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Monday's Toons & Quotes — 125

The Toons are by artists who give permission to share their work (SMBC, Joe Martin, Wrong Hands). The quotes are from the original Jokes of the Week. Continue reading Monday’s Toons & Quotes — 125

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AI Does Steampunk

Steampunk Toaster I’ve been posting about AI, and how much it costs to run, and I thought I might as well show some images, each of which took more energy to generate than it does to charge a smartphone. Actually, these took a good bit more than that because I then processed them using AI capabilities of the processing tools I own. For instance, the image below is the original as output by…

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More AI Stuff — It's All About Energy, Part 2: Images.

Generated with Midjourney In Part 1, I used three different Large Language Models (LLMs) to explore the cost differential between traditional searches (i.e., a Google search) and AI-assisted searches. And by ‘cost,’ I mean both monetary and energy costs, although they are interconnected. The models were Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Claude. In this post, I address the energy cost associated with…

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S23 Ultra Photo Smapling — May-June 2025

S23 Ultra 10x optical zoom I should publish more structured posts. Posts about places we visited and stuff we experienced. The problem is that something always comes up. A YouTube video (or ten) that I want to watch. An interesting anime show. A book I want to re-read. Some new technology I want to explore so I can later report on it (‘later’ being the operative word). Then there’s a navel that…

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Major WordPress Annoyance

Midjourney AI-generated image Something happened in the last few days that’s causing an annoyance. In short, whenever I LIKE a post or try to leave a comment on a blog I follow, I’m asked to log in.  Even if the dialog block displays my Gravatar, when I try to publish the comment or click “LIKE,” a new dialog window opens, asking me to log in. Sometimes, it asks me to create an account, and…

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Monday's Toons & Quotes — 124

The Toons are by artists who give permission to share their work (SMBC, Joe Martin, Wrong Hands). The quotes are from the original Jokes of the Week. Continue reading Monday’s Toons & Quotes — 124

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A Fourth R. G. Broxson Story

This is not part of any challenge; Gary found time in his busy retirement schedule to finish another story I have a standing offer to The Twins: write it, and I’ll publish it on the blog. I shouldn’t have to remind readers, but here it is again: I pass no judgment on these stories. They are not for everyone and, often, not my type of fiction. However, enough readers like them, and I don’t mind…

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Tiny Thoughts 26 — Bananafication's Path To Monarchy

About 685 words, or less than a three-minute read at 265 words per minute. I’ve often joked that we’re increasingly resembling a Banana Republic. We have all the earmarks, everything from stifling news organizations (fake news!) to prosecuting political opponents (dissidents!), and now, using the military against our own civilians (insurgents!). It’s funny that people who actually stormed the…

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My Fiction To Music

The capacity for AI to keep me from writing seems limitless . . . or is it boundless? You see, Perry informed me of a site (SUNO). This is another AI site, but instead of generating images or prose, it composes music and songs. So I tried it. I gave it a generic prompt about some epic music, with orchestral strings, soul-stirring crescendos, cinematic, victorious . . . and it came up with one…

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Monday's Toons & Quotes — 123

The Toons are by artists who give permission to share their work (SMBC, Joe Martin, Wrong Hands). The quotes are from the original Jokes of the Week. Continue reading Monday’s Toons & Quotes — 123

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More AI Stuff — It's All About Energy, Part 1: Queries.

Generated with Midjourney I’ve written about my Perplexity and ChatGPT conversations, as well as their fiction writing, but many users employ these models to obtain information, get answers to questions, and find out stuff (Microsoft and Google are both pushing AI-based web search tools). I used three different Large Language Models (LLMs) to explore the cost differential between traditional…

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Disperser versus Perplexity AI: Drabbles

Cloacina This is a long-ish and maybe boring post if you’re not interested in how AI performs when writing fiction. Still, if you have any interest in learning a bit about AI, I think it’s an interesting read. A few readers may have read the two Drabbles I included in THIS post and the competing Drabbles generated by Perplexity. One was about the goddess Cloacina, the other about the goddess…

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Monday's Toons & Quotes — 122

The Toons are by artists who give permission to share their work (SMBC, Joe Martin, Wrong Hands). The quotes are from the original Jokes of the Week. Continue reading Monday’s Toons & Quotes — 122

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Disperser versus AI: The Barn Files

Shot with a Nikon D7500, and Nikon 70-300 f/4.5-6.3 lens My previous post (LINK) imagined a contest between ‘lil ole me and the considerable might and power of AI. The first part of the contest involved a quick comparison between my meager photography talent versus the vast image database the AI stole . . . er, borrowed . . . no, wait, they did steal the images from the web. Anyway, I shared…

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Disperser versus Perplexity AI: Images and Fiction

That is a recent photo I took. I wanted to see how well I could describe it to an AI Art Generator and have it give me their version. This is the prompt I used with Perplexity: Picture of a barn with a gray and rusting metal roof, weathered gray wooden walls, and red door with faded and peeling paint and with a hay loft opening Now, perplexity is not an image generator. I believe it utilizes…

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Monday's Toons & Quotes — 121

The Toons are by artists who give permission to share their work (SMBC, Joe Martin, Wrong Hands). The quotes are from the original Jokes of the Week. Continue reading Monday’s Toons & Quotes — 121

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Memorial Day 2025

“Our flag does not fly because the wind moves it. It flies with the last breath of each soldier who died protecting it.” — Unknown “All gave some; some gave all. Remember them this Memorial Day.” — Unknown “Those who have long enjoyed such privileges as we enjoy forget in time that men have died to win them.” —Franklin D. Roosevelt “This is the day we pay homage to all those who didn’t come…