Today I started to follow a course where someone turns a static html page into a Laravel blog. I experimented with home.blade and one or two other features and I got two pages to load, and the login to work, without more than that.
What makes today’s learning and experimenting interesting is that the time I spent creating PHP arrays for my website content is now easy to transfer to json files for use with dynamic websites. What this means is that content that was stuck on individual pages is now organised by website section. I am now free to do more.
The primary goal is to convert the static part of my website into a flexible content management system as well as to possibly swallow up the WordPress powered blogs. For at least a year I have disliked that WordPress uses react, so if I can replace WordPress with Laravel then I will be happy. All websites that use React look the same to me, and I don’t want to use technology that was developed by Facebook, no matter how popular.
Having a website is not just about writing blog posts and creating content. It is also about playing with technology and learning new skills. I want to understand how laravel works, and to have a way to demonstrate that I have learned relevant skills for future job applications. This website isn’t small. It has quite a few sections, topics, content and more. It’s worth working on and improving this website.
And Finally
I am curious about playing with ActivityPub. It is still in early days but if and when it is ready, it will be a more advanced of interactive RSS. I want to see what possibilities it will open up.
I am currently working towards a goal and I am struggling. I am struggling to stay focused when I follow online courses because I find that my mind strays. I am also struggling because the topic is so broad that there are hundreds of things you can learn but you need to be focused.
I am also struggling because although many people live in denial about the pandemic it is still thriving. The positivity check, for a disease, to be considered under control is less than five percent. COVID, after five years is still at ten or more percent. This gets in the way of going to conferences, meetups and other networking opportunities.
Out of pandemic I would volunteer for many events for two reasons. The first is that I’m shy, and by volunteering I force myself to go to events. The second reason is price. If you volunteer you pay for the train or parking but nothing else. This is a good way of going to conferences, meeting people, and coming across interesting ideas.
If I felt comfortable with what I am learning at the moment I would spend four or more hours a day on it. I would spend two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon.
Recently my progress keeps stalling because I don’t have the solitude that I need to be at my most productive. I sit down, start to focus and then noise interrupts what I am working on and I stall.
This isn’t an uncommon problem. Usually writers complain about this but I am not a writer.
What I find hard with this situation is that I am a good worker, when I am in contract. The problem is that contracts are hard to find and they end after six to nine months, and finding the next one is a struggle. That’s why I’m working on changing career. That’s why I try to write at least a few lines of code every day. At the moment I am working on being at ease with Laravel and PHP and it’s progressing.
The progress is not as fast as I’d like, because I don’t have as much solitude as I would like to make good progress.
Friends is a television series that aired in the 90s and that still makes millions today, as the show is re-aired. Jennifer Anniston, Rachel Green in the series, says that people today find the series offensive today. I find it ironic, that in a day and age where books are edited to be more politically correct, parties that are immoral, are voted into power.
Brexit, the Tories, the UDC and The US Republican Party are two examples. They represent old fashioned views and yet people not only vote for them but they lead politics. In the age where people are worried about what people said and thought decades ago, people are showing more bigotry in who, and what they vote for today.
If we edit books to be more politically correct, and if we criticise television series and films for representing old fashioned views, then we should edit the bible and Quoran, to make them more representitive of modern values.
Television series, films and books represent the world as it was, and if we have moved on from the values seen in TV series, films and books, then that is the entire reason we study them in the first place, whether through english litterature classes, film studies or media studies. The fact that our values change is part of the academic discussion to be enjoyed.
The danger comes not from laughing about something, but about growing angry, and showing intolerance. Remember that joking about something, offending someone by accident, and apologising is one thing.
Brexit and some political parties are about radicalising hatred against people based on race, religion or national identity. Whether Roald Dahl or Friends shows old fashioned attitudes to one thing is an interesting quirk to be discussed by parents, children, and students.
The movement to divide, radicalise and spread hatred is quite another. Until Drumpf and Brexit I felt that England and the US were making forward progress. With BRexit and Drumpf the US and England took a big step backwards, morally.
Complaining about books, televisions and films is nice, but it’s a desire to change the past. What worries me is that the Far Right is thriving in the US, England, Switzerland and other countries. I want people to vote against the Far Right, in government, rather than worry about how people thought three decades ago. What I see happening now worries me. England voted against Europe and the European identity. They behaved in a xenophobic manner and no one noticed.
Rather than complain about television, books, and films people should vote to keep the Far Right out of power. If the Far Right is in power then the very things that people decry in films, books and television, are shaping government policy in the wrong direction. Vote intolerance out of government.
Over the past year, over half a million visits have been counted to this website.
Over the past five months over fifty thousand visits, a month took place. For the period in question, there have been almost two million hits and 58 gigabytes of data transfer.
Being at the stage I’m at, and having discussed the work with the tutor there are three things I must make sure to do before handing in the work.
The first task is uniformity. I need to go through two or three sections and make sure that I tie them into the overall structure of the dissertation work. It’s meant to flow from one section to another. That’s something I’ve got to work on.
The second thing I’ve got to work on one or two paragraphs, make sure that the information that I wrote down is comprehensive and there’s no so what question left in the air.
