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Overview
In this episode of Relentless Geekery, hosts discuss their diverse experiences and interests, starting with holiday activities and visits to Christmas-themed events in Cambridge, Ohio. They share anecdotes about navigating cold weather and enjoying various light displays and festive atmospheres. The conversation moves on to technology, focusing on setting up multi-monitor systems, the advancements of Apple’s Mac Mini, and the benefits of using artificial intelligence tools like Perplexity AI for brainstorming and other creative tasks. They also touch on the evolving comic book industry, mentioning distribution challenges and upcoming plans to read and discuss new comics.
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Transcript
[00:00:00] Do you like conversation on a variety of topics? Feel like no one wants to talk about the things that interest you? Tired of only hearing the same political, sports, or catastrophe talk? We feel that way too. Join two high functioning geeks as they discuss just about anything under the sun. We can’t tell you what we’ll be talking about each week because we don’t know where our brains will take us.
It will be an interesting conversation though, so hang on and join us. Here comes the Relentless Geekery.
Alan: Christmas in the. All right. Still Christmas in the background. Sorry, I didn’t Still Christmas season. Exactly. Exactly. In fact, just last night, Colleen and I went to Cambridge. Oh! You had gone a couple weeks ago, I think. We didn’t get the full Dickens experience [00:01:00] because it was Monday night instead of a weekend, but it was, the county courthouse has a spectacular synchronized light and, Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Displaying stuff and it was cold. And yet we walked the town. We sat there for a while and watched, we had to get up and start walking again, because just sitting there on a wooden metal bench is like, Hey, this is back to the days of college football. Have a Bodo full of creme de menthe and hot chocolate.
You froze to death.
Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. Did you go in the welcome center and get your picture with the hat and coat and stuff?
Alan: We did not. I don’t even know where the welcome center was. They, we went, we were there late, probably eight o’clock or something, make sure that it was already dark. And they’re really it’s cool.
Philippians have never been to Cambridge, Ohio, they do a whole Dickens thing. So up and down the main streets, they have Dickens figures and little plaques saying, oh, this is, the guy that used to be the lady that used to be the milliner or something like that. And we, there was nobody live.
Play acting and so [00:02:00] forth while we were there, but it really was fun. I don’t know if you did this year. We went to multiple displays. Yeah, the park, which was really cool. We just went to wild winter lights at the zoo, which was the best it’s ever been. One of the joys of technology is they keep on making things better and not just in a way that’s only overwhelming and flash But it’s wow, that’s really Pretty and so well coordinated and stuff like that.
So we might still someone just recommended going to Kirtland’s Farm Park, you know the Metro Parks Farm Park out there And I don’t know if that’s a walkthrough or a drive thru because it’s about to be rainy And below zero, not below zero, below freezing and stuff.
Stephen: Yeah. Do
Alan: it in the car, and even if we can’t do it in the car, I don’t know that we want to take an hour drive and then skid our way home.
Roads and stuff.
Stephen: Yeah, the Cambridge thing is really cool, like on the weekend, because they have a horse carriage you can ride in, the welcome center, you can go in and You can put on like Victorian coat and hats, and they’ll take [00:03:00] your picture. I think I saw
Alan: the picture you posted. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Okay.
Stephen: Yeah. And when the stores were open, we went the one year and there was like a thrift junk store and my grandfather instilled in my kids, it’s Oh, this is a panacea of wonderful item just, and they would go explore for. Yeah, we
Alan: did. We did walk the town and I think like almost everything was closed down.
I really because of the golden whatever else I really had to be and dominoes had a big side of the window saying no public restrooms and yet I went in there and said, I really need to go. Can I go? It’s right over there, sir. And in fact, when I came out of the bathroom, I realized, oh, that was the women’s bathroom.
But luckily, the door was open. It wasn’t like, oh my God, I surprised someone or something like that. But it’s I think when you get to be of a certain age, they know that you’re not like, A little kid, they know that if you have to go, you’re really like an adult that’s judging. Yeah, I probably
Stephen: should have gone on the car and management put to the [00:04:00] sign up, but probably 8 o’clock on a Monday night.
It was just the couple teenagers working there and they don’t care.
Alan: That’s right. When I came out and I said, thank you again, the guy just laughed and said, sir, no problem. So that, we, what we experienced there was everybody was in a great mood. Little kids were running around and, it looked like they kept There’s lights and strings of things up everywhere.
And I just, in my mind kept thinking, he’s going to catch a toe and he’s going to bring this whole string of things down. And luckily kids are amazing. They’re like little gazelles running around. They didn’t make anything. So it, I guess that was their way of keeping warm. You know what I mean? They just built up speed, especially little kids.
Like how do the parents let them go out without. Adequate cover, the kid was there in a arms cut off t shirt or something like that It’s like billy you’re gonna you say it’s not gonna bother you, but I know you’re gonna get feeling this in about 20 minutes
Stephen: Speaking of I met randy from a christmas story a couple weeks ago at the very good Colin and his partner [00:05:00] got me. Tickets to the Christmas story house and then the play afterwards and the guy who played Randy was there and I was talking to him for a bit.
Alan: It’s really sometimes it’s weird to see that little.
I don’t know what you’d call it like, like fame that’s lasted beyond what you thought it would, where people in a specific movie, but oftentimes they’re not full of themselves. They’re actually like, it was fun to be on the movie set. Oh, yeah. Stories about and I like those. That it’s not like an expose that it’s more like a friend sitting around talking and he’s going to tell you about.
