As a follow-up to yesterday’s post, I also used Gemini to revisit my “Ode to a Tie” cartoon. Unlike yesterday’s cartoon, I didn’t have to wrestle with Gemini very much to get it right.
Ode to a Tie Revisited
Dexter Meets AI
As a college student in the early 1990s, I created a daily comic strip named “Dexter” for the student newspaper.
Over the weekend I dusted off some of those old strips and asked AI to make photo-realistic versions of them. The first one was among my favorites – a large cartoon called “The Salesman” which was a spin on Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven.”
I initially used Claude to generate the revised cartoon because it’s the agent that in my experience makes the fewest mistakes, but it turned out not be the right choice for image manipulation. I switched to Gemini and it did a great job with the images but I had to spend a couple of hours convincing it to do what I asked. It kept resizing panels, changing the wording, and hallucinating extra images. My overall impression of Gemini is that it’s like giving instructions to a drunk genius.
Here’s the original cartoon:
And here’s the photo-realistic AI version:
Aside: Gemini initially chose a dog breed closer to my original Dexter, but my wife suggested I change him into a Boxer because we have a two-year old Boxer named Suki, and it just works.
Tic Tac Troll
As a teenager, I wrote games for my TRS-80 Color Computer using a mix of Basic and assembler, but the only game I’ve written as an adult was the Easter Egg in FeedDemon.
This weekend I changed that by experimenting with using AI to write a tic-tac-toe spinoff named “Tic Tac Troll.” I used Claude Design for the UI, Claude Code (Opus 5.5) for the coding, Adobe Firefly for the troll images, and Google Gemini for the background music.
The idea for the game, the style of images, the layout, the “bleh” and “meh” the trolls utter, and pretty much everything else was my idea – I just directed AI to bring my idea to life.
Then I asked Claude for suggestions to improve the game, and it came up with a “bored trolls” mode, where once you add a fourth troll the oldest one gets bored and leaves.
I thought that was a brilliant idea. I use AI every day for my job so I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. I’m used to AI being clever, but that idea was more creative than I expected.
PS: Sorry, the app isn’t in the Google Play Store yet.
Jazz Fest
Years ago Melissa introduced me to New Orleans Jazz Fest, a two-weekend long festival of music, food, and culture. Given the festival’s title you’d think it was all about jazz, but it offers a wide variety of music. Here’s a short list of some of the acts we’ve seen there:
- The Rolling Stones
- The Who
- Stevie Wonder
- Foo Fighters
- Lionel Richie
- Red Hot Chili Peppers
- Buddy Guy
- Trombone Shorty
- Joan Jett
- Pearl Jam
- The Black Crowes
- Heart
- The Eagles
- David Byrne
- Aerosmith
And the list goes on and on. Along with these big names are countless other acts, some local and others from around the world. We discover so much incredible new music every time we’re there.
One of the many things we love about the festival is it ends at 7pm every day, giving us time to explore before making our way home. There’s always music going on in New Orleans, so after the fest we’ll sometimes catch another show.
We look forward to Jazz Fest every year like kids waiting for Christmas.
AI and the Old Guy
I turned 59 this year, which in my mind is almost old (but younger minds might disagree). I’ve been fortunate to witness many big shifts in CompSci, including the rise of PCs, the advent of the web, the switch to object oriented programming, and the mobile explosion.
But all of these pale against what I’ve witnessed with AI this year.
I had a three-month sabbatical from September to December. Prior to my sabbatical, I could use AI for basic programming tasks, but it wasn’t capable of heavy lifting without a lot of assistance. When I returned to work in December, everything had changed.
In those three months, AI became capable of carrying out large requests, reviewing PRs, and planning complex tasks. My job changed from writing code to reviewing code created by AI. I switched from using an IDE to using Conductor to manage multiple AI tasks in parallel.
I’ve read some concerns from fellow aging developers that AI will replace us, but at least for now it seems more likely that AI will replace the need for junior developers. We need experienced developers to review AI generated code (again, at least for now). There have been numerous times I’ve had to correct AI code that contained serious flaws.
But increasingly these flaws aren’t directly found by me, but instead found by AI after I raise questions. I ask AI if its approach is valid, and it comes back and basically says, “Oh, good question, you’re right that there are unwanted side effects that need to be addressed.” And then it fixes them.
At some point I won’t need to raise these concerns – AI will do it by itself – but I’m crossing my fingers that my experience will be needed for several years before I retire.
Surprising Me Mum
Every five years at Automattic we get to take a three-month sabbatical. I think it’s one of the greatest perks of working here.
Unfortunately, my first sabbatical happened during the pandemic, so I didn’t get to travel. My second sabbatical, however, was a different story. My wife and I used all our frequent flier miles to take several trips.
Our first trip was going to be to Spain, but my wife said she’d like to see England, and my mum would be there visiting relatives so we could surprise her. I thought that was a great idea.
And surprise her we definitely did.
