I’ve been playing with dalle-mini the last few weeks. Part of what makes it fun to play with are the bizarre and obtuse outputs. They reached that sweet spot between laughably bad and frighteningly perfect: they’re good enough to be understood and enjoyed, basically.

I think that incompleteness is part of what makes it so amusing to toy with these things, and conversely what will make future versions much less fun.

So dreary I didn't need to compact this image.

After about two years living in metro Vancouver, I decided to leave. I’m in a smaller city in the Fraser Valley, and it has been great!

My first time in Vancouver was for an interview at Amazon in 2019. I stayed at a hotel near the downtown office for a couple of nights, which was less time than I spent in the 6 different airplanes and a similar number of airports to get there from Brazil. Then the pandemic happened. After almost two years waiting for the visa, I finally moved to Vancouver in late 2021.

This could have been a subway.

Since moving to metro Vancouver I’m continuously surprised with how common electric vehicles have become. Some may see the rise of EVs as an exciting turn towards a futuristic solarpunk utopia. I see the opposite: they are a dystopia of sorts. They are a dead end, a waste of resources in the wrong direction, a false hope.

The proliferation of personal electric vehicles is a strong marker of failure. It is a manifestation in the physical world of our inability as a society to move on from a clearly failed, car-centric way of living. Teslas kind of epitomize this – despite being just another very expensive car, despite catching fire every now and then, despite bizarre QC issues, despite its nitwit CEO, still they are seen as cool and fashionable and trendy.

Immigration sucks. In addition to the personal toll it takes on anyone, it is also mind-numbingly tedious and baroquely complex. Why aren’t things better by now?

This reminded me of the so-called “digital nomad visas”. Searching for that term will get you a thousand clickbaitey Wordpress sites with the “20 best countries with nomad visas” or whatever. But how real are they really?