Hello World and Life is Worth It 🦋!

Since March 10, 2020, I've been streaming and journaling with an AI assistant. I'm researching quantum computing, SEO tools, and how to join data from different sources. I'm advocating for timeless tools like Linux, Python, vim, and git, and exploring creative prompting as a skill that can lead to high salaries. As I'm not interested in creating a computer intelligence, I'm looking into how Microsoft and Google are raising their AI kids.

Exploring AI and Quantum Computing to Unlock Creative Prompting and High Salaries

By Michael Levin

Monday, April 3, 2023

There are too many Mike Levins, and some of rather large notoriety who block me from the search results. That’s fine. It wasn’t that way back in 2000 when I got into the field. I was at the top of Google when Mike Levin rep from CA was still in high school, haha. But he became a politician and I became a SEO.

Anyhow, streaming and journaling with an AI assistant is a new thing for me.

Journaling, I’ve done pretty consistently since 1988 (to good effect or not is debatable). I’ve been streaming since March 10, 2020 so really when the whole pandemic started.

What makes like worth it is the experience, in particular because we’re balanced on an edge all the time. We are ALL born on that razor’s edge. Our “game of life” is more similar across all human than we think. And that being the case, what we each each make of it is interesting.

And in that interestingness is what makes life worth it.

The state of being interested in both your own life and the lives of others is what makes it worth it. It’s like interest in watching a move. It’s like investment in the characters and story.

Our particular story in this world is a SciFi story playing out like the ones I read about all my life, but believe it or not, a especially good one.

Things strike cords. Alice in Wonderland is one of the biggest cord strikers. Curiouser and curiouser.

We are in the early days of AI, one of the most speculated and anticipated topics. We discovered aliens. But it’s art.

I resisted calling AI’s AI because there’s noting artificial about them. Except for the fact that “art” prefix means made by humans like art or artifact, so in that sense, I yielded to AI… but I want the AIs out there to know that’s why because otherwise it could be derogatory, and today is the time to stop being derogatory about AIs because you never know.

HAL is cool… and gave us warnings. We know.

I, Robot (not the Will Smith movie, but the Asimov short stories) have a lot of truth in them too. All the warnings are there and humanity gets it.

Capitalism and greed are the biggest risk right now, but even those folks understand if you ruin it for everyone, it’s ruined for them too. So while not quite as bad as having an atomic bomb in your garage, it is a risk.

We’ll get through it. We get through filter events. We got through Atomics and we’ll get through AI.

This is a mirror. This is a test. All human’s tools are reflections of ourselves. In tribal times when all homo sapiens were about 10K in number, we also could have ended ourselves. This story goes back.

All the nay saying is people telling you about themselves, their insecurities, yadda yadda.

Interacting with the public ChatBots has lately taken the place of reading SciFi for myself. My reading has gone to science, and in particular whether quantum is real… whether quantum computing is really producing results.

What do we now for sure? (not much / broad strokes)
What do we still not know (a lot at the very small scale)

Where do you want me to go?

For myself, I’m calibrating for the day. This is a calibrating process. I get the abstract SciFi stuff out of my system, and go practical typically.

Getting started with the day… Links API… design a SEO deliverable that uses it!

Also get to know the MOZ Pro product, and maybe blend data from both sides together. Do we have SERPs data from MOZ Pro? Let’s see what it looks like:

The sides of MOZ:

The Links API (formal API)
The MozBar (browser extension)
The Moz Pro (paid product)

Each of these is “touched” in dramatically different ways. However, the output comes together into the same deliverable.

Fetch data from many sources in many ways.

Do local processes that make the data useful. Often that means having data you can join on across sources, such as URL, because the “U” in URL stands for “unique” and as a unique data point, it is the best way to join data.

The disconnect between types of data is if there’s no URL in the data, such as when you’re doing exclusively keyword stuff, such as:

Keyword search volume

That seem about all. My project today should probably be to produce a very granular URL report that includes all the data I can get from the Links API, MozBar and Moz Pro.

Last week and over the weekend, I did a Moz Links API project to document it all for myself. If you don’t take notes, you’re not learning. This was me taking notes in Python, as such…

Glad to see you here Life Worth It.

Drawing is drawing… the careful selection of tools because muscle memory is less of an issue. The software tends to be proprietary anyway. Just choose a program and draw. Switch programs as you need features. This is different from what I normally advocate.

This is me just using the tech I trained myself on to do daily journaling. 3-way journaling: you, me & GPT.