I need to backtrack for a minute here. Growing up my English father would greet people with “What ho!” instead of “Hello!” – and that became the way we all greeted each other.
So back to the surprise.
I reached out to my cousin and told her we’d like to surprise my mum while she was staying with her. We booked a wonderful hotel near my cousin, and plotted to show up when my mum was doing her morning walk in the British countryside.
My cousin texted me when the walk was underway, and my wife and I showed up at the end of the walk.
My mum saw us from a distance and thought we looked familiar, but never considered that it was actually us until she got close enough to recognize us.
She couldn’t believe her eyes – she stopped dead in her tracks with her mouth hanging open. And just to make sure she knew it was us, I said a very loud “What ho!”
She turned to my cousin and said a stunned, “It’s Nick and Melissa!” To which my cousin replied, “Yes, we know, everyone knows but you.”
My mum then looked at us and said, “You toads!”
After the shock wore off (which I’m not sure it ever did), we spent the rest of the day with them and had great food and conversation.
Smoke on the Water
Over 20 years ago I took my 5yr-old son to his first concert. The band was Rush and we both loved the show.
Rush stopped touring 13 years ago, but they surprised everyone by announcing a string of shows this year. My wife and I were lucky enough to get tickets to see them in Chicago recently, and once again they were incredible.
What was also incredible was the scene outside. Smoke from the Canadian wildfires had blanketed the city, making it dangerous to be outside unmasked. Once I understood the situation I immediately bought us N95 masks, and wearing them gave us unwanted flashbacks to the pandemic.
The local news caught this lovely photo of us.
Thankfully by the weekend the situation had improved and we were able to do the Architecture boat tour, which I highly recommend.
My Support Blog
Many years ago I blogged about how developers should do tech support, so after joining Automattic as an Android developer I was pleased that an annual support rotation is a requirement.
Previously a support rotation meant dealing directly with customers, which is incredibly important, but this year we also have the option of spending a week using our software as a customer, and I decided to choose that option.
So, every day this week I’ll post something here using only our mobile app. I’ve used our mobile app for blogging for as long as I’ve worked on it, but I haven’t used it for this blog, which has been quiet for several years.
My hope is to gain insights to issues customers are experiencing, and maybe it’ll convince me to blog here more often.
Yoga
Back in 2005, I had surgery to remove a tumor that had wrapped itself around my left hearing and balance nerves. Removing the tumor required removing those nerves, so when I awoke from surgery I was (and still am) completely deaf in my left ear.
I was also extremely off kilter due to the missing balance nerve, but I was determined to regain my balance and enlisted the help of a private yoga instructor (I couldn’t return to a yoga studio because I would’ve been falling all over the place). These balance-oriented sessions helped immensely.
I’ve been practicing – and loving – yoga ever since.
For the longest time I focused on holding poses, but eventually it dawned on me that the poses themselves are less important than how you get there. This revelation turned yoga into a slow motion dance for me.
For several years I went to the studio by myself, but then I met Melissa and now we go together. Doing yoga side-by-side with your partner is a wonderful thing.
And then the pandemic hit and we could no longer enjoy being around a room full of yogis moving and flowing with us.
Thankfully, one of our favorite instructors set herself up on Vimeo and offered on-demand classes, which we do a couple times a week from our basement. We also do live-streaming classes via Zoom, which was a little strange at first but now we love it. We don’t have to drive anywhere, we still get to see people we know, and best of all we can play our own music. It’s quite a treat doing hot yoga to a Metallica playlist :)
We’ve also been doing virtual classes at studios around the country like this one, and it’s been oddly fun seeing a screen full of people we don’t know practicing with us. We’re being extremely cautious about venturing out right now so apart from grocery stores and occasional outdoor events, these virtual classes are practically the only time we feel like we’re around other people.
When we can eventually attend an in-person class, it’s going to pretty hard to adapt to it. Since we mute our audio, we’re constantly talking in these virtual classes, often trying to crack each other up during balance poses to see who falls over first. I’m pretty sure we couldn’t do that in an actual studio.
It’ll be quite a while before we’re comfortable going to a studio, so for now we’re extremely thankful we can still do yoga in other ways despite this raging pandemic. Having a regular practice has really helped us stay somewhat sane during these insane times.
And now for something completely different…
I was born in England but moved to the US when I was very young. My parents held onto their British culture in many ways, one of which was continuing to watch British comedy.
When I was in elementary school, I remember walking in on my dad watching “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.” I watched it with him and thought it was the funniest thing I’d ever seen.
The sketch I walked in on was the Upper Class Twit of the Year, which I found even funnier because one of the “twits” had the same name as one of my brothers.
My brothers and I continued to enjoy Python for decades and followed the cast’s post-Python work as well, especially John Cleese’s (in fact, my wife and I re-watched “A Fish Called Wanda” just last night).
So I was thrilled to discover John Cleese on Cameo, offering to create personalized videos for a fee. My oldest brother had a birthday coming up, so I couldn’t resist paying John Cleese to insult him as a birthday gift.
He did not disappoint.