Chronicle sets up base of operations in Thailand. Begins second phase of work on Radiant Assistant.
The view from Park 19 Residence. Our hotel for the time we’d search for a base of operations | Sky Towers, Jungle, Poverty
The Radiant team landed in Thailand on the 14th of August. Through a Thai contact made prior we arranged to meet with a real-estate agent. She was Kind and helpful, a sign of the so far consistent quality of character observed in the way Thai people treat others. I’d chosen a location for our hotel based on proximity to a transit line, which I assumed would make the house hunt easier. My first culture shock was when I discovered that particular transit line could only be accessed from specific entry points. Entry points a significant distance from where we were staying. The alternative, BTS skytrain line, was about a 25 minute (30 minute depending on who you speak to) walk in the other direction. Ekkamai, as it’s called, became our home station for the time spent searching for accomodation. And search we did, along with other life essential activities like getting bank accounts setup.
The walk to Ekkamai station. Always dotted in the Sukhumvit area with massive condo buildings.
To not erode the pace of the post I’ll only briefly pause to mention the noteworthy Thai banking experience. With a masterfully simple implementation of qr code banking made available to the population, it’s safe to say in my experience of both Japan and Canada, both are losing ground to a progress hungry nation which has managed to leap-frog their complacent banking systems. If Thailand can do this…
Getting a chance to walk around near our first hotel the colors of bangkok were like none in a city I’d seen before.
Returning to the hunt for our home, a few sleepless nights yielded an excellent selection of apartments. Searching through the several real-estate sites on-line gave me an insight and means to assist our agent who was making the calls and booking us the viewings. We narrowed down where to live based on proximity to at major BTS station, quality of building and its surrounding neighborhood. We spent a little extra time searching for just the right one, but are confident for having done so that we made the right choice. Where often the buildings we visited had good value in the rooms we saw, many were noticeably aged. The one we found was built in 2018. Where buildings advertising pools and gyms sparked excitement at first, many once viewed, failed to live up to their hype. That is again, until we found our building. It’s gym was actually good. It’s pool is surrounded by a well maintained garden and the infinity design allows for views of bangkok sunset. You’re free to swim in the evening and watch as the city comes on with lights. It’s one of my favourite first memories since arriving here. Of course the true center of focus has to be the affordability. Living in a 40 sq meter condo built in 2018 with the aforementioned amenities most places in the world these days will cost you around $3000, probably more actually. Vancouver, where I spent my mid-twenties, has become a world-wide meme for hopeless cost of living. The world is united in its scarcity of housing these days and to find a place where your dollar goes a little further, is a safe harbor indeed.
Through the mud up to heaven the lotus finds a way.
With our housing taken care of, finding a rhythm and refocusing on Radiant Assistant became the priority. Working in a new setting, just having moved, all the new sights and sounds, smells and flavors, added up to a blur of a first work week. Speaking together and dedicated brainstorming yielded the usual actionable results. We agreed on where we should focus.
Ambitiously we chose to see if we could get generative art working in our campaigns. A task no one on the team had any experience with and likely would involve some need for aws cloud hosting for storage of assets we generated. You know, something easy.
A huge shout out goes to our CTO, Connor, for going in blind, working hard for the last two weeks and giving us real results to now share with the community. Where before when you generated a campaign, depending on the biome you chose, a pre-made image would be assigned to that campaign when it was made. Now, given the hard work of the Radiant Assistant team you can expect each campaign created to have its own unique image. Each tailored to the specifications you created it with: biome, weather, and mood.
Never see the same campaign twice. Each image is custom generated according to your choices.
While you may occasionally create a campaign from similiar choices, you’ll never be faced with the same experience. If you choose forest for your biome, stormy for your weather, and epic for your mood, each time will yield a satisfyingly different result. It was a lot of fun playing around in our testing to see what kind of imagery the different choices prompted. Subtle changes in tone for the campaign or more obvious like weather were plainly felt in each generated piece of art.
Our campaigns, however, were not the only part of Radiant Assistant that saw a major improvement over the past two weeks. Until recently Radiant Assistant used the open ai gpt 3.5 turbo LLM AI to power its narrative capablilites. We are excited to announce we have now upgraded to gpt model 4.0, a 10X increase in intelligence. Said more plainly, when Radiant assists you in telling a story, it’s become far better at it. Where the previous model could impressively create narrative for combat scenarios, it did struggle with nuance and connecting larger more complex ideas. The vast improvements in the gpt 4.0 model allow it a far greater command over any kind of narrative task it is given. For example if you were to request a full story from the gpt 4.0 model it would do so with minimal effort, where the gpt 3.5 turbo, would have struggled to maintain coherency.
Franz has 100 million downloads attributed to the projects he’s designed on.
Where we’ve made strides in our technical developement the community surrounding Radiant Assistant continues to grow, connect, and offer invaluable assistance. The addition of which creates the potential to exceed what are limited team size is capable of. Franz responded to our post asking people to contact us if they had an interest offering feedback on Radiant Assistant’s development. His insights into design have already caused a directional shift in how RA will look and feel going forward. Franz will also feature as a guest on my podcast ‘The Interstice Podcast’. You can hear more about his career path there if you’re interested in design.
The vibrance of the nieghborhoods is striking.
User feedback is Crucial as well and we’ve had some excellent data from that. Not a single system in the website hasn’t been updated due to user feedback and our approach going forward will remain the same. We plan though, to improve how we are collecting that feedback. Our current system invites you to write back at length to us in the form of a ‘homework-assignment-like-email’. We’ve made plans to re-work this point of connection with the new users in the community and we will make a google form to accomplish that same effort. But now you can focus on what you want to say, rather than spending 30 minutes typing an email, when you have other things to do.
Slaving over the hot desktop in downtown Bangkok
This last month was a blender of change. You feel a bit dislocated after uprooting and going somewhere new. That said, with the dislocation comes a sense of satisfaction as well. Nothing to make you feel like anything is possible than setting up life somewhere new. I am glad to have this opportunity and to be able to share that with the team here. Everyone has worked hard. I look forward to sharing more of the team’s highlights and achievements as Radiant Assistant cracks on with its development. Thank you for reading and never hesitate to reach out. Collaboration is the lifeblood of Chronicle and we look forward to the next great connection.
