LavaCon 2026 and the future.

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LavaCon is a conference now going on 25 years. Its always fun at conferences where folks collaborate on what the future holds. This year I drove to Charlotte NC from Duluth GA to attend. I used the Tesla in Full Self Drive. I went park-to-park without touching the wheel for over 200 miles. It's crazy. I don't think most people understand how well it works. Lots of nay-sayers still, but it really does work. Be on guard, but enjoy. I spent some of my time "driving" while conversing with Grok as part of my daydreaming. I was discussing with Grok an idea I have of building a West system (cold molded) old style barrel-back runabout maybe 20 feet long- all varnished Mahogony. Of course this boat would have an exotic 12-cylinder engine under a transparent engine hatch between the twin cockpits. We discussed the designs, available actual study plans and pre-lofted design documents for the hull. We also discussed the best engine (perhaps a BMW N73) coupled with a Velvet Dri...
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Travel Planning with Chat GPT 3.5 Artificial Intelligence

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I am planning a trip to Southern Africa. I am planning on Zimbabwe, Eswatini (Swaziland), Botswanna, South Africa, Lesotho, Namibia, Mozambique and Zambia. I decided to ask Chat GPT 3.5 to help direct me in the sequence of travel. The result seems to have saved a lot of my time. Let's see how that order works out as a finish booking. I am skeptical since travel efficiency on commercial airlines has little to do with a straight line being the shortest (cheapest) distance between two points.

A couple weeks back I did a co-presentation at a conference regarding AI in language translation and have been attending other events to educated myself better on AI. It is a real thing and a game changer. Executives will be able to skip over middle management more relying on the "pseudo-wisdom" of AI prompt chats. It will work. The issue will be finding executives smart enough to leverage it. A couple of things are clear with the current state of AI. It only does what you tell it and you will need to check/verify the results.

Follow up-- I am just learning on how to create good prompts in CPT 3.5, my skepticism was appropriate. There are no connecting flights as it was suggesting for the best sequence. It was a "dumb" analysis of distances between major cities, not anything to do with the reality of actual flights available. The thing that ChatGPT does very well is control elements to improve information literacy. The sentances, layout, and organization of the information presented is excellent. In this regard it will outproduce much of the current technical writing these days. What it won't do is gut-check facts, and answer second level questions that are not asked.

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