Musing - Obey the cats ??
A big welcome to all the new subscribers to Tech YOU Out! And a big thank you to every for all the chartered marketer love. Impression wise, it was close to 3x the next best performing post in the last year. But way off my poll on pizza oven buying regret a couple of years ago and my post about Jack Dorsey stepping down from Twitter which was featured in LinkedIn news.
Speaking of LinkedIn news.
A University is now offering a course in Influencing. Which is actually click bait (naughty LinkedIn) as the degree title is actually bachelor of arts in content creation and social media.
Not so rubbish now huh when you see the official title, as it doesn't sound so "crazy". I'm torn though, on one side, I see the value as influencers need a multitude of skills to get to the point they can afford to hire help.
At the same time, the world will have moved on a lot in 3 years and what do the lecturers know about being an influencer anyway? Unless they have been one themselves, in which case cool. That said, how different is it from acting or any other art form these days? In a way, I'm surprised in has taken so long for a course like this to come along, at the same time, I'm not surprised at all.
P.s. Anyone hoping this will be like Gen V (The Boys) is likely to be very disappointed. Great show though.
Moving on to some tech news:
Firstly, a quick mention of the Muse set at the O2 (Featured pic). The technology involved and the set design was truly amazing!
Chromebooks now come in plus. Whether you need a better powered Chromebook is up for debate. I bought one off eBay just before the first lockdown so I could avoid lugging my tank of a work laptop about when I was being an oldskool "influencer" (AKA blogger).
It still works like a dream and is built like a tank, but isn't one. It has survived 3 years of my children after all. Anyway, the Plus moniker means better processor, ram and screen. Ultra would be overkill and more than the ￡399 starting price. So, if you use your laptop for 90%+ chrome and happy to fill in the app gaps with Android Apps, you could save yourself some serious $$$ and still have a premium experience.
On the fence? There's also a great article by the Register on Why Chromebooks are the new immortals of tech.
On to a bit of AI, but the fun kind.
These images of people and cats say words. You can't unsee it once you do.
There's a full article by Wired that explains how it was done. It's basically a hack of making super cool looking QR codes (yes it is possible). I spent an hour one evening and quickly gave up, but if you're into your MidJourney, you could have a lot of fun. Tag me if you do, just keep it clean.
Old news by this newsletters standards but Chat GPT has added more strings to its AI bow. These "brainstorming idea" features are due to be released in October for paying customers in October. Nothing for me yet, but at least they have made a cute Hedgehog/Sunflower video so not to terrify people.
Also, ChatGPT and Bard (Google) have now allowed websites to stop them scraping them in the future. No word from Bing (That I have seen). I tried to use Chat GPT to rewrite the classic song YMCA for... reasons. ChatGPT 4 said no to my copyright infringing ways. ChatGPT 3.5 simply did the best it could do. (It was bad)
Microsoft is not stopping its AI feature pebble dash either. Next is Copilot, the quirky AI assistant for your Windows 11 machine. Expect somethings to work and others to not. You'll probably need to update your computer to the latest version of Windows. So go and close those 77 Chrome tabs and treat yourself, plus there's a handy guide from the Verge, so I don't have to write one.
But I do have to write a best man speech for Saturday, so I'm going to leave it there this week.
Enjoy the rest of your week and take care
Adam