¶The Guardians won last night, by the way, sealing yesterday’s perfect status. They finished the game before midnight, thanks to the new pitch clock, so I guess I’m a fan of that now.

¶St. Pete Beach has a distinctive Midwest vibe to it. There’s no shortage of vacationers from Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, etc. Residents often hail from the breadbasket, too. I think this has been true for a long time. I remember my grandmother noting essentially the same thing, forty plus years ago when I first started visiting the area with her and my grandfather. Our vacation stays at the Howard Johnson hotel on Gulf Boulevard are treasured memories for me (the HoJo is now a Hilton Garden Inn).

¶There seems to be more folks from the East coast in the area, lately. Not a bad or a good thing, just a thing. An observation.

¶We’ve met a few vacationers from New Jersey on this trip (retirees) and I’ve noticed several license plate frames touting Rutgers and other East coast schools. Maybe that could be viewed as a Midwest thing, though, with Rutgers now in the Big Ten. Maybe not.

¶Home prices have shot up dramatically over the last few years. I think Covid forced a wave of people out of NYC and other big cities permanently; perhaps vacation attitudes changed, too, as part of that.

¶St. Pete Beach has a character that, I think, is distinctly its own, unique among the Gulf Coast beach towns. It’s down to earth, diverse, and vibrant. It’s not pretentious at all. No one cares what you do (or did) for a living, or even what your last name is. People would rather talk about the early bird special at Leverock’s than hear about how important you are (or were). It’s fun and interesting and active and safe. It’s wonderful, and I love it.

¶Like all cities that are lucky enough to have a defining personality, St. Pete Beach knows itself, too. It has confidence. Not arrogance; not even swagger. Just awareness and comfort in being true to itself. Confidence.

¶An influx of new folks won’t change that.

¶Not overnight, at least.

¶As I just finished writing (and editing) this post, I watched a guy walk across the street as he headed to the beach. He had a pool noodle in one hand and a caged bird in the other, and was wearing an Ohio State t-shirt.

¶Go Bucks.

¶It’s Opening Day! We’ve got a great day of baseball planned, too. Renee, Jake, and I will be at Tropicana Field as the Rays open the 2023 campaign against the Tigers. The Guardians are conveniently in Seattle, which will give us plenty of time to get home from a Rays victory (here’s hoping!) to watch Cleveland in a late game.

¶The Guardians lost their opener in a game that, I guess, qualifies as a pitching duel.

¶Castillo was lights out for the Mariners, and Bieber managed to keep things together and avoid damage as the two starters battled to a 0-0 lock until each left the game. Relievers told a different story, though. Seattle smoothly transitioned to the bullpen, while Cleveland hit a major bump in the eighth when a clearly rattled by the pitch clock Karinchak served up a three run homer, which was the difference.

¶Guardians lose the opener 3-0.

¶I’ve played around with ChatGPT a bit over the last few days. I’m wondering how it might be useful for Daystream. I can’t get past the basic inaccuracies in the system, though.

¶For example, today I asked it to “Describe some events or happenings that occurred on March 29, 1983.” I thought API calls using a prompt like that might be an interesting way to generate user-independent content for historical days. I’m not sure why I picked 1983, but 40 years ago today seemed like a decent test. I was 13.

¶ChatGPT quickly gave me a list of seven events that, according to the AI, “occurred on March 29, 1983.” The first event on the list caught my eye because I have specific memories of it: “The final episode of the television series ‘MAS*H’ aired on CBS, drawing a record-breaking 125 million viewers in the United States.”

¶Unfortunately, ChatGPT got this one wrong. Basic web research using Wikipedia and IMDB reveals that the final episode of MASH, Goodbye, Farewell and Amen, actually aired on February 28, 1983, 40 years and 1 month ago.

¶This is an easy one to get right, too. The last episode of MASH is generally considered to be one of the most-watched scheduled television episodes of all time. It’s the GOAT of episodic television. If AI got details wrong on something that is so easy to verify, what might it get wrong on things that aren’t as easy to check? Or that can’t be checked? What about a historical event or item that has such a low level of general interest that people only touch its details once a generation, once every other generation, or less? Human verification of AI generated historical content isn’t just something that should be done, it’s something that must be done to avoid a quiet rewriting of the details of human history. Anything that isn’t human-verified should be labeled as such, and treated accordingly.

¶ChatGPT, and AI generation of content generally, still intrigues me and I think there might be a place for it in Daystream at some point. But, in light of errors like this that are revealed with basic fact-checking, I currently have no confidence in using it to assert that something actually happened on a particular day in the past, or that a list of various things occurred on a particular day.