Coding Tips: Stop Vibe Coding – Start Writing Elegant Code

Know someone whose code is a bit sloppy or too vibey? This video might be just what they need.

ChatGPT's Atlas Web Browser

Yesterday, ChatGPT released a standalone Web browser, called Atlas, with ChatGPT integrated into it. You can download it here for macOS only. Other operating systems are coming soon. 

As a web browser, it seems OK. 
But it really shines when you're on a web page, like a specific restaurant on Yelp, and ask it how long it'll take you to drive there.
"What time should I leave to arrive here by 6:15 today, accounting for live traffic updates?"

Also, since you're logged into your own ChatGPT account, your Atlas website queries are saved in ChatGPT. 

Perhaps, one day, Apple will integrate AI into their operating systems so it can answer questions like this based on what you're looking at on your screen. 

AI Calendar Invites

I live near a religious facility and they recently left a door hanger on my front door to let me know about upcoming events that will create parking issues in my residential neighborhood.

I uploaded a photo of the door hanger to ChatGPT and asked it to create a ZIP file of calendar invites for each event.

Boom! It worked perfectly. I downloaded a ZIP file with more than two dozen calendar invites that I added to my calendar.

Very impressive and helpful. 

No, That's Not a 10 Minute Call

I just came across this old screenshot of a 10-hour conference call from 2012, when I worked at Wyndham Hotel Group in corporate IT. (Wyndham owns about two dozen brands like Days Inn, Ramada, Super 8, Howard Johnson, etc.)

Every website deployment was a major endeavor requiring a separate deployment for each brand throughout the night, followed by a quick "smoke test" by QA before moving on to the next brand.

This painful process took many hours. In this case, we began the conference call at 10 PM on a Sunday night and we were on the phone for ten hours straight.

Would you ever believe that AT&T could keep a call connected, without dropping, for ten hours?

Amazon Fulfillment Warehouse Tour

This afternoon, I took a one-mile walking tour of an Amazon fulfillment warehouse that’s mostly run by robots, here in San Diego. This facility spans 3,330,000² feet, employs 4,500 people, and operates 23/7 in three shifts with one hour of daily downtime.

I highly recommend taking one of these tours which are free and open to the public in nearly 20 states: Amazon Tours.

The most fascinating part was watching the robots disappear into the darkness as they moved shelves of Amazon products since they don’t need light to see where they’re going.

Sorry, no photos allowed.

AI for Eating

Last night, I was at an Italian restaurant and I wanted to know how these two sauces would look on my cheese stuffed gnocchi.

These photos the are AI-generated images I received after uploading the menu photo above and asking what both dishes would look like.

AI-generated Images

I ordered the second option, the Gnocchi Ragu della Nonna, and what I received matched the image perfectly.

My dinner was spot on

AI for Data Science with San Diego Data

I asked some popular AI chatbots to analyze the open source data that San Diego provides.

I started off analyzing the data for parking meters, since that's a hot button issue for the city, recently. Two separate chatbots gave me similar answers when I asked what's the most amount of money that these 10,978 parking meters could generate if they were in use continuously for the times they're in effect. The answers came back remarkably close: $75,772.75 and $75,796.75. That's an impressive $24 difference between the two AIs. Close enough for me. 

Crimes committed within half a mile of a local high school

Next, I downloaded the 190 MB file of crimes committed in San Diego since 2020 and asked it to plot on a map all of the crimes committed within half a mile of a local high school. I was genuinely impressed with the static HTML file it generated which included listing the crime with each pin. Upon digging deeper, I noticed that I didn't see my police report for my stolen catalytic converter from three years ago. But after a bit of investigation, I realized it wasn’t included in the SDPD’s dataset, so the omission wasn’t the AI’s fault.

Shared Proof Theory

I enjoy learning new things, especially if it involves a paradigm shift that changes my perspective. But what's a trusted rule that yields objective truth?

Objective truth is a fact or reality that exists independently of individual beliefs, feelings, or perceptions. It’s considered true regardless of who observes or thinks about it.

So, how do I evaluate and arrive at objective truth? I've adopted the following as my own personal philosophy:

If something can’t be shared, measured, or observed, then it’s subjective; it becomes very difficult to prove to others.

In other words, if an experience is accessible only to a single individual, it is subjective; but if it can be seen, tested, or agreed upon by others, it is objective.

We connect through an objective shared reality, while it is the inner, unseen truths that give our connections depth and meaning.

AI Let Down

AI is great at manipulating text and documents, and it does a very nice job at examining photos and transcribing text from images. But today AI let me down with what seemed like a simple task: to take a single, three-and-a-half-hour MP3 recording and break it down into individual tracks.

I used to belong to 3rdSpace, which was a coworking space for creative people. They had monthly Jazz Jams along with other music events. I would typically turn on my audio recorder on my iPhone and let it record the entire event as a single audio file. Occasionally, I’d then take that MP3 file, load it up in GarageBand, and slice it into individual music tracks. But more so than not, instead of doing the work myself, I’d upload the single MP3 to AWS’s Mechanical Turk and pay someone a few dollars to slice up the music into individual tracks. 

This morning, I thought, for sure, that one of the big AIs could do this for me. After trying ChatGPT, Gemini/NotebookLM, and DeepSeek, they all failed me. The closest was ChatGPT, which kept apologizing for timing out on me. Gemini referred me to other applications, and DeepSeek was beyond its depth. 

Perhaps one day; but, for now, AI’s sweet spot is language, not action.

Gravity and Philosophical Cosmology: A Work in Progress

Gravity is not a a fundamental force in the universe.

Gravity is one of the four fundamental interactions in the universe, but it’s not a force since it has no messenger (carrier) particle that transmits it. (Gravitons are similar to tachyons: they don’t exist.)

The electromotive force is transmitted by photons.

The strong nuclear force is transmitted by gluons.

These two forces, photons and gluons, seem to be the only forms of massless energy that we are aware of. Photons act over an infinite distance, whereas gluons travel only within a proton to bind the quarks that make up a proton.

The weak nuclear force is transmitted by w and z particles (which do have invariant mass, better known as rest mass). Rest means that, if a particle of energy could stop moving at c, it would literally have zero mass - in other words, all the mass of an energy particle is a result of its momentum. 

The leads to another phenomenon I’ve been trying to better understand, which is how do attractive forces work, such as the attraction of the north and south pole of a magnet? While this interaction seems as obvious as gravity, at first glance, I’m wondering if it’s truly an attractive force? Rather, could it be a push force where the space between the north and south poles creates an “energy vacuum” or lower energy state? In other words, is what we see as an attraction actually the magnets being pushed into a lower energy state from the space or forces around it? 

How does attraction work? Good question. I came to imagine repulsion in a classical sense. I can imagine “pushing.” For example, classically, I can envision two atoms emitting photons directed at each other like two people standing in a rowboat while throwing a ball back and forth to each other. The ball leaving one person’s hands is analogous to a photon emitted from an atom. As this process continues, the boats, like the atoms, are pushed apart. They’re repulsed. So, how do we imagine an attractive force? 

Additionally, it seems that gravity doesn’t originate outward from mass, rather inward; otherwise, how could the gravity of a black hole be detected outside the event horizon? How could a fictitious graviton travel faster than light to escape out of the event horizon?

Rather, it appears that the Cosmos (spacetime) is flowing, like a river, into mass. Crossing the event horizon is analogous to going over a waterfall. 

A final thought…

What happens or what exists in the space where the event horizons of two black holes overlap? The flow of the spacetime aether would be in opposite directions. Would it simply be a void of nothingness? 🤷‍♂️