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Cool AI Use

Last time Esther wanted some coloring pages, I guess it’s time to battle with a bazillion sites trying to monetize everything. Jump through hoops here, web inspector there, the usual “this will take a minute” turns into another tech ordeal. Wait… I could just ask ChatGPT for some black and white stuff made for coloring.

The cool part? Esther gets a say into what she’d like to color. Well, she likes cats.

Then I realize that instead of asking for the generic stuff we’re used to seeing on coloring pages, we can ask for specific moments of her life.

Playing with an umbrella on a pile of woodchips? No problem:

Jumping on a trampoline full of Duplos? You got it!
And quite a few more:

Beyond the cool factor, I wonder if coloring her lived experience has a similar effect to journaling. Maybe, this helps process things?

More could be done to clean up the SVGs but this is quite sufficient for us. Evidently though, artists who were in the kid’s coloring niche have some competition :\.

One of the things that blows my mind with AI is all the things it can already do but have yet to be discovered.

All images above clickable for SVG, if you end up coloring one please send a pic 🙂

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Attention Sniffing Events

I get disproportionally upset with websites playing videos which pause when you background their browser tab. I don’t understand why browsers respect the focus and blur event at the window level, clearly they only benefit nefarious purposes seeking to milk a poor soul. Either by forcing them to watch content, or by building a better model of their attention behavior. Attention which we all know is a currency to be extracted on the internet.

A while back I added a Tampermonkey script to catch the registration of these events, and invalidate it. Out of curiosity, I added reporting to it these past 10 days. I was curious to know how prevalent the practice was.

Out of 140 domains visited these past 10 days, 28 cared to know whether my eyeballs were pointed at them or not. 8 were in the constellation of Google.

Now of course, I don’t use social media, I have pretty established work routines, and 2 layers of ad blocking. I suspect both the numbers of domains visited, and the number domains interested in my eyeballs would be significantly higher if I disabled ad blocking. But do I really want to subject myself to 10 days of ads? No, I really don’t, not even for science.

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SketchyBot 1.0

I finally built a standard sized one. I ran into a few unexpected challenges given how smooth the small one went.

It really isn’t the most accurate machine, the belts inside aren’t timed, but it does pretty ok with some rendering algorithm and is fun.