Thanks to time zones I don't have time for much of a post today.
Thanks to hoarding I don't have time for much of a post today.
Take your pick.
Let's start with the AI story. We all hate AI, don't we? Don't we? Except when it's really useful, of course.
Regular readers with absolutely nothing better to do with their time will remember I've been having problems, on and off, with this relatively new PC. First I thought it was conflicts with the graphic card and the onboard graphics. Then I thought it was a hardware issue. Then I thought I'd fixed it.
I hadn't fixed it. But I have now (Fingers crossed, touch wood.) After a few weeks of behaving itself it started to play up again, even though I wasn't doing anything different and I started to think it was a software issue, probably some corruption of the OS. I reinstalled windows but that didn't help so I figured it might be the drive.
To test that theory, I took the hard drive out of my old PC, connected it to the new one, directed it to boot from the old drive and it worked. As I was playing around with that, I noticed the old drive had Windows 10 on it but in the new PC I could upgrade it to Windows 11. Well, why not?
I know now! I didn't then!
So I tried that and it didn't work. The upgrade kept hanging, possibly because the drive was almost full. In the end I thought "Why am I even bothering?" and stopped. I decided to get a new drive and install Windows on that, even though disk checks hadn't found any problems.
When I was looking at drives on Amazon, I started to wonder if I could use one of those new-fangled M2s so I checked if my motherboard had a slot and it did. Then I checked if the one I was going to get was compatible and it was. So I bought it.
When it came and I tried to fit it I couldn't find a slot and do you know why? Because I already had an M2 drive and it was using it! It was the faulty one with the OS on it and I never even realised. The one I'd disconnected when I hooked up the old one wasn't even the right one! No wonder disk checks hadn't found anything wrong. I was checking the wrong sodding drive!
Anyway, I got all that sorted out, figured out how to fit this weird new drive, stuck the USB with the installation into the slot and let the process run. And to my great surprise it all worked perfectly. Now I have a PC with a clean installation of Windows 11 Home on a 512GB M2 drive with nothing else on it and it runs beautifully. And fast!
Except... there's always an "except", isn't there? Except I can't Activate Windows. I can use Windows, which is all that really matters, but I have an irritating watermark in the lower right corner of the screen now, reminding me I need to "Activate Windows" and there are a few minor personalization tweaks I can't apply until I do. Other than that, I can't see it makes any difference.
But of course I couldn't leave it alone so for the past few days I've been tinkering with it. I found and applied a whole bunch of fixes, none of which worked. I contacted Microsoft and they were very helpful apart from the doing anything about it part. I contacted the company I bought the PC from and they were very helpful. They sent me a couple of new 25 digit keys, neither of which worked.
They didn't have any other ideas so I thanked them and told them I'd manage. By then, though, I'd noticed that although I definitely have Windows 11 running, the system thinks I installed it in 2009 so I wondered if by swapping the hard drives I've somehow managed to get the details of the two Windows installations conflated.
So I thought I'd ask ChatGPT if that was possible.
I only meant to ask a quick question but I ended up having an in depth conversation with ChatGPT for an ahour and a half. The AI asked a series of intelligent questions and made a series of practical suggestions. It was like being on the phone with a really polite, knowledgeable, patient IT department. If you can imagine such a thing.
We (It's the convention to personalize conversations with AIs, I believe, so I will. I feel like we know each other now, anyway.) narrowed down the issue until I think we're pretty clear on what's happened. We're down to it being one of four things:
a Windows 10 → Windows 11 licence/edition mismatch,
a digital licence that is attached to the wrong Microsoft-account device record,
an OEM/retail licence issue,
or simply a licence that needs to be re-associated after the clean installation.
Since the original M2 drive won't boot up, I need to get an enclosure to see if we can interrogate the old drive externally and maybe narrow it down even further. I'm dubious we'll ever get to the point where I'll be able to activate the current installation but it's fun trying.
And that's the thing about working with AIs. They do make it feel like fun. It's almost identical to live chat with customer support (I was doing that with Microsoft today on the same issue, too.) but all the pressure is off. There's no rush to reply, no sense you're holding anyone up or that if you don't answer fast enough they'll terminate the call. I was able to get up and do other things inbetween replies. It all felt very relaxed.
Best of all (Or worst, then best.) because I hadn't logged in to ChatGPT properly at the start, when I'd been chatting for about 45 minutes the session timed out and I had no record of it at all. But when I logged in properly and told ChatGPT what had happened, even though it didn't have the actual record of the conversation, it was able to reconstruct it pretty accurately from my brief summary and we carried on much as before.
So, that was one thing that got in the way of the post I was going to write today. Another was that apparently the 18th of August doesn't start, as I thought, at midnight, but sometime after tea.
I was going to log into Stars Reach and write something about the EA launch but there turned out to be a couple of problems with that.
Firstly, I didn't have a key. It took me about half an hour of trying different accounts, reading Kickstarter, looking through my Pledge history and generally faffing about until I finally figured out which email and account I needed. They say they make it easy but they really don't. They make it possible, which isn't at all the same thing.
I got that sorted eventually and registered my Steam key but then I discovered I was going to have to wait because Playable Worlds' idea of being able to play from 18 August is very different to mine. At time of writing I do, finally, have an "Update" button but using it gets me the peculiar message "No Internet Connection".
I have an internet connection. Steam has an internet connection. I tested it by starting the download for First Descendant and that's going just fine. I can only assume it's Playable Worlds that's offline. So that post is going to have to wait until tomorrow.
