Wally’s Wild Ride

The state of AI music in 2025 is getting pretty good. Here is a song written by a prompt in ChapGPT then converted the lyrics and music with udio.

The story that inspired the song was from a time that my grandpa took my young uncle Wally to the stockyards on a thoroughbred horse that was broken but still wild. My grandpa sent him home on the horse and at 10 years old, he was too little to control her. After she spooked and started to run for home, Wally worried that if the barn doors were opened the horse would run into the barn and he would get scraped off. Here’s the song:

Update (April 9, 2025): Even though it should not have come as a surprise, given how he had been deteriorating lately, I was still caught off-guard when my cousin Lydia contacted me last night to let me know that Wally died yesterday while she was there at the old folks home visiting.

When I played this song for Wally last week he confirmed, “If the door would have been open, Molly would have killed me.”

He was 92 years old. He will be greatly missed.

Whale Swallows Kayaker and Spits Him Out

The moment this father watched as a humpback whale swallowed his son whole must have been terrifying. Luckily whales don’t like the taste of kayakers and spit him out just a few seconds later.

From The Guardian:

Last Saturday, Adrián Simancas was kayaking with his father, Dell, in Bahía El Águila near the San Isidro lighthouse in the Strait of Magellan when a humpback whale surfaced, engulfing Adrián and his yellow kayak for a few seconds before letting him go.

Dell, just metres away, captured the moment on video.

“Stay calm, stay calm,” he can be heard saying after his son was released from the whale’s mouth.

“I thought I was dead,” Adrián told the Associated Press. “I thought it had eaten me, that it had swallowed me.”

Previously.

(Via Neatorama)

Image Playground

I’ve tested out the new Image Playground app for MacOS and the results are pleasing. I created a whole collection of my family (my wife and my siblings and their respective spouses). This is what we would all look like if we were in a Pixar feature:

There is still a little wonkiness in some of the eyes but overall I think the state of the technology is progressing nicely. The other change from other image generators I’ve used is just how fast Image Playground is able to generate the images. These took just a few seconds each.