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Halal vs AI
This has undoubtedly been said many times (heh) but I don’t recall reading it before. Customized one-hour productions like movies, novels, plays, symphonies and operas are totally unlike all other human activity. All other activity consists of repeated reused segments, interspersed with possibly original commentary or filigrees. The typical job repeats the same transaction or…
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Open source is shit.
Part of the bitcoin gospel, and the Tech Tyrant gospel in general, is the “benefit” of Open Source at every level. Supposedly a codebase maintained by unpaid and overworked hobbyists will automatically be better and more secure than a codebase kept within careful bounds by a business that owns and guards the rights. Via Protos,…
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Today is Shakespeare Day
It’s Willie’s birthday and also ‘Talk like Shakespeare Day.’ The poet at the local Weather Bureau was truly inspired.
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Missed his best argument
Eric Barmack writes a smart and practical overview of the current status of AI as a movie production tool. I especially appreciate the fact that he didn’t just discuss how it could be done, he tried to do it. The result is not better or worse than most short Youtube documentaries, but the cost in…
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More word boundary peeve
Still more random peeving triggered by previous phonetic randoming… Substack’s internal editor for comments is AI-powered, and is eager to form links to commercial sites. I suppose they get some ad revenue from every href. When I’m writing a comment and accidentally miss a space between sentences, Substack’s editor immediately tries to form a link.It…
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ŋ
Random phonetic musing. Among Euro languages, only the Germanic group treats ŋ as a phoneme. In every language ŋ is a natural allophone of n before k or g within one word. It’s unavoidable. English has three ways of pronouncing the written arrangement of n and g. (The previous sentence includes all three.) Examples after…
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Emerson wins
A few days ago a dream contained an encouraging message. Things aren’t as bad as they look on the surface. Give people a chance. Semi Bird has been running for governor of this “state” on a clear and firm anti-muzzle and anti-vax and anti-lockdown agenda. The last time I checked he seemed to be losing…
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Pony in Oz
Jeffrey Funk gathers up a long list of fake AI successes. In each case the machine was only doing part of the work, with humans in India doing the rest. There’s a real Turk inside the Mechanical Turk. There’s a little man named Ramesh behind the curtain in Oz. The same illusion was forced on…
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Universal NIP
Burge continues to delve into the details of NIPs. He shows plenty of survey data to prove that NIPs aren’t just uninterested in religion; we’re uninterested in EVERY SINGLE institution, from politics to corporations to journalism to entertainment. I commented with some sales-training wisdom: It might help if the churches or newspapers would ASK why…
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The fleet rule
Listening every night to those auto dealer training films. They assumed forced obsolescence as a basic fact of the universe, and relied on the manufacturers to keep it moving. The Conservative Prospect was troublesome because he liked simplicity, liked to do his own maintenance, and disliked constant change. New thought: This is a pretty good…
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Reciprocity
I’m trying to pