat which dates back to 1995. V-Chat was pretty much utterly horrible in every single way but considering what the technology was like back then I suppose it’s surprising that it worked at all.
But I suppose the granddaddy of VR environments is probably Second Life from Linden Labs. Yes, Second Life is still around and doing quite well, actually. Despite all of the bad press it got for a time (some of it justified, some of it not), and articles that indicate that SL has “failed” somehow, it is still out there and doing rather well. The last data I saw showed SL has about 900,000 unique users per month. And then there is the in-world economy to consider.
In-World Economy? WTF?
Oh, I suppose I should explain what an in-world economy is, shouldn’t I?
People being people, you can be sure that no matter what kind of environment they might be in, they will eventually end up doing two things: First, try to figure out a way to make money off it, and second, sex. Yeah, sex. I’m not even going to go down that road, though, so let’s stick with money.
Second Life is an environment that is entirely created by its own users. Every single thing you see in SL was made by the people who “live” in the world. The vehicles, the trees, the flowers, the grass, the buildings, the clothes the avatars wear, the avatars themselves, the little props decorating scenes like pottery, cups, eye glasses, trains, all of it was made by someone. Now you can build your own stuff in SL if you have the time, the patience and skills to do so, but if you want to decorate your own personal space in SL, what you’ll probably do is just buy the stuff you want from the creator.
Now someone will come along and say, well, that’s silly. Why would you pay actual money for something that doesn’t actually exist except as a graphic in a video game? Well think about it for a minute, we do stuff like that all the time as it is. When you pay to rent or buy the latest blockbuster superhero movie from Marvel you aren’t really buying a tangible product either, are you? You’re simply buying the right to view someone else’s intellectual property. It’s the same with systems like SL, you’re buying the right to use someone else’s intellectual property, their artwork if you want to call it that, in your own environment.
And creating and selling virtual objects is big business. Seriously big business. Second Life’s in-world economy generates about $50,000,000 (US dollars) worth of transactions. Per month. That is not a typo. Fifty. Million. Dollars. Per month.
SL has its own currency, the Linden (usually shortened to “$L”, as in $L100 for one hundred Linden. And the value of the Linden is pegged to the US dollar. The current exchange rate is about $L 240 per dollar.
SL mimics the real world in other ways, not just the economy. You can buy or rent virtual land and put up your own buildings or whatever you like on it. Why? Because we’ve found over the years that people like to mimic the real world, even though there is no requirement to do so. We feel more comfortable in an environment that is more or less similar to what we experience in real life.
But to get back to the in-world economy for a moment. With it’s paltry 900,000 users per month, SL’s in-world economy generates about a half billion dollars of transactions a year. Facebook has literally billions of users. If Zuck and Meta can get significant number of Facebook users to buy into this system, the amount of money they could make off of just taking a cut of in-world transactions would be staggering.
What the Heck Do You Do in VR?
In the case of Second life you do pretty much whatever the hell you want to as long as you don’t violate Linden Lab’s terms of service. Linden Labs provides the environment and the tools, and the users define what they want to do with it. A lot of people love modeling things. You can find, for example, a virtually full sized, working, aircraft carrier (used in a Vietnam war simulation). You can find entire cities, both modeled after real world cities or created entirely out of the creator’s imagination. Want to have your own starship? I have one that’s about 250 meters long, has five decks, fully equipped with weapons, shuttles, and can handle a crew of a dozen or more people. You can fly ultra-realistic aircraft. You can go bowling. Want to be a dragon and breathe fire on people? Go for it. Second life has its own railroad, SLRR, and its own highway system if you want to play with trains or wheeled vehicles.
Mostly though, virtual realities like SL are social spaces. People go there to interact with others in some way. I belong to one group which put together a rather elaborate theater environment and we get together once a week or so and stream bad movies in-world while making snide comments and bad jokes.
Here’s a quick little video of one environment in SL, a place called Le Village de Roqueblanche.
Or you can go totally silly if you like:
Or get even more silly.
I’d show you my place but I just completely tore it down and I’m rebuilding it with a new theme so there’s scaffolding all over the place, cement mixers, construction crews, porta potties and debris all over the place.
What, GF, you ask, does Facebook/Meta’s virtually reality look like? It must be really, really cool considering the resources Meta has at its disposal, right?
Well, let’s take a look…
Wait, seriously? That’s it? With all of the billions of dollars Meta has thrown at this thing this is what they think a virtual world should look like? Yeah, seriously. Horizon World hasn’t been doing too good, and that video up there should tell you why.
