While I mentioned my New Year’s resolutions to no longer take on every project, accept every challenge, and work every weekend, I left out my other resolve to get out more. During the pandemic, we’d gone on trips, met friends, and similar, but taking part in cultural events had come to an utter standstill. No concerts, exhibitions, plays, author readings, or anything, with the lone exception of one trip to the movie theater in December 2021. (The Matrix Resurrections, of course.) As of last week, that’s changed! We went to an art exhibition for the first time in over three years, and it was terrific. I also booked tickets left and right for all kinds of events over the next three months, on which I’ll happily keep you posted.

Last week, again, I was preoccupied with LLM/ChatGPT developments thanks to my term preparations, planning to cover practical stuff for my 2nd-term students and social, technological, and economical stuff for my 6th-term students. Which made it quite convenient to keep neglecting my between drafts and Voidpunk blogs and only push out stuff at just drafts instead. Thus, there are three coding-related posts on ChatGPT in Unity, John Carmack on what coding is about, and ChatGPT-4 as a coding assistant; one post on Midjourney entering the ban words merry-go-round; one post on Ubisoft’s writing assistant tool Ghostwriter as presented at the GDC, and one post about running a ChatGPT clone on your PC at home. Then, there’s a new album on Flickr with 12 images from Asakusa, Tōkyō and my daily vintage-style travel squaries at Pixelfed. At my Instagram accounts, also slightly neglected, there are two fresh posts at voidpunkverse and some digest stuff at betweendrafts.

For the Sunday funnies, please enjoy this quantum state joke; this swipe at AGI soapboxers that cracked me up for three days straight; and this ambitious littul kitton that’s almost there.

J.