The final task is to make sure that I have a clear dissertation title and write the dissertation conclusion according to this. Once that’s done I’m pretty much done with this most major of assignments and it’s been a great learning curve. I think it’s been the best learning experience overall that I’ve had in University.
Today I want to discuss something different. I want to discuss using AI as a teacher, rather than as a tool to replace us. For a few days I have been playing with the Instagram json file that I got when I requested my archive. With this json file I thought about things to do, and in so doing asked chatGPT for help, and it provided answers.
Adapting the Questions
When you ask chatGPT to do something it will do what you asked. If you see that you got a partial answer then you can tell chatGPT more specifically what to do. In some cases I would ask it to do something, but I didn’t tell it that the data was in an external file, so I told it the name of the external file and it was added.
You Still Need to Think And Understand
Although ChatGPT is a great tool you need to learn to debug. Sometimes if you get an error message you can ask chatGPT how to resolve it, but in other cases, chatGPT will not realise what the error is.
The Zero Width Asset
Yesterday I was trying to generate a heat map of when I took photographs with ChatGPT via the instagram json file but it did not detect that the height for an element had been set to zero. It’s by experimenting that I found this error and fixed it. ChatGPT gave me a useful answer, but only resolved part of what I was trying to achieve. I had to do the rest.
Testing and Double Checking
In one case I told chatGPT that I wanted to make something available in the head element. It helped me to do that but then removed some functionality from another part of the page. I had to tell it “put that functionality back”, not in those words, and it did. Double check everything.
Trial And Error
Coding, and finding solutions, with chatGPT is about having an idea, and seeing if, and how, to get chatGPT to understand the request that you’re making. I find that I often have to ask a question several times, and in different ways, before I get to an answer that is useful for me. The more you play with chatGPT the more you learn about its quirks and how to avoid them.
Context Aware
One feature that I find especially useful with chatGPT is that it is context aware. With Google you can ask how to do something, but usually you can’t go into the specifics because it is not as context aware. The best example I can think of is the array. With an array you have layers within layers and it can be confusing to see whether something is one or three layers down, and how precisely to get to that data. With chatGPT you can say “here’s one array item, I want to retrieve x from that array, how do I do it, and it does. It gives you the request you need to access that bit of information from the array.
Practical Example
The Instagram Archive JSON is thousands of elements, but they all have the same structure, as long as they have the same data. The first step is to create the foreach loop to cycle through the data. Getting the first bit of info, with the instagram json file was easy, but deciphering the exif element wasn’t, so I asked chatGPT for help within this specific context, and it worked fine. I could then copy and paste for the exif that I had not asked it to help me with.
Converting Time Stamps from Epoch to Human Readable Dates and Times
There are plenty of places where you can find where to convert from epoch to machine readable time. chatGPT can also provide you with a context relevant solution, rather than a generic one.
Learning by Repetition
People may say “but you’re not learning, you’re just playing with chatGPT in the hope that it will give the right answer, to which I answer that we all learn in different ways. People that studied computer science and understand all of the theory might be able to read the fabulous manual, and understand everything, but for those of us that are learning bits and pieces, in an informal context, chatGPT allows us to ask “how do I do this in that context?”
We are learning three skills in processes such as mine. The first is to think about how to write functions for an app. The second is being able to communicate this desire to an AI. The skill has a name: Prompt engineering. It wouldn’t have a name if it wasn’t an important aspect of working with AI. The final skill we are learning is how to assemble code to make it work as we want it to work.
ChatGPT doesn’t just give us a few lines of code. It provides us with relevant contextual information to help us understand what is happening.
In short chatGPT can be used as a tutor, or course program, to teach us how to write better code, when others may not be around, or have the time to help us.
Udemy Courses
At least two of the “teachers I followed on Udemy, to learn about JavaScript and other technology have now made courses teaching people how to use AI to help them with their workflows. Rather than watch how others are using chatGPT I am playing and learning, with projects I think up. It’s fun. I should call it experimenting, rather than playing, but in the end I am playing.
Does this make sense to chatGPT?
Does that make sense to chatGPT?
Would chatGPT understand what I mean if I asked this?
ChatGPT and Debugging
I find it really interesting that chatGPT can be used for debugging. It tells you, do this using that library, assuming that the library is installed, but if it isn’t then you need to install it, but that’s not the end. You need to see which version chatGPT meant for you to implement. I got error messages and asked chatGPT for help, tried one version, got another error message. I then shared the new error message and chatGPT said “Oh, if you’re using this version then you’re meant to use this code, rather than that code.” I didn’t change the code. I swapped versions and the app worked.
Conclusion
The more time you invest in prompt engineering, with a specific goal in mind, the more you will learn, and the more you learn, the more useful chatGPT becomes. It goes from being an interesting curiousity to being an interesting tool.
A recent article has brought to the world’s attention that Wikipedia has over 2 million articles on its website and that’s great. What it means is that thousands of people have taken a little time out of their day to provide what knowledge they had to a global audience through their small contribution.
