Wrangling AI: How I Turned ChatGPT into My Creative Sidekick for Garden Design

My Cottage style garden with Mediterranean influence - Lavender, and various grasses are in the foreground.

“Are you crazy, nobody uses ChatGPT like that, you know that right?” Mark said as we sat in the pub. I took a sip of cold crisp beer, slightly puzzled. I thought about how I’d been using generative AI to change my life recently. How I had used it to build a zen-like focus-point around a huge Japanese Acer in my garden. “Surely everyone uses it like that, isn’t it obvious?” I said, feeling slightly self-conscious. I hesitated. Should I tell him how I had also spent all evening talking to ChatGPT coming up with ideas for a cottage garden? It had factored in thousands of different plants that would make even Monty Don drop his trowel in surprise. That was when it struck me that most people use ChatGPT like Google. They punch in a prompt pieced together from some cheat sheet they found on social media and watch it spew out information like a hot bubbling volcano of knowledge, before copying and pasting the answer and never to give it a second thought. For me, this was a bit like using an expensive Macbook Pro laptop as a tea tray. Sure, it works and it’s useful to some degree, but there is so much untapped power in this method of computing, and by method, I mean “conversational intelligence” computing.

Steve Jobs famously once compared the computer to a bicycle for the mind — for its efficiency in propelling humans to where they wanted to go. I would be so bold as to say, extending this analogy… That AI is a motorcycle for the mind.

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AI Thoughts: Computer Vision, ChatGPT and Captain Kirk

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending a compelling lecture on computer vision at The Royal Society in London. Professor Andrew Zisserman showcased an innovative approach to building models, much like how a child learns – by cross-referencing visual, audio, and text data. However that is an oversimplified summary, the actual process can broadly be summed up into 3 steps and really got me thinking deeply about AI and some of the issues the lecture uncovered.
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Framed in an interview!

Recently I have been interviewing and it is eye opening to be the other side of the interview table/Zoom chat! Having been an iOS developer for 14+ years, I think there are things you learn very early on in your career that you never question or need to revisit it again and it can catch you a little off-guard. One of those areas that I got asked about recently was about the relationship between the frame, bounds and transforms in a `UIView`.

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Can software influence your emotions?

By the end of this article I want to convince you that your emotions can be influenced by software. To do that I’d like you to imagine a progress bar. Yes, the humble loading bar or progress-done indicator as it is also known. They have many variations. Some even have fancy animations so they feel like they finish sooner but its essence has been a mainstay of the user interface for 40 years or more. They are so ubiquitous, you can’t escape them.

So what actually is a progress bar for? At first glance, this seems easy to answer. Progress bars are designed to see the progress of a task… or are they?
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Time is an odd concept

Time is an odd concept. It’s suppose to be linear but sometimes you can watch the clock and 5 minutes seems like an hour. At other times you can look up from your desk after what barely seems like 5 minutes and find the night settling in.

It’s been 8 months since my last blog post and I hadn’t meant to leave it so long but I’ve been busy with a few things… I architected in-app subscriptions into my weather app for drones, released a brand new version with new features, joined a new startup, studied for a number of flying exams, lost a few hours to Starcraft Remastered, rebuilt Pac-Man from scratch, forked and heavily updated an open source project, started work on a prototype AI concept, watched a whole season of Game of Thrones, went to the gym a lot, learnt an old song on guitar, remembered to socialise oh and got quite into Rick and Morty again. Hence why I haven’t found the time to blog! However I should be posting again soon.

In the mean time, you should watch this interesting TED talk about a guy who thinks the brain hallucinates your reality which could have some interesting applications for AI.