Yeah, when the guy licked the pole, they really have to make sure I asked him. I said,
Stephen: So you were so it was really actually cold, but they imported snow. They have a museum there and they have pictures of them blowing snow for the film, the
Alan: winter scenes.
Stephen: Yeah, but I asked his name.
Ian, if I remember right as it’s so like in between takes and stuff, did you actually fall down and have someone help you get up? He says, no, I just, got up [00:06:00] and I’m like, oh, so it really wasn’t all bulky. He says, no, it was acting. Okay. Good point. He’s
Alan: the guy that said that they said it was his only defense that he went over like a beetle, right?
That’s funny. Yeah. It’s funny, there’s all kinds of Christmas movies nowadays, and not all of them are created equal. Some are a little corny, some are a little, but some, they just they have such good spirit to them. Darren McGavin is really good as the dad, as is his wife, I don’t remember the actress’s name, but it just was, Like true to life.
And a lot of kids go through that. You wish and you wish for the one thing and they don’t want to get it for you because you’ll put your eye out and whatever else it might be. It’s
Stephen: a nice slice of
Alan: life.
Stephen: You should go if you haven’t gone. Just warning, you guys have the ability to go outside of the busy times.
That’s when I would go. I went on a Saturday and it was packed. You have to park on the street and we were like two blocks away. But the museum had a Akron Beacon Journal, I [00:07:00] believe, a review of the movie from the 70s when it came out,
Alan: came out
Stephen: and it panned. It’s like it was done. The acting sucked.
This is a movie that just deserves to go away and blah, blah, blah. And here it is a beloved classic 50 years later. So that made it cool. But the play, let me tell you that they’ve captured everything in the play. So well, because there was a narrator just like in the movie. We have the voiceovers.
There was an older guy telling his story and that’s what the actors on stage were portraying. But the narrator stayed on stage and reacted to everybody on stage, even though they ignored him like a ghost except for his younger self. Like three or four times they gave a high five or they nodded at each other and broke that fourth wall.
And then there were a couple of times when they both said lines and they were like, in perfect sync. And it was so well done. If you haven’t gone to the play, they do it every year. You really should go.
Alan: It’s, we’re always looking [00:08:00] for new Christmas traditions. We have a couple things that we like doing, but like last year we went to the Celtic Christmas and it was good, but now oh, we have to do this every year.
Zoolites, we do. Zoolites gets, it’s good every year and gets better and better. So I will do that. We’ve seen. Let’s see. What’s the one by David Sedaris with Crumpet the Elf? You know what I mean? It’s about a guy working at a department store over Christmas and the department store Santa and the intolerable kids and all that kind of stuff.
And it’s really, David Sedaris is a very witty guy. So I don’t know that one. And then, of course, there’s the Nutcracker, and there’s Scrooge, or sorry. Christmas Carol. Christmas Carol. Exactly that. We went to see Scrooge the Musical this year, and it was actually quite good, so we packed a lot of good stuff.
Christmas things without it being, let’s try to see everything. You know what I mean? We’re trying to find good I don’t know, life, work, entertainment balance, if you will. And now that work is much less a part of the equation, as you were saying, we can go to the the Tuesday night show and then it’s not as crowded and during the day, a lot of times we, it’s, we really, [00:09:00] maybe this has always been us, when we went to all kinds of national parks because of what we do, all of our state capital trips over the years.
And we really. early on decided, and we need to go to these things. It’s like the collar times of travel. We need to go April, May, before the kids are out of school and like September, October, when they’re back in school. But the weather is still nice and things are still open. Because we’ve been to some places where why is the lot already closed?
I guess they have seasons and they really, they don’t have enough business to justify keeping this whole huge old wood, hard to heat building open and stuff like that. So we’re we are continually try to find those good trade offs with, I don’t want the noise, I don’t want the litter and the crowds are like.
When we were at Zion, for instance, if you go at the wrong time, you can’t like go and drive and park near the trailhead. You have to stop at the entrance, get on a bus, and then they do a circuit and take you all these various different things. But it just ain’t the same as taking your time going 30 miles an hour through a beautiful place without [00:10:00] the yammer of everything going on around you.
When you get off at the trailhead, it’s not you and your sweetie. It’s 50 people. It’s it’s going to be different.
Stephen: So for tonight. I’m going to call and change plans. Him and his friends were supposed to come here and play games and they’re going something else. So I changed plans and the one venue that Casey and I do our soaps at it’s an it’s a century barn down in Carrollton, which my family used to live down that area and they redid it and they do events.
They do a lot of weddings and stuff, their pictures and after things. So they do a new year’s event and I thought about it last year, but yeah. So this year I’m like, Oh, I don’t have any reason to stay home. So I’m going down to that and it’s going to be an eighties party bash. They have an eighties band and all that.
But this is one of the reasons. Not only is it a beautiful venue that is just. Gorgeous inside. It’s going to be cool with the band and everything. They do it in a really wonderful way [00:11:00] So you can get a ticket. It’s 75 bucks, but it’s catered But that’s the non alcoholic Ticket you don’t get alcohol But there is food and the band and they do the sauerkraut and pork after midnight.
And also,
Alan: New Year’s tradition,
Stephen: but they also have a hundred dollar ticket, which includes alcohol, but you have to register at one of the local hotels and your tickets are waiting at the hotel and they drive a shuttle to take you to the barn.
Alan: Tying it on and then driving home in your weapon and be a statistic could be making somebody else.