So, Back To The Metaverse Again
These virtual realities, these metaverses that already exist and have managed to survive like Second Life are games and social spaces, and that’s about it. There are people who make a tidy bit of money creating and selling in-world content, but the majority of people who use these places do so for recreation.
What Zuck and Meta want to do is push you into a world where you will be “in world” a large part of your time. They want you to not just engage with these worlds as a game, but as an extension of your real life. In their vision of the new world order you will have some version of those stupid goggles strapped to your face pretty much all the time. You will work in some kind of version of this virtual or augmented reality.
Your interactions with your colleagues will take place in VR, not in the real world. Your business meetings? You’ll be talking with their avatars in some kind of augmented reality. You’ll work in there, too. Your documents will appear to be floating in space in front of you instead of reading them from a monitor. You’ll write your code or work on your spreadsheets or write your reports all inside of this world. Even when you aren’t actually working you’ll still be connected to this world in a way through augmented reality systems that will project information overlaid onto the real world like the HUD in your car does.
There are serious problems with all of this, though, that Zuckerberg and his people don’t seem to be able to grasp. The first is that we’ve tried a lot of this stuff before and gave up on it because it didn’t work. Second Life is still littered with the remains of companies, charities, news organizations, universities, etc. that tried to do this before. The few properties in SL that weren’t dismantled are now little more than little visited tourist attractions. The virtual world and the real world simply do not play well together.
We are still people, still human beings, and firmly grounded in the real world where we have to live, and Zuck and Meta are ignoring that. We have to accomplish real world tasks in order to keep our lives going. Most of us would much rather socialize with real people down at the local pub or interact with actual real people at work than someone’s cartoonish avatar. These virtual worlds are fine for games or the occasional diversion, but as human beings we crave, no we need, reality, not some bizarre, cartoonish version of it, no matter how realistic that cartoon version might eventually become.
And the majority of us not only live in the real world, we work in it, too. We aren’t stuck in an office somewhere sweating over reports or code or spreadsheets. We’re out here being carpenters, plumbers, electricians, construction workers, road builders, mechanics, caregivers, nurses, farmers, cooks… This metaverse has little or no relevance at all for people like us. Except when I was a writer and a programmer for a time, I’ve never had a job that I could do in some kind of virtual world. Milking cows, planting corn, repairing HVAC systems, repairing plumbing, laying floors, repairing roofs, installing water heaters, repairing laser scanners… None of it could have been done in Zukerberg’s metaverse. And I suspect the same is true for the vast majority of people who are reading this.
In my opinion, the image that Zuckerberg and Meta have for this metaverse of theirs is fundamentally flawed. They’ve put together a bunch of interesting ideas, almost all of which have been tried before and failed, put it all together and have come up with this “vision” of theirs that they claim is going to solve a lot of problems that, frankly, we don’t actually have.
I think that part of the problem is that Zuckerberg and people like him already are living in a virtual world that is disconnected from reality. He lives in a walled garden that is completely isolated from the reality. His power and money give him the ability to already alter his environment to suit his whims. If he doesn’t like something, he has the money to change it. He is surrounded by sycophants who will agree with any kind of stupid idea he comes up with, telling him how wonderful he is, because of, well, money, really. He already lives in a virtual world, but one created by his wealth.
But let’s talk about the real problem with this metaverse, and that is Meta itself, the company, and the people who run it.
Consider, for a moment, what Facebook does. What it does to you, the user. It “harvests” every single bit of data that it can scrounge up about you. It examines every post you make, every photo you put up, every message you send. It tracks every single thing you read or view. It knows how much time you spend looking at a particular type of post. It knows what you like, what you don’t like. It even tracks your physical movements via apps on your cellphone if you haven’t figured out how to turn tracking off. (Even if you have turned tracking off according to some reports I’ve seen.) And what it does with all of that information it has gathered about you is package it up and sell it to anyone who can cough up the money to buy it. Facebook has been called the most sophisticated piece of spyware ever created, and it pretty much is exactly that. That’s how the company works. That’s how it makes money. It sells you.
And now this same company owns this metaverse in its entirety. From the Oculus headset you need to wear, to the software that runs the systems, to the servers that run the code, Meta owns all of it. So everything you do in this metaverse is also going to be owned by Meta. Every document you write, everything you read, every meeting you have, every spreadsheet you work on, even your calls to your grandmother. Meta is going to have all of it. And you can be damn sure that what Meta is going to do with that data is the same thing Facebook does with the data it gathers on its users. It will collect it, slice it and dice it and index it and sell it to whoever can come up with the money to buy it.
You think you you don’t have any privacy now? Just wait.
grouchyfarmer 