ChatGPT

Mind blown. When it comes to anything regarding IT, I consider myself a seasoned veteran and there aren't many things that astound me. I went from “I don't know what all that fuss is about” to “I can't live without it” in about two hours. It's like Google, but instead of personalised ads you get personalised responses. For me it might be the biggest jump since the internet itself.

I love I can be super lazy in writing prompts, it doesn't care about typos or abbreviations and is very context aware, so I don't have to write extra words. It will grasp terminology, acronyms, newspeak, slang or even mixed languages! It can translate no problem and its sentence elaboration helps my learning Japanese immensely.

ChatGPT Logo

Asked for source, it gave me the source. I asked for links, gave me the links. Many of which were 404 and I thought they simply changed since the learning cutoff, but after a while I started to suspect those links were actually hallucinated by the language model.

Quantum computing explained, simple WebGL 3d engine or basic isometric engine created. There are devs with mobile apps accepted to the stores with zero lines of code written by themselves. It's endlessly helpful with regular expressions, I just describe what I need and the model is often correct on it's first try.

Neural network schema

Although I sometimes struggle, it's still VERY helpful. It's much quicker to simply ask ChatGPT, which will usually respond on topic and distills the info into four paragraphs. I don't have to click on dozens links, half of which doesn't even contain the keywords for some reason.

I kinda like bouncing off ideas or asking GPT to provide lists of things, like when I was looking for inspiration for Qard, I asked: "how they do it in all major game engines?".

It really excels for "easy" programming tasks in languages I'm not that familiar with (like code to download and unzip file), or to translate code from one language to another. But it could be frustrating to have a specific code in mind and force GPT to comply. In a few instanced it started to loop around, disregarding any further prompts.

It's kinda strange, but while many others complain it plagiarizes a work of thousands, I'm so mesmerized by the language model's capabilities I've started to think how to give it even more sources. Maybe QB data will come in handy for a plugin?

Despite all it's flaws, like hallucinations, it's very handy sidekick. I even tried to task it with a few topics for this blog :-)

Antarctica

When we put all the reasons together, it was obvious our decade of Earth exploration have to conclude in a grand finale – the last continent. And it doesn't matter what you consider a continent, we've done all of them. Well, except for one, but that was about to change.

We didn't want just to dip a toe into the peninsula, because the time and money are considerable in any case, so we were looking for a cruise that goes below the Antarctic Circle. That decision made things a bit easier, because only a handful of companies offers such voyages and those reasonably priced you can count on one hand of not so skillful carpenter.

And one day we found ourselves in the middle of the Drake Passage, heading south on an expedition-type ship. But to stay on-topic, let me describe the level of IT we had available.

Antarctic Peninsula from Stonington Island

First of all, they managed to print “á” in my last name incorrectly on a few occasions. I always thought it's a safe letter, it's been around since the Extended ASCII from 1970s. They all usually want my name EXACTLY as printed in my passport, but it contains accented letters, which they can't process or even disallow them completely (like most airlines do).

On my plastic passenger ID card there was “Ô in my last name, which is apparently double-encoded Unicode “á”. At the end of the day it didn't matter, so maybe that's why nobody raised an eyebrow about that.

Next, on 2 of my certificates of achievement in PDF there was “¡” instead of “á” , which is also a remnant of the same error, because the full conversion is “á”. Oddly enough, on one certificate, using the same font and everything, was my last name correct.

Later I was told different certificates are created by a different staff member, so my assumption they'd generate them was quite naïve. Now I suspect they just have a DOCX template, which they copy for each certificate and only change the name. As if they don't have so much things going on as it is...

My Polar Plunge (water had allegedly -0.5 °C/31 °F). Photo courtesy of a fellow passenger.

There was satellite internet on board, you could purchase a 1 GB voucher for $40 or 5 GB for $120 to use it either in your device (on-board Wi-Fi) or at one of the three desktop computers in the Computer room, that were mostly used for sharing pictures among passengers.

There were two big antennas on either side of the topmost outside deck, reading “Marlink” (connectivity provider) and “Intellian” (antenna manufacturer). Besides that there were all kinds of antennas, weather sensors and detectors on the deck, each one labelled.

I opted for an on-line detox, so I can't tell how reliable it was, but I could see an "Internet Offline" sign at the reception for longer periods than a paying customer would like.

I missed the internet only for checking CruiseMapper (to see how well we're doing, apparently we were the southernmost vessel at some point) and to hope for an Antarctic Pokémon, which would definitely spoil my overall experience. It was nice to be immersed in the wilderness without any distractions from the “real world”, which we actually had it all around us.

There was a big screen with OpenCPN 2.3.1 (current version is 5.6.2, what a surprise... :-) to plot our route and show us marine map of our surroundings, which was interesting and quite useful couple of times.

P. S. This trip was another big reason why I upgraded my iPhone. Totally worth it! And even months later, I still love the thing. I wish I'd find such upgrade for my decade old laptop...