I think
Stephen: that’s absolutely perfect. Now, I haven’t obviously talked to anybody. I can’t imagine, but I know there’s probably somebody complaining about that. I want to drink alcohol, but I don’t want to have to stay at the hotel blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, you know what? You could get a shuttle back to the hotel and jump in your car and you can go, but I understand it’s not, hey, that’s totally off of us.
We did everything we could, but I love that they did that.
Alan: [00:12:00] That really is good. We’ve been to first night in Akron. Oh, I miss that so much. Yeah. We really liked it, but it was incredibly cold, and so that’s another one of the things if it’s cold like this year, I can handle it pretty well.
We’ve been to the Ice Sculpture Festival in Medina and Vermilion and stuff like that, but Colleen is, two percent body fat. She’s a beautiful lean creature, and so then we have to okay, we’re gonna do this block, and then we’ll pop in here for coffee and not chocolate, and we’ll go another block, and we’ll take shelter for a moment.
And so the I wish that when they did that, and it was, if I remember right, no alcohol plus they had the Chris Kin market, where they had all the German Yeah, maybe Scandinavian in general imports and stuff, and it, everybody is on the street having a nice time, not musicians calling time.
It is, everybody’s Merry Christmas, happy new Year. Everybody’s in a good mood and it’s wonderful family oriented, and stuff
Stephen: like that. Yeah they always had a ton of stations for kids to stop and do activities. They had musicians. They had different bands. They had the Akron steel drum band at one point street musicians doing drumming and stuff.
Alan: Yeah. [00:13:00] What kind of buskers exactly? Yeah.
Stephen: Yeah. I, and I love that. They also did like a tree lighting at 10. So if you had little kids, you could go and watch the tree lighting and celebrate, Oh, happy new year and take the kids home.
Alan: Not have to have them go until 1201. Yeah. Yeah. We’re still looking.
You know what I mean? For a while, we had good friends Beth and Stan that invited a whole bunch of people to their house down in, why am I missing it, Yellow Springs, I think, right? Oh! Southwest Ohio. That’s a nice place. That’s where Chappelle lives. Exactly. And just gaming all night, food all night, wonderful conversation, just like with a group of maybe like honestly two or three dozen people. So the people that I wanted to talk to and spend this thing with, and same thing, a lot of people crash at their house, but Colleen and I would get a hotel, but we don’t drink, so we didn’t worry about driving home. And it just it’s really nice to spend New Year’s Eve in good company and stuff like that.
This year we didn’t, I don’t, we don’t really have anything going on. We’re going to go probably see. The Lion King 2, [00:14:00] Mufasa, and we’re going to go to Aladdin’s, which has become a tradition for us, that they stay open until 10, but don’t require like champagne New Year’s Eve package and stuff like that.
And it’s just a really nice, we have a nice conversation, like, how was your year and what’s going on for next year? And we just, we’ve done it either as, one or two or three couples or just the two of us. We’ll see. Like I said, weather’s supposed to get crappy. It’s supposed to be like rainy, then snow, below freezing for the next two weeks.
Not getting above freezing, so
Stephen: I heard single digits.
Alan: Yeah, and it’s so much like the worst kind of thing for New Year’s Eve. If it’s going to be raining, and then cold, it’s going to ice up, and you’re going to get black ice, and you’re going to get I hope that it’s not Terrific, horrific driving conditions and stuff like that.
We were, the Capitol Theater is where we like to see things. And one year, between the time we were in and came out, it really had iced over. And we’re coming down Detroit Road, which is only like a 25 mile an hour place. But it was so slick that we’re like, [00:15:00] We might have to play bumper cars on the way home.
I’m keeping us in the center. But there’s any number of times where you just touch the gas, and your wheel will spin instead of going forward. It’s I Thank God it’s front wheel drive, and we’re not going to fishtail and so forth. But we were in a 15 minute drive. I was like 14 minutes of it white knuckled because this was really not good.
They didn’t have the plows running on New Year’s Eve, etc. Anyway we’ll see what it’s like tonight. It turns out that we get home at 10 o’clock and cuddle in and watch the ball drop on our TV and stuff like
Stephen: that. I remember back in the 90s when I used to do plays in the pit orchestra.
There was one in Hudson I did. And it was cold winter, it wasn’t snowy, but we came out. And from the time I went in and Simon came out, we got two inches of snow and the wind was blowing. So I scrape off my car and that was when I had a car where the thermostat had given out and I hadn’t fixed it yet.
So I had no heat. So I’m wrapped in a [00:16:00] blanket and I’m driving 10, 15 miles from Hudson to my house, but. Because it’s so cold and I’m breathing, I’m icing over the windows on the inside. So I’m trying to And then, I go past a spot, somebody hit a skunk, and my nose starts to itch. And I’m, when I was younger, my allergies were way worse.
And I was always clogged up, and I always had Kleenex. And I’m both hands holding the wheel, white knuckling it, wrapped up my noses at Jim. I go, don’t sneeze. I sneezed. And what’s not looks like frozen, hanging off your windshield on the inside. Exactly. A little, it’s not pleasant.
That’s terrible.
Alan: I, one time coming back, I went to school in Champaign Urbana and coming back, it used to be, you get rides home with friends or buses or whatever else it might be when you’re got, I had hope from friend and two days before we were supposed to head back. His heat conked out.
And still, we’re with you. Man, all of us bundled in, and honestly, you were okay except for your extremities. No heat in a car that that [00:17:00] doesn’t have good insulation. Our feet were frozen solid. You get out of the car and you’re like, Man, I hope I’m not injuring myself because I can’t really feel if I’m like, tensing my Achilles tendons or whatever like that.