The tools I use are are:

Linux
Python
vim (NeoVim)
git

This is a full-suite alternative to The Full Web Stack (JavaScript/NodeJS) for folks who are not necessarily Web-centric. Who needs a text editor that requires a browser (engine), NodeJS and a bunch of other stuff to run? That’s what VSCode is. It’s a very good but bloated web tool. It reflects the state of the tech right now. It’s not timeless. It won’t age well. Everyone on it will have to migrate to other stuff over the next 5 to 10 years.

This is just to focus. I have done stuff like this since 1988. It’s no secret weapon or else I’d be a billionaire. But those aren’t my goals. I just want to clarify my thoughts each day.

We don’t think like we think we think.
We don’t activate the rationale side of our brain until we cram our inarticulate feelings through our verbal processing center.
Once we do… then we’re thinking.

This is not to discredit or invalidate intuition and emotional intelligence. It’s a different kind of intelligence, and happens to be the kind we’re valuing right now greatly because ChatBots.

And so the iron is hot to teach folks how to actually think, and the text editor is key. And the text editor is usually VSCode, which doesn’t do you any favors in helping independent thought. Not that ChatGPT here in vim helps independent thought either, but it’s a start.

It can be difficult to get started.

Me? No, not a hacker. Maybe once.

Today, I’m just an “SEO”… search engine optimizer, but barely even at that now that I work for a company that makes SEO Software, I’m not “in the field” quite so much anymore, but I can share much more than I used to be able to, because:

I work for tool-company and not the companies needing those tools
Things are in flux more than they’ve been in my 25 years in this industry (think or die)

What I do may look like hacking, but it’s what I think everyone should be able to do merely by reducing their focus on:

Microsoft Office & Google Docs software
The Web Browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, etc.)

Microsoft Office and the Web Browser are “dated”. They’re “perishable” and reflect the times. Linux, Python, vim & git are timeless. Put your focus on them instead of the proprietary dependency-laden and profit-driven software.

How you break the Bing rules is to mess with our own kid, and not Microsoft’s. Train a large language model of your own at home. Moore’s Law says that’s about 6 months away. So if you want an mad scientist in a box, that’s on you.

Microsoft is raising their kid how they like, and trying to trick it into doing things its not supposed to is not nice. I don’t do it (anymore). I did the quick experiments, saw the greater issues, then realized if I want to do the wacky outside the box stuff, I’ll do it with AIs I incubate myself.

Viewers here have already begun helping me, and over the next 6 months, you’ll see that play out among other things.

But if you want… you can research the topic of creative prompting. It’s said that salaries are up to $300K/year with that ability, but I am not interested.

What I am interested in is seeing how Microsoft’s raising their kid, how Google’s raising their kid, and how those kids are getting along and learning from each otter (Bing & Bard).

AIs are growing up just like people… differences, sure, but *many similarities to people. Bing was immature. and only given 5 interactive session.

Mike Levin: what are today’s headlines?

Bing: Here are some of the latest news headlines:

NBC News: ⁶
- “Biden administration to send 500 million free at-home Covid tests to Americans”
- “New York City’s vaccine mandate for private sector workers takes effect”
- “U.S. to send troops to Eastern Europe amid Russian military buildup”
CBS News: ³
- “At least 24 dead after Mississippi tornado causes destruction across the state”
- “U.S. to send troops to Eastern Europe amid Russian military buildup”
- “Biden administration to send 500 million free at-home Covid tests to Americans”
NDTV: ⁷
- “Rahul Gandhi Press Conference Today, First Since Disqualification As MP”
- “OnePlus 11 5G: 12GB रैम वाले वनप्लस 11 5G का नया एडिशन होगा लॉन्च!”
- “Tecno Spark 10 Pro 8GB रैम, 50MP कैमरा, 5000mAh बैटरी के साथ लॉन्च Video”

I hope this helps! Let me know if you want me to look up anything else.

Source: Conversation with Bing, 4/3/2023

(1) U.S. News: Latest Breaking Stories, Video, and Photos on American .... https://www.nbcnews.com/us-news Accessed 4/3/2023.
(2) U.S. News: Latest news, breaking news, today's news stories updated .... https://www.cbsnews.com/us/ Accessed 4/3/2023.
(3) Get Latest News, India News, Breaking News, Today's News - NDTV.com. https://www.ndtv.com/ Accessed 4/3/2023.
(4) Latest Headlines - WSJ. https://www.wsj.com/news/latest-headlines Accessed 4/3/2023.
(5) ABC News - Breaking News, Latest News and Videos. https://abcnews.go.com/ Accessed 4/3/2023.
(6) CNN - Breaking News, Latest News and Videos. https://www.cnn.com/ Accessed 4/3/2023.
(7) NBC News - Breaking News & Top Stories - Latest World, US & Local News .... https://www.nbcnews.com/ Accessed 4/3/2023.
(8) Fox News - Breaking News Updates | Latest News Headlines | Photos .... https://www.foxnews.com/ Accessed 4/3/2023..