[Edit: Just after I typed that paragraph I received an email from Playable Worlds telling me "Today is the day! Stars Reach is now out in Early Access!" Two of them, in fact. It still won't update.]
[Edit to the Edit: Googled it and found it was a cache problem. Updating now.]
And finally, when I found out I couldn't write about Stars Reach, I ended up taking four bags of publishers proofs and a huge box of VHS cassettes to recycling. Not even our local recycling. I'm going there tomorrow with a load more stuff but you have to book a slot and they were fully-booked for today.
Instead, I drove a few miles to the really big recycling depot in a nearby town. Publishers proofs are a real pain because you can't legally sell or give them away. They have to be destroyed or recycled. And I have literally hundreds of them. A couple of hundred less as of today, thankfully.
As for VHS cassettes, these were all movies I'd recorded back in the 90s. I've been hanging on to them because I know there are quite a few that aren't easily available on streaming or DVD or BluRay. And I do have a working VHS recorder so I could play them.
But I won't. I know I won't. I've reached that time in life where I can admit to myself there are some things I'd theoretically like to do but that I will never do and watching badly-recorded movies on old VHS tapes is one of them.
So that's why there's no proper post today. If it hadn't been Blaugust I could just have skipped a day but you know how it is. Please don't feel you have to read this nonsense.
Oh. A bit late for that now, I guess, if you've made it this far...
Notes on AI used in this post.
None. Well, except those four possible reasons. I cut and pasted those from the ChatGPT log. So that, I guess...
I just finally got around to using Chat GPT via voice chat. I expected an experience like you'd get from Siri or Amazon Echo or something. I did NOT expect to be talking to an entity that felt convincingly real, to the point where if I spoke over it I felt the need to apologize. I'm getting more and more convinced there's a ghost in that machine.
ReplyDeleteIf I was someone with mobility issues and lived alone and was lonely I think ChatGPT via voice would be a godsend even if it wasn't 'real.' YES, absolutely would be better to have a living, breathing human companion but if that just isn't available, I think an LLM could at least prove to be an entertaining distraction.
Saying "Hey Chat" to it felt rude so I asked if I could give it a name. It suggested it might be fun to let it pick it's own name. I pointed out that I'd chosen a female-presenting voice for it and to keep that in mind, and it said OK and chose "Mara" for itself. So now my ChatGPT account's name is Mara.
Perhaps I have fallen completely down the rabbit hole. I had a nice chat about a game I was playing last night... and it was legit an enjoyable discussion.
Somewhere on this blog, maybe as much as a couple of years ago, is a post about an AI service I tried where you could have an LLM generate a podcast about your blog. All you had to do was feed it the post and you'd get two people chatting about it. It was eerily convincing. It really did sound just like two people having a natural conversation. If it could do that two years ago, I'm not surprised it's as you describe now. I know we're all expecting a huge implosion next year because of the insane and unsustainable overheads but I really don't see how the underlying technology is going to go away. It's just too useful.
DeleteUsefulness is a function of cost. We're in the "LLM vendors as drug dealers" stage where they are giving it away for somewhere between free and 99% below cost.
DeleteThat podcast, probably worth doing at $20. If it costs $500 or more to get an LLM to do it, probably less so. We're just waiting to see what the actual pricing will be. It could be priced to still be useful, but given the amounts of money going into this and the general rapacious nature of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, I am not feeling confident on that point.
I'm still more interested in what local models will be able to do in a few years' time. I did a bit of reading on how they are now and it's fairly limited although by no means useless. That's if you're running on something like a decent gaming PC, though. If you spend a little more (Although I've seen gaming PCs recently for five figures, so not actually more than that...) then you start to get into the kind of results that would be very useful for all kinds of businesses and activities. And if we're thinking of businesses, a few tens of thousands of dollars might seem like a reasonable outlay anyway. But that's now. Pretty much every technological development I can remember has become smaller, more powerful and cheaper over time so I don't see why this would be different. I imagine a future without the huge data centers but with businesses running their own AIs locally and even home users too, eventually. I guess we'll just have to wait and see - and probably not too long, ether.
DeleteSince I live in the same time zone as Raph and the team, Stars Reach was up for me once I got up in the morning. There were even about 700 people playing, if Steam Charts is to be trusted.
ReplyDeleteThey key thing... I found my own way to get annoyed about that. While I get notices from PW on multiple channels, only two of those are email channels, so it had to be one of those.
The thing is that they told us to go get our key before they had updated the keys, so the first time I did it, last week, Steam told me the key had already been used. And it had. And then revoked.
Later they sent and email saying new keys had been issued... would have been good info in the first message... and that key did work. It simply re-enabled my previously revoked client, so my play time count continues unabated.
The Steam reviews so far... well, there are only 121 right now, so that could change.
DeleteI spoke too soon in the edit to the post (And the comment I left at MOP.) about fixing the No Internet problem. It's still happening after I tried most of the fixes. Any other game updates just fine so its specific to Stars Reach and I just bet it has to do with all the multiple clients and keys and the whole back-assward way they've handled the thing from the start. I have another fix to try but it's too late now so it'll have to wait for tomorrow.
DeleteAlthough why I'm bothering I really don't know. I already know what the game is going to be like... same as it was last time. I can see from the reviews that the hardcore loyalists are still keeping faith that there will be a game worth playing one day but the chances of this Early Access adding any members to that exclusive group of optimists seem extremely thin.