This video is made from images created with Midjourney, animated by Kaiber.AI with an autobiographical poem written by GPT-4 and narrated by a voice made with Eleven Labs AI. The poem is conspicuously apt, meaningful and seems self-aware. (It's not, but humans won't be able to override their intuition that such AI is sentient and conscious.)
Holy week? More like holy shit!
The wait inside the airport gates looked like a couple hours. Fortunately we know of this spot some locals use that’s unauthorized but much quicker.
Another treat from Reina’s kitchen: ayote en miel. It’s squash slow cooked with water, panela, cinnamon and cloves.
Amazon just opened up a free, nationwide, low-power, wide-area network called Sidewalk. It's optimized for IoT devices. It’s great at securely and privately sending small quantities of data impressively long distances. It reaches 90% of the US population.
Some devices can connect as far away as several miles.
Here's a piece I wrote for Computerworld tell you everything you need to know about Amazon Sidewalk.
He said these are Brazilian coconut trees.
A mountain near El Salvador's capital, called Los Planes de Renderos is famous for eco parks, cool temperatures and, above all, top-shelf pupusa joints. Lining the roadways one can find dozens or possibly hundreds of pupusa restaurants, dives, street vendors and others. I call it "Pupusa Mountain."
Our current favorite is called Pupusaria Elisa. It directly faces another place called Pupusaria Isabel. (A few other restaurants sit in the same facility.) As you can see, Elisa is packed and Isabel is empty. We always find it like this. Last night, all tables were taken at Elisa, and all tables were available at Isabel. Quality counts, I guess.
Marinated in pineapple juice for a couple days.
We're spending a few days on the beach with friends and family. Not a vacation for me -- just another Thursday.
Ever heard of an icaco, or (in English), coco plum or paradise plum? It's a tropical fruit that grows on trees as close as 30 feet from the ocean. The closer to the water, the sweeter the fruit.
The tree is native to the tropical parts of the Americas, especially the Caribbean.
People eat them raw, cooked or made into jam.
The seed of the icaco is 21% oil, and some people burn them for light.
You can buy great pupusas in El Salvador -- great curtido (cabbage-based vinegar-flavored stuff) and sauce are harder to come by. But home-made is the best.
My wife's cousin, Reina, made riguas for breakfast, which I had never tried before. (The rigua in this picture is the long, oval item, part of this complete breakfast that also includes a tamal, cheese and red silk beans.) They're delicious!
Riguas are one of the many foods unique to El Salvador that were retained in the diet from indigenous cooking.
They're made with rough-ground fresh corn cooked in banana leaves.
You can have this pre-Spanish item with nothing on top, or topped with foods brought by the Spanish: sugar, butter, sour cream or curds.
I found my beach.
I'm enjoying a nice bowl of Atol Shuco (also spelled "Atol Chuco," and "Atol Shuko") at my beach hotel in the Southeastern-most corner of El Salvador. Shuco is one of the indigenous staples that Salvadorans never stopped eating. It's a massively nutritious dish for two reasons: 1) it's made with "black corn" that's made black by large quantities of polyphenols, so it's highly antioxidant-packed; and 2) it's fermented, so it's loaded with probiotics for healthy gut flora.
For my breakfast, it's got ground roasted aihuashte (also called "aiguashte" or "pepitoria") on top, made from the ground seed (pepitas) of a Salvadoran pumpkin-like squash, which is common when taken for breakfast. Shuco is also eaten with beans and white "pan francés" (basically a white-bread roll) if you have it at night.
People here make it at home. Rural Salvadorans eat it on their way to or from work, purchased from a street vendor.
Before OpenAI, the company behind both ChatGPT and DALL-E, the sustained panic centered around deepfake videos, produced by generative adversarial networks (GANs). Everybody feared that deepfake videos would become the ultimate tool for spreading disinformation. Deepfakes, we were told, could produce “evidence” that political leaders, for example, said or did things they never said or did.
Deepfake fears haven’t been realized yet. The tech isn’t convincing enough. (And, once they are convincing, I fear the bigger threat will be that people caught on video will plausibly deny the truth by falsely claiming the real video is a deepfake.)
But this week a new panic set in. Rumors circulated about the imminent indictment and arrest of former president Donald Trump (rumors started by Trump himself in a Truth Social post that falsely claimed he’d be arrested Tuesday).
Read the rest on my Substack.
The Salvadoran government has not only installed them all over El Salvador, but 50 such machines in the US where 20% of the Salvadoran people live.
Despite the high number of job openings, the number of qualified applicants has dropped significantly, leaving many employers feeling frustrated and overwhelmed.
Meanwhile, job seekers are finding it difficult to land a job, even with all the opportunities out there. They are applying for various job openings but getting ghosted by potential employers.
It's called the “Great Mismatch.” Here's what's causing it.
You get to taste amazing wines nobody has tried yet, and even wines that are only halfway between grape juice and incredible wine. (This is an incredible winery in Veneto, Italy, during The Venice Prosecco Experience.)
Watching the sun rise over the Sahara desert give you an indescribable feeling. No need for shoes. It’s all just pure burnt-orange sand in the Moroccan Sahara. You really should add this to your bucket list.
The restaurant is newish and has no signage. It’s not on Google Maps. You just have to know about it, I guess.
Reverse prompt engineering is the process of querying text-producing generative AI tools like ChatGPT to find out which text prompts led to a specific output result.
It's so good, it's almost a dessert. Amazing bread, the cooks hand-whip the milk and egg batter custom with each order, tons of cinnamon, organic berries on top and whipped cream. This french toast is not to be trifled with.