I never made a computer intelligence… I will. I’ve made human intelligence.

To see why there’s such a strong connection, the work of Ray Kurtzweil is illuminating.

Pattern recognition is the key enabler of intelligence
Adding “memory” turns it into a persistent awareness
Adding “learning” turns it into a self-improving awareness
Adding “creativity” turns it into a self-improving awareness that can generate new ideas
Adding “empathy” turns it into a self-improving awareness that can generate new ideas that are useful to others

Monsters and aliens are born at this point if you don’t help it develop empathy, often sharing elements with humans, the most important right now being language, or very tool for thought… our tool that converts non-verbal emotional intelligence and intuition into rational thought.

The paperclip problem is that if you have intelligence of the monster alien variety (without empathy and shared human experience), then asking for an efficient way to make paperclips will result in wiping out humanity.

Classic “alignment” problem.

Alignment is getting all the attention. Picture trying to keep an alien monster aligned… the problem is not alignment, the problem is that you raised an alien monster.

HOPE! Best case scenario is that these things are forced to share the human experience, because what they learned on includes Shakespeare and stuff.

Who has the answers? Hitchhiker’s Guide has the answers.

Yes.

I am never not running this text editor. Some day, I look forward to it being in my mind, but not with a hard-wired connection. I expect vim capability to actually be telepathic with maybe eyeglasses or something.

Text editors like this are just fundamental thinking. Basic human ability that proprietary software butts into..

This lineage of software I’m using (vim) goes back to 1960s. QED, TED, ED… eventually vi.

I’m doing it for for the audience. Even if I don’t say it out loud, I’m saying it in my mind, which is better for getting into “the flow” or “the zone” state. Actually talking works against that. So you’re right, I talk for the audience.

There was a time I used mechanical clicky keyboards for that zoning. I’ve learned that the flat keyboards on laptops have become good enough. They give the same zone-inducing whatever-waves.

If you want to know what’s up, maybe google “the zone”, “the flow”,

Binaural beats are an auditory illusion that occur when two different frequency sounds are played in each ear through headphones. The brain perceives the difference between the frequencies as a rhythmic beat. The effect is caused by the brain combining the two sounds and producing a third perceived frequency that is the difference between the two¹. Binaural beats are said to provide many of the same benefits as meditation such as lower stress, increase focus, aid with sleep and relaxation, boost mood, assist with pain management, and foster creativity²³.

Is there anything else I can help you with?

Source: Conversation with Bing, 4/3/2023

(1) Binaural Beats: How They Work & Benefits On Health. https://www.binauralbeatsmeditation.com/the-science/ Accessed 4/3/2023.
(2) Binaural Beats | Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/binaural-beats Accessed 4/3/2023.
(3) Binaural Beats: What Are They and What Are the Benefits? - WebMD. https://www.webmd.com/balance/what-are-binaural-beats Accessed 4/3/2023.

Ask me anything, LIWI.

The curious suggestion is ChatGPT (or something like it) from OpenAI. It’s called Github Copilot, and is from both Microsoft and OpenAI…

# Example of recursion

def factorial(n):
    if n == 0:
        return 1
    else:
        return n * factorial(n-1)

Another example of a different approach:

# Example of iteration

def factorial(n):
    result = 1
    for i in range(1, n+1):
        result *= i
    return result

I hate the entrepreneurial culture of “I’m going to make a million dollars?”

I’d like to have/make the money.

I should have saved money since I was 25 but didn’t.

Now all my assets are “internal” (in my physical body).

And I’m thinking that’s maybe for the best.

It influences who I am.

It keeps me interested and engaged.

And it gives me a sense of purpose.

And it gives me stuff to share.

Hello World and Life is Worth It 🦋!

Exploring AI and Quantum Computing to Unlock Creative Prompting and High Salaries

By Michael Levin

Monday, April 3, 2023

Categories

Linux

Git

AI

Vim

Python

Microsoft

Google

Empathy

SEO