In 2019, I posted here about a novelette I wrote for TechDirt. The people behind TechDirt had put together an anthology of stories about the future of work, Working Futures. I’ve since put that novelette, “The Auditor and the Exorcist,” up on my writing site as a free read.
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OpenAI has released an API for accessing GPT-3, an AI text generator that’s capable of generating much longer responses than GPT-2. The API is currently in closed beta, and while I’ve requested access, I haven’t gotten it (yet?) But, I learned from Mario Dian’s blog about AI Dungeon, a text-based dungeon game powered by GPT-2 and/or GPT-3. Imagine a text-based adventure game, like Zork–that’s the feel of AI Dungeon, but instead of being programmed behind the scenes by something like ChoiceScript, it’s using GPT-2 (free version) or GPT-3 (paid version) to generate text.
I’m interested in exploring GPT-2 and GPT-3 for fiction generation, so I gave the free version of AI Dungeon a try as I was working on a short piece of flash fiction. I didn’t want AI Dungeon to write a story for me, or even to write parts of a story. I wanted to use it as a tool to spur my own creativity. Read more
I wanted to get some data off an agent listing website and into a spreadsheet. I’d been meaning to play around with python for web scraping and this was the perfect excuse: There were just enough results that it would take longer to manually copy and paste them than to write a little python program. (I never want to automate something that will take less time to do than to automate, as long as I’m only going to do it once or twice…)
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Scene: INT. LATE NIGHT.
NATALKA is typing on a MACBOOK AIR.
Suddenly, the screen goes dark. Silence. The MACBOOK AIR has shut down with no warning.
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The people behind the American tech industry blog TechDirt have put together an anthology of stories about the future of work called (appropriately) Working Futures, and I’m excited to have a story in it. Read more
An unavoidable fact of database support life is webconferences with clients or users. Most of the time, we’re more interested in what’s going on onscreen than in each others’ faces. But every now and then we need to have a face-to-face. Skype is popular, but I recently had the chance to try out a FOSS alternative with better security: Jami.
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Earlier this month, I conducted a totally unscientific survey on Twitter, asking where people got their Oracle news from. Twitter and the NoCOUG Journal were two popular sources, along with a wide range of blogs. Here are some of the blogs that the Oracle DBA & Dev superstars in my Twitter like to read, along with my own recommendations.
PROCEDURE solve (my_problem IN varchar2) IS BEGIN my_idea := have_great_idea (my_problem) ; my_code := start_coding (my_idea) ; IF i_hit_complications (my_idea) THEN new_problem := the_complications (my_idea); solve (new_problem); ELSE NULL; --we will never get here END IF; END solve;
This abuse of recursion was inspired by @ThePracticalDev !
How do you spell “Brittany”? The picture above has four well-known women with four different spellings of the name. It turns out there are nearly 100 different ways that Americans have spelled it. The US Social Security Administration names data lets us tease out all the spellings and find out which ones are most popular – and when.
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One of the amazing things about being a DBA/developer in 2016 is the sheer amount of freely available, downloadable data to play with. One fun publicly available data sets is the American Social Security Administration names data. It contains all names for which SSNs were issued for each year, with the number of occurrences (although names with <5 occurrences are not included to protect individual privacy).