The World Wide Web was not always as easy to use as it is today. Back when I started using the world wide web there were less than six million web pages. Now there are several billion and google is helping to index this mess. This mess I’m talking about is the enormous amount of content that people have created and shared on the world wide web without any consideration for ease of retrieval. In 1997 when I wrote about the Romans I was one of ten to twenty people who created content on this topic. As a result, it was not hard to get other people’s attention. As pioneers of online content when Larry Page and others started to create lists of interesting websites it was easy to be added to the collection. As more content was produced so the link collection would have to be stepped up and get help from search algorithms. I remember when Altavista was one of the great websites you wanted to be linked from.
I remember the first time I saw that Google had sent me traffic. It was quite interesting because google was a young startup only just getting to be noticed. I was happy because I was the top result on this search engine as a result of which I would get more traffic.
There was one drawback however and that was that I did not have the time or inclination to carry out the level and quality of research to write new articles therefore I looked for contributors. I tried with forms, with e-mail addresses, and with a forum. All of these had little or no success because I had not generated enough of an active audience. I was getting many insults and questions by e-mail but no one bothered to give me answers.
As a result, what you see there today is what I wrote when I came back from a holiday in the Ardèche region of France.
Over the years I would study a number of subjects and as I learned a little more on each one I would add a page or two and see more traffic and more comments come my way. The lack of contributions meant that my website is the labour almost entirely of one person. Last month I had half a million visits in a twelve-month period. Keep in mind that I am not a social networking website and have no programing knowledge to create something attractive to a mass audience in the same way as Flickr, Facebook or other websites.
Communities have been part of the internet since the BBS days when it was text-based and only universities and government officials had access. Over time so the community would develop and people would team up to work on specific projects. Wikipedia was one of them. Jimmy Wales found a model by which he could get people to contribute “as little or as much” as they wanted. They could as easily add one line of text as add an in-depth explanation of a theorem. As a result, no one was kept out of the loop.
He is often credited with being a pioneer whilst in fact, this notion is as old as the first dictionaries. Whilst I do not remember the name of the first people to compile the first dictionary I do remember that they worked by contributions. Their idea was simple. They would ask people to write down a word and a description of what they thought it meant. Over the years as more and more words were amassed, and as the need for storage went from a room to a barn and beyond so the dictionary would become a good resource for a uniform definition of words. I’m sure there’s a great dissertation to be written on that topic.
Anyway, the point is this; through the combined effort of a community so knowledge could be processed and shared through dictionaries, encyclopedias, and more. In so doing we now have access to the answer to any question we can think up.
I have noticed a trend in online interaction that has been particularly strong within the past six months to a year and this is the centralisation of specific activities. If you’re looking for social communities there is a movement away from interest-based communities to having mega-communities such as Facebook, myspace, Bebo, youtube, and Flickr. Each of these communities helps to bring together vast amounts of people but they also help to move away from the search engine.
What I mean by this is that whereas in 1997 you would go to search engines and type a search query today you know that you’ve got central locations where to concentrate your effort. In 1997 you’d type Roman Civilisation and my website would have been the first result. Today if you type the same query you’ll end up on Wikipedia because at least to thousand dedicated people have put so much time into the web site aggregating and collating information. As a result of this some people would say that the section of my website on the Romans is redundant since you have such a great resource within the depths of Wikipedia. The web killed Encarta and similar efforts to provide encyclopedias in electronic form. As a bonus, any researcher can drop by Wikipedia, find a short introduction in what he is researching before moving away from this website to a more in-depth knowledge that has been written by academics and experts in their field of research.
This brings me to the Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen. He was criticized by people such as Leo Laporte for expressing his thoughts that the web is a congregation of content for idiots. You can tell he didn’t read the book or listen to the audio file and here’s why. The web is full of content that takes only a few seconds to compile and digest but that’s because those who are new to the medium are playing around and testing a variety of possibilities. Now take a look at the trends for university graduates per year and you’ll see that there’s an increase in the number of highly educated people.
As a result of this, there is an increasing number of experts on a progressively diverse number of topics. If you’re specialised in zombie films, as was one friend, for his dissertation then you’ve got a widening base of specialists who can talk between themselves. It’s the same for development studies, for documentary and any other intellectual pursuit.
Whilst academics are busy carrying out research and making sure that every point they make is backed up by at least three or fur other sources the “plebs” for lack of a better word are playing around with the technology and seeing what works and doesn’t. For them, it does not matter whether what they say is right or wrong because they have fewer credentials. Take as an example of what happened to the BBC with the Hutton inquiry. The problem was not whether the information was correct or incorrect but who was saying it. If Sky news makes certain allegations then they will be ignored because they are not as highly regarded as the BBC. The BBC is held in such high regard that should they say anything that is not absolutely backed up by the fact they will be called to account.
It’s the same with the online community. Children and teenagers are developing the infrastructure, which they, as grown-ups will take full advantage of. Wikipedia is a self-moderated international community of researchers who work together to get the most accurate information out to their readers. We should see the same trends within the wider blogosphere and as people gain more experience in audio and video websites such as myspace, youtube, and Facebook.
Jimmy Wales and his community have demonstrated on a small scale, with over two million articles, what we should expect to see from the World Wide Web within the next few years.
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