You may have heard of the term Quantum Computers in the news. They are an entirely new process/technology to replace the computers we all know and love. Though in its infant stages, Quantum Computers promise to rewrite the book on how computing works and how data is handled. It is promised that we could see exponential increases in data read-write speeds and complex calculations.
If you’ve ever heard of AirTags, or their less-popular brethren Tile or Eufy, the value add is fairly obvious: Put the tag on an item and if you lose it or it’s stolen, then nearby devices can ping the NFC tag on it to report that they’ve seen it. Unfortunately, several nefarious individuals discovered that rather than track down lost items, these tools can also be used to covertly track someone’s location if you can get an AirTag on a person or in a vehicle. Apple was quick to issue a fix that alerts iPhone users if an AirTag is away from its owner and seems to be following them for an extended period.
Almost 4 years ago, my partner and I moved into our new home (our first house purchase together). Never would I have thought we’d be here, transitioning from Portland to Denver, with a pitstop in Chicago. A lot has happened and changed the course of our lives (ahem, *pandemic*). This is the 3rd blog post I’ve made about moving. Let’s say I’ve grown a lot.
Here are some more hacks/regrets about moving across the country (again):
—— Written in Bierstadt font ——
Trust me for a minute; this might get weird, but let’s think back to 2007: iPhone, Nancy Pelosi, the bald eagle, Lindsay Lohan, the Spice Girls, people thinking this is okay. You’re there now, mentally? You just signed up for Tumblr and are getting the hang of “hashtags?” Cool, so you understand that 2007 was a very long time ago, and the world has changed a TON since then. One thing that’s remained the same, though? The default font in Microsoft Office: Calibri. Until now.
Recently, we went to the mountains for a fun weekend of hiking and stayed at a nice little resort hotel. But it was not nice that in the evenings, while winding down, catching up on our shows was nearly impossible. Unfortunately, when traveling, you commonly lose access to all your streaming services. Some TVs (the ones in our hotel, for instance) allowed you to sign into your account, but I’m very reticent to type in a password on a random device that I don’t own. Thankfully, a super portable device allows you to bring all your streaming with you: The Google Chromecast.
You may have heard that climate change will affect almost all aspects of our daily lives. From the food you buy to the clothes you wear, the climate affects all the raw materials needed to produce tangible goods. Coffee may be able to resist the changes more than most, however, with the study of the Robusta bean in the coffee farms of Vietnam.
If you’ve been on the internet for a while, eventually, you’re going to see a weird string of numbers called an IP address. They’re a cluster of four numbers between 0 and 255, separated by periods. Like 8.8.8.8 or 192.185.71.128 (that’s the IP for this blog!) or 172.66.40.4.
But why are they shown like that?
A scene in the 2013 movie Her immediately struck me as incredibly understated because essentially, it was a window to our future. At 5:14, Joaquin Phoenix’s character, Theodore, walks into his apartment, and the lights turn on without him doing anything. As he moves from the entryway to the living room, other lights come on, and the previous ones dim slightly. As he reaches a set of chairs and lingers, the light above them slowly turns up. The scene is immediately followed by his character playing a video game on a giant holographic screen controlled by moving his fingers around. I fully expect that to be the image you have of his home when you reflect on the movie. That 21-second scene with no dialogue and no consequence to the plot is the main thing I remember from the film. I was fascinated by the idea that these technologies would be so ubiquitous within a few decades that you wouldn’t even notice or comment on them.
Have you heard about the new technology tool, Chat GPT? Its cutting-edge technology is so potent that it will disrupt various aspects of your personal and professional life. Below is my interview with the chatbot:
What is Chat GPT?
GPT, or Generative Pre-trained Transformer, is a type of natural language processing (NLP) model developed by OpenAI. It is a neural network-based machine learning model that is trained to generate human-like text. It can be used for various language-based tasks, such as language translation, question answering, and text generation. GPT is pre-trained on a large dataset of human-generated text and can then be fine-tuned for specific language tasks. There is no specific “chat GPT,” but GPT or a similar model could potentially be used to power a chatbot or other conversational application.