Oh it was an adventure.
Stephen: Yeah it’s got a story. That’s always my thing. Hey, did it give you a story? All right.
Alan: That’s right.
Stephen: So you’ve got three monitors now switching topics. Here’s some geek
Alan: here. I wish I could pan around it. We are now Skynet. We are live. It’s we carbon units have screwed this up enough time for silicon overlords to give it a shot it.
I thought the new Mac Mini M4 is so mighty. I got it all maxed out. I got 64 Meg of Meg gig. Of memory, I got a two terabyte SSD as well as external all this kind of stuff. But the big thing is it supports enough HDMI plus u SB three ports that and nowadays many things are smart that it used to have to be that you’d configure [00:18:00] it and you and like on the monitor itself say, am I in TV or HDMI or whatever mode.
Now they just talk to each other. So I plug things in and things came up and I am surrounded. I guess I like to be where I can look around at all the things that I care about. Here’s my calendar. Here’s my music. Here’s my browser and my email. And not in a twitchy response to interruptions way, but it’s just nice to be able to survey and then refocus on the thing that you’re working on, but not miss other things that you do care enough about going on.
And that’s it. I don’t know. I just, I wanted this setup for a long time. The most you could have was two for a long time. Or you could buy like a specific box that made two monitors, one contiguous monitor, and that’s how all these are. The mouse just moves from one to the other. But you really had to get a 300, 500 extra device in order to enable that.
And now it’s, I bought Amazon Basics monitors for my side guys, and they’re like 120 for a 1920 by 1080 monitor. [00:19:00] millions of colors, everything you want. No eye strain, no flicker and everything like that. It, I just, I love living in the future, man. This is like this vision of
almost like a movie. You know what I mean? Like here’s NORAD and it’s the wall full of Monders. Now I get to be Ozymandias. I have all these things and I get to, I’ll be here just me and the world. I’m getting all these impressions of what ads are running on various different things. And that tells me why I should buy diapers because we’re about to have a baby and stuff like that.
So I’m, I don’t know. I love it. I love that for very reasonable money and just a little bit of paying attention to is it compatible and how much does it cost and stuff like that. I’ve got an ideal setup without having had to be like, I have a friend, he made good money, probably 25 years ago and retired.
And he always wanted to have the perfect stereo system. And he went and bought okay. The turntable at that time, even more than CDs, where it’s like [00:20:00] rock solid, it absorbs vibrations, it’s tracking at a quarter of a gram, tube amplifiers, his whole gig cost him like 10, 000 plus. And he was willing to do it, because once you have that kind of money, it’s like that’s, you know a tenth of a percent, one percent or whatever like that, I can do this.
And I have never had a good enough I guess I don’t hear so well that I can distinguish between audio file quality things that he really could, or at least he had convinced himself he could, I don’t mean to tease him, but it really was like, I would listen as hard as I could.
And there’s a certain decibel range and there’s a certain dynamic range that I, you could hear things like, Oh, I can hear the guy’s fingers sliding on the fretboard of his guitar or something like that. But I didn’t have the appreciation that he did, but having, as having said, wow, 10, 000, but there’s nothing that he wanted to spend that kind of money on more than that.
That’s cool. Guys that would sit in his chair and put on the perfect album and just let, you The base [00:21:00] thunder blow his tie back, you know what I mean? The fact that I can do that, not for 10, 000, but for 20, 000. I don’t know, 120, 120. It’s really nice to get high quality for little money. As we’ve talked about here on Relentless Geekery, if you want to be in a field and as a consumer, the world of electronics, the world of computers, the world of, audiophile stuff, is continually more money, more bang for your buck.
Less money, even better. Doubles in capacity and resolution and everything, every two years or something like that. So my having been in this field for 40 years. It’s unbelievable. There’s so many things we can do with it. We can make video streaming, like I have fiber to the house, and so I’m just really like a client to the world.
I’m not dealing with, 1200 baud modems and hearing the machines scream at each other to make a connection. It’s getting nostalgic once in a while because I have, we both have all those stories about the way it [00:22:00] used to be, and you had to be a wizard even just to put it together, and solder things in your machine, and all the things we used to have to do, and now so much of it is.
Delightful plug and play and delightful just the reading of spec sheets and saying, I think it’s going to work because there’s nothing here that says it has these limitations. Nowadays, so many things are perfect plug and play. Let’s just get it. And if I don’t like it, I return it. And I’m continually surprised and delighted, especially Apple.
Everything about Apple just seems to always be, it does more than you expected. You know what I mean? Audio is better, and it does better multi channel, and it does, it supports more formats and I just, they, because they were at the video early with FaceTime and stuff like that, they’ve always handled every single codec, every, everything, and you get spoiled, then when you go and troubleshoot somebody else’s system, it’s Wow, I don’t know that I’ve had to troubleshoot this before because it just works.
That’s right. And now instead I’m having to be like, [00:23:00] okay, I got to choose exactly the right monitor resolution and the refresh rate. And that, and you can, it used to be that you’d try it and then it would. Do you want to keep this setting? Give you the wiggles, give you the wiggles, say drop back.
Can’t go 75. You can go 60. It’s very nice that it, like auto optimizes and stuff like that. And even I know I’m talking so much, but isn’t this like a cool end of the year type thing? The way you used to have to telecommunicate was to really be aware of everything about the speed, everything about the file format, all those kinds of things.
And if you had trouble on the line, it would just drop down to the lower speed. And only by troubleshooting it or actually rebooting, could you get it to go back to what you thought was your best, your 38. 4 or something like that. And nowadays. They do just enough overhead to continually be saying, there was a glitch, but can we bump you back up safely?
And it, it like, you can almost hear it revving. You know what I mean? That all of a sudden like things are a little bit It’s a little bit faster, a little bit zippier, and [00:24:00] it does those things for you. A smart team put together something that those six guys did something that now a hundred million people get to take advantage of, the continual advance of technology, a hundred billion, I’m teasing.
You know what I mean? Whatever the scalars, yeah, when we hit a hundred billion, the planet might have more problems than us. How fast is your telecom, but anyway,
Stephen: so you know what the best reason for having three monitors is? Yes, you could set up and do the online racing, do car racing, and you got the side windows to look at.
And I was looking, you can get a pretty good rig the chair, the seat, the steering wheel with the motor, the
Alan: vibro, and the pedals.
Stephen: For a thousand bucks. And it’s, mid grade the really expensive ones are like 4,000 to 5,000. The thousand is about mid grade. You get just a wheel and stuff like that.
But if you want that immersion, ’cause you got three screens, that’s the way to go.
Alan: Yeah. Way long ago. [00:25:00] Remember this. They used to have flight simulator. Oh, yeah. Microsoft actually bought it and put it out. It’s that’s uncharacteristic for a very business oriented company.
But any number of people said, this really is like training worthy. This is what the military or the commercial airlines could use. Because it really simulates the instrument panel just right. In real time, it feels just right. And they keep improving that for racing games, for flying games and stuff like that.
That’s very cool to get that simulation,
Stephen: That’s on my bucket list to maybe get a shooting for maybe this year, early next year. Sometime I got a few more things I’m trying to, and we got a building that needs taken down, a few expenses that I got to put out for, but then I’m looking at going, yeah, a thousand dollars for a racing thing.
And racing is one of my favorite. Type of games, so if I’m going to be using it and playing on it, and I don’t need the, don’t have big expenses. Yeah, maybe I’ll do that.
Alan: I got
Stephen: to get a third monitor
Alan: you like, maybe you do this. Colleen and [00:26:00] I have always had a running spreadsheet of.
The house projects that we want to get done, and the acquisitions of various different things, and the must haves of you got to be saving up for before you need a new car, you want to make sure that you have the money for the new car so that you’re not like usurous rates and just taking what you can get within a price range and all that kind of stuff.
And then when we, each of our jobs, we got bonuses at various different times. And it was very cool to get chunk money and say wow, we really can do the bathroom. Instead of incrementally, you can’t partially do your bathroom, if you’re going to do certain kinds of things to it, you really want to totally rewire it and totally revent it and all that kind of stuff.
And, yeah. Some things like these, my technology has always been inexpensive enough that even while we were taking care of business, you want to make sure you’re safe and comfortable in your house and that you get, things fixed around your property and stuff like that. But even while we could do that, I could like I could get that new super drive CD, DVD, reads everything, writes everything type player for 300 bucks.
That, that’s, I’m thinking there’s even like [00:27:00] studies that say that’s some kind of. magic point at which everyone is willing to say, I’m going to get the 4k ultra hard, ultra HD, as opposed to what makes people move up from incremental to revolutionary technology and stuff like that.
And it’s very cool to be able to, even while we’re taking care of business, being responsible citizens, you can also get those things. that I just want to have my monitor be so good that there’s no lag, no pixelation when I’m playing. No streaks
Stephen: like Atari used to have.
Alan: I like that, and also when you start, if you’re, there’s games now, as we’ve talked about, that have incredibly good immersive experience. The sound matters, and the visuals matter, and the fog of war, and whatever else it might be. And when you can only afford a certain level of technology, and it’s clunky chunky instead of Sweet and smooth and everything like that.
It just makes you hunger for one day. I’m gonna get 30 fps one day I’m gonna you know what I mean that kind of thing [00:28:00] and then eventually it happens and you’re like now i’m spoiled but they keep on upping the ante So what’s the next thing i’m going to need if i’m going to be in an underwater simulation?
It really has to have like auto float that you’re never at rest that you’re always moving You and they’ll be able to do it, then it won’t be kind of juddery. You know what I mean? They had, they’ve had to come up with all kinds of terms for we can only do so much. You know what I mean?
If you look far, it looks good. If you look too close, the wall doesn’t really look like a dungeon wall. It’s got like fake lichen on it and stuff. Yeah. And then eventually got it to where that I can zoom in as much as I want. And it looks like I’m really leaning into the wall, et cetera.
And if you’re looking for a hidden door, it’s especially like. They got to where they could do Hidden Doors with just the slightest perturbation to give you the hint because you had resolution that let you do that. I love
Stephen: it. I love it. Speaking of all this tech stuff, I’ve got something new that I’ve discovered.
Have you heard of Perplexity AI? [00:29:00]
Alan: They’re a big competitor to the chat GPT OpenAI people. Yes. So have you tried it? I have not. So what’s your experience?
Stephen: So I heard about it on some YouTube videos I was watching for some side hustle type stuff. And several of them mentioned perplexity just in passing, not focused.
I’m like, okay, I’ve heard it several times. Let’s check out what perplexity is. So It’s, everybody’s been using chat GPT and Claude and everything else help me brainstorm, help me figure this out and, trying to drill down and do all this work. Perplexity is completely focused on being your partner brainstorming right next to you, as far as I can see.
So I was. I always play around. I’ve got a couple games, board games, card games I’ve worked on sitting around. So I’m like, okay, I’m just going to test this out and see what it does. So I put in the one card game. Here’s what it does. Here’s the goals. Here’s the objectives, blah, blah, blah. [00:30:00] Can you give me, I want to come up with some better ideas for game mechanics that work with kids and adults and blah, blah.
And it came up with this. Those are really good. And then it had a list of things at the end that says, do you also want to know about this? Do you also want to look at this? Do you want to read more about this? You click on it and it adds to it. And then you can click on several of those. It just adds and you’re creating your own brainstorm document or what I was using it for.
And it was really good, better than the results I get. From chat GBT without futzing around and, tweaking the prompt, it really understood, this is a business mind. This is brainstorming. Here’s good information. And it links to where it picked up some of this or for further. I was like, Oh man, I love this one.
It’s my favorite right now to play.
Alan: Very interesting. That very much. That’s what I always wanted. I didn’t want something. telling me how I should be doing it. I wanted the companion. I wanted the [00:31:00] able assistant that like anticipates what you might need, gives good suggestions, not anybody about knowing anything about this field would suggest that.
So this isn’t a breakthrough. It’s very cool that your experience was like just that. It’s something that you like we’re working on that set aside for a while and that this is actually going to enthuse you enough that you might return to it and incorporate some of these cool things.
That’s good.
Stephen: And I’m really starting because I’ve got several that I use, Claude, Chad, GPT, I’ve got a couple different art ones and stuff like that. I’m discovering which tool works best for which purpose, so if I got perplexity, and it’s really good at that brainstorming business stuff, I go there.
If I’ve got chat and I need some keywords or a description based on some. It’s really good at that. If I need help with a book or an outline or a chapter or analyze, I go to Claude, they’re all getting their specialties that way. They’re all trying to, now you can analyze this document. Now you can [00:32:00] analyze a picture.
Now you can do it. They’re all trying to do everything
Alan: right. Cause they want to be, applied general intelligence. AGI is the Holy grail of all this kind of stuff. But maybe we’re going to find out that you need to have very specific or aimed tools, because you don’t want to get the smartest guy in the world to help you with everything.
You might want to get a particular expert to help you with art, to help you with gameplay. It’s and
Stephen: perplexity actually has different LLMs. You can choose. Depending on what function you’re trying to do, and it’s more focused to help with certain things.
Alan: Yeah. So about data that they used to trade it with, and you can guide it towards the data set that you think would be the most appropriate.
If you have any insights in that’s very cool. Yeah. Now I’m falling behind. Like I explore a little bit into a lot of things, but I just had a friend, Vic, ask me I’m just starting off. What would you recommend? And I honestly didn’t know how I would frame it, because I really have only dabbled, not got to where I had such a good experience that I would say, That may be like [00:33:00] comic book art.
I have looked enough at that where it actually creates, not trying to be photorealistic, but to be cartoony but good and simulate various different artists and that kind of stuff. Is that the only thing that I can talk about? I don’t want to be like so niched that I’m only about comic books. I love them, but I don’t want to be that.
That’s my idiot savant area. And I need to start exploring and jump into things with no preconceptions and just say, let’s try it, and then get some of the sensibilities that you have of, so far as I can tell, for advertising, it’s this. For writing, it’s this. There’s even, obviously, different kinds of writing.
For scientific writing and stuff like that. For poetry, there’s, there, I don’t know that I want to find the one that will do all those things. I really want to find The really good assistant for each of those things that I would hire on, perplexity
Stephen: is definitely I’m, you, all the other ones I’ve gone to, I’ve used, but now I’ll be thinking of something.
I’m like, Oh, I bet I could get a good answer for, I get this like spark [00:34:00] Oh, I really got to go talk to perplexity because I’m going to get a great answer. It’s go, it’s going to spark more things. The others are yeah, okay. I’ll use them. I’ll get something. I’m sure, and the thing I’m also trying to work on I use Lama Olama.
It’s a open source that has multiple LLMs that you can use. And I’m trying, I want to work on getting a computer set up that just runs that. So I can access it remotely while I’m at home and have my own setup for AI. That’s just the ones I want.
Alan: It’s got all the NVIDIA GPUs and all that kind of stuff that really have made it so that it’s a dedicated AI machine.
Yeah,
Stephen: it’s cheaper to get the racing rig than it is to set up a good computer for that.
Alan: Honestly, it’s always. The advent of new technology hasn’t been like, let’s just see what we can do for a spreadsheet. It’s almost always been, can we make this game better? Can we make porn better? It’s like some of the tech breakthroughs for streaming and all that kind of stuff have [00:35:00] been because you wanted to get consumers to be able to use this, but it was a difficult technical problem in terms of rich media or of, the, so I’m glad that, You’re seeing that there’s various different things that work for different purposes and that NVIDIA did a wonderful, as they say often in the investment world, a pivot where they really were GPU and they were like gaming rigs And that kind of stuff and then they realized well if we’re gonna do neural networks This really is positioned well, and so the AI stuff that I did a while back with genetic algorithms I don’t know that there’s anything particularly technologically that’s perfect at doing recursive and multiple ways.
So it’s a different problem that you’re solving where you’re using neural networks to find patterns amongst big data than doing multiple simulated runs and having it pursue, converge towards a solution. I was reminded of, Stephen Wolfram from, a new kind of science. Yeah.
And they did Mathematica and stuff [00:36:00] like that. At one point, and not, and this is honestly 25 years ago, Wolfram Alpha came out, which was the first general inference engine. It’s one of those things that you could just say, Hey, what’s the temperature in Ecuador? And in real time, it would tell you that. It was continually feeding information in every scientific database, every almanac every bit.
And it was really good at parsing human queries so that you could ask it about pretty much, I don’t know, like Watson, right? General coverage of all the knowledge in the world. Who’s the last guy to have done that? Tesla knew everything. Leonardo might have known everything at the time, and it really was like miraculous.
Like you didn’t say I could, could easily find the temperature in Ecuador. How about if I asked what the temperature in Ecuador was in 1861 in November, and it would come back in real time and still, the depth of data that it had and the ability to either anticipate any query you might have, or just have the general drill down capability to look for more and more specific, even [00:37:00] obscure, even ill formed questions you would come back with, do you mean this or do you mean this?
And then you would guide it towards what path to take instead of it wasting a whole bunch of cycles. Giving a perfectly right answer to not the question you asked. You know what I mean that kind of thing So I wonder what has become of that because you would have thought that He must have been looking at what kind of technology is really going to make this even better than what it is and stay ahead of that and Unfortunately, there’s all kinds of people brilliant people that they do their best work When they’re like 25 to 35, when their mind is that way or their preconceptions are limited or whatever else it might be.
And now that he’s of my age, I think I mentioned, I know him because we used to play video games next to each other at the Union at the U of I. And but if he’s 65, I don’t want to think his best work is behind him, but you need to have these hungry, no preconceived notion people to like, just push aside, throw away a lot of what worked in the past and say, we’re doing it a new way now.
[00:38:00] I really wonder if alpha still has relevance. Because for the time it was a miracle machine and now we have even better miracles. Yeah.
Stephen: You know talking about tech and all that the way the algorithms ran and worked Back then is totally different than the way they run and work now It’s a different way.
It’s set up for the programming and for how it does what it does so You know, it makes it difficult to take any of that old stuff and keep it relevant or keep it useful because the new stuff Is just so much Different and efficient and whatever else.
Alan: Exactly. It’s one of the things that I always liked about working in GA, gender algorithms, and I told you this was a quandary.
If you’re going to explain to a client, why is it so smart? Why does it do such a good job? And you can’t say I coded it to do this and this. You would say I gave it a survival function that made it so that each generation, it gets better at what it does. And so it’s an artificial light form, and then they go they get like eyes glazed over or they get [00:39:00] scared or, and if you can’t tell me how it does what it does, then I can’t tweak it or control it or whatever else it might be.
Nowadays, the acceptance of, AGI is a lot like that. Do we have any clue as to, you threw a whole bunch of literature at it, and then it was able to write. Like Twain, like Mark Twain, and it’s having a little kid locked in a room reading nothing but good books for a long time in super speed, and so you still have to make analogies as to how it’s finding those patterns and doing, that it generates things that Pandora used to have a thing where it would like classify music, as, and all different, not just, it’s got guitar based drums.
It’s it had all these more nebulous concepts is it different kinds, styles of music, because ska is different than reggae, is different than any kind of backbeat, and all those, is there a lot of vamping? Where people are going to continually play more than what’s written to the music, but they have feel, they’re good at it.
Nowadays, that’s like automatically baked [00:40:00] in, that you can, what makes a work by Vonnegut different than a work by Twain, different than a work by Crichton, or something like that. And yet it can do it. It can say I, whatever those ephemeral characteristics are of James Patterson, I can make a very pattern, pattern esque thing.
Maybe it’s a matter of, How he forms his structure, structures his sentence, what vocabulary he uses, whether it’s dialog y or prose y. And I can start to try to think of what I would distinguish various different writers as being. Are they funny? There’s a hard thing to quantify.
There’s I wouldn’t make something funny because it takes a left turn, the paradoxian, because it, you know what
Stephen: It uses, Honestly, that’s when we really have to start worrying is when the computers are coming up with stuff that’s actually funny. That’s when we really, because when they can grasp that.
Emotions,
Alan: illogic, exactly. Why does that tickle? You know what I mean? That’s I laugh about Skynet going active because when it starts to stimulate [00:41:00] human behavior, that’s As like the Turing test is long gone now, right? It used to be that’s when you think you have true artificial intelligence.
If you had a conversation with this thing in an hour, could you determine whether it was a machine or a human being? And nowadays they can so easily do that. You know what I mean? They can, this can sound like your friend and your friend is a little bit drunk and you’re talking to him at two in the morning.
They can do all kinds of things to like totally mask that, no, it’s just silicon behind all this, not carbon. I’m I love it. And I’m I don’t think I’m scared about it. I think it’s really cool to see what happens next. Already they, like they had with NATO technology, anything they had was really breakthrough technology.
Immediately people want to put on some kind of guardrails, as they call them, or limitations and stuff. It’s I don’t know, man, I’m willing to let everybody try everything. And the worst case scenario, it only happens Once every hundred years. I’m willing to do a whole bunch of false starts and who knows why it did that in order to get to But look what it can do instead of oh, no, we can’t have [00:42:00] it.
You name it So what are some of the downsides that we’re already seeing depending on what data set you give it? Inherits the prejudices and the ugliness is of various different parts of humanity so if you’re wondering why it comes out with Neo Nazi writings, it’s because the dataset they trained it on is the darknet, and all of that QAnon and channel, 4channel and all those other things that are out there where people, it’s 90 percent terrible, at least in terms of humanity, and yet that’s what it thought was normal.
That’s what it thinks is how people talk. Oh, my
Stephen: God, the thing I see a lot is whoever some writer for a piece or some business article or something related that they put in a prompt and it may not even be the best prompt because AI. We’ll guess has the certain things. If you don’t put enough of the right information in your prompt.
Yeah, that’s a new skill. That’s a [00:43:00] new skill is being able to write prompts properly, but that they will get information from the AI and then just take it and use it without any reading or verification. And it sounds clunky. It sounds inaccurate. There’s things wrong at times. That’s the thing is the people are getting lazy and just letting it do everything without it.
being checked or, revised or it’s great for brainstorming. It’s great for a rough draft and stuff like that. That’s what I find.
Alan: But it sparks things in you and you’re the determinant of whether, is that interesting? Is that something that would be more like what the game I want to play more like what I want to do is me.
So very cool. It’s I don’t know. I’m, I just, there’s an inherent conservativism in thinking how bad could it get instead of how good could it get? You know what I mean? They want to find reasons to not pursue, to not go further, to not experiment and bename all the bad words nowadaysprogressive, [00:44:00] liberal, open minded, woke.
They think that there’s something inherently wrong, that we already know how we should be, and we just have to follow the rules and we’ll get to go to heaven. I know I just threw some religion in there. Sorry, everyone, but don’t you see it? Don’t you see that’s the case for so much of As if we figured it all out.
Name it, 2, 000 years ago, 1, 100 years ago, whether you’re Christian or Muslim, or whatever your rarest difference is, like 4, 000 years ago if you’re Jewish. But it doesn’t take much for me to step back and say, but we didn’t know everything back then. We just have this wonderful book that was written by desert nomads, and they didn’t have any idea about refrigeration and viruses.
So how can they possibly inform us unless you really twist yourself in order to make it that what it really meant back in, Aramaic was this Moore beans virus. No, it never could have, et cetera, et cetera. So to get back to that whole idea of, I’m just. Curiosity has done much more work, much more benefit for humanity, than shutting down.
You know what [00:45:00] I mean? There’s a reason it was called the Enlightenment, and that the Endarkenment didn’t do us any good. It stopped progress. It stopped breakthroughs, and better life and more food, and all the things you can point to that are the result of mankind just like goofing around and figuring things out.
And I don’t want to be like, nope, you can only go so far. There, there’s whole science fiction series that are based on The ministry of compliance that is right. We already know everything we need to know you just keep in your place there, young man, young woman, I inherently that can’t be the way to make the world a better place.
It’s just part of reasoning is seeing how reasoning works or doesn’t, and that I’ve done in Kruger world where people are incompetent. And one of the things they’re incompetent is judging how they’re incompetent. You can’t let those guys be the ones making the decisions. They’re so
Stephen: Idiocracy.
It’s a documentary now. So. So I’m gonna have to get rolling, but we got to set up sometime here, not the first couple of weeks in January, but [00:46:00] get Colin on, probably be Absolutely. An afternoon or something,
Alan: we have stored up interviews for comic book guests, musical guests, whatever we want to do, it would be great to, because as much as fascinating as we are to listen to, it’ll be cool to bring some of our cool because we’ve got cool friends
Stephen: and I’m excited about talking with Colin with you because I’ve been, he’s recommended a few things to me.
I’ve been reading. I’ve gotten some new things and there’s some really good stuff out there. Cool.
Alan: I’ll tell you what, December 31st, I should have my first batch of comics to read because I ordered two months ago for December, but I only, I ordered where like after they accumulate everything into one shipment, and I guess if things are still showing up on Tuesday of the last of the year, I might not get until January.
And boy, I just, I’ve been champing at the bit to be like, I want to read the new comics. And I want to have that conversation with you and Colin about How things have changed in my years in the wilderness and now coming back to the fold, yep, it’ll be that could be [00:47:00] an every week thing.
What have you read lately? And what do you like? And what do you not like for both of us? Yeah with Collins guidance as to have you tried this? I really did order Hundreds of books. You know what I mean? I buy very voluntarily. It’s going to
Stephen: arrive in this box, and Colleen’s going to say, I’m not picking that up.
I’m going to have
Alan: to be the one to bring it in and out. I hope to God that when it shows up, they put it on the porch in the safe place, instead of just on the lip of my porch, and then the rain hits today. It’s You can’t do that. The books,
Stephen: comics, you can’t. Oh, that’s one of the things we should talk to Colin about for, comic book listeners.
The problems in the industry right now, because Diamond used to be like the only distributor and now there’s three and they all do slightly different books, but Diamond is like going downhill according to what has been showing up and lots of people and stuff. Okay, so it’s, there’s a big disruption because of that in the whole industry and he’s, that’s 1 of the things that he could [00:48:00] complain about a lot.
I hear about it that they cut the shipments come in and there’s damaged books and it’s we only ordered 10. Yeah. Yeah. We have eight pools and nine of them are damaged. What are we supposed to do?
Alan: Apologize to the one that’s not, nah, I order mint. I want one, you’re my service.
That, we’ll see. It’ll be pulling the curtain behind of something. I want it to be like easy innocence. I’m gonna read comic books and then you find out that indeed there’s a trade war going on, that there’s a , distribution networks are breaking down. Damnit . Yeah. Yeah. It’s one thing worked just easy.
I hear you. Okay. Alright man. Happy New Year my friend. Happy New Year. There we go. We’ll talk resolution next year. Exactly that. Always a pleasure. Thanks very much.
You have been listening to the Relentless Geekery Podcast. Come back next week and join Alan and Stephen’s conversation on Geek Topics of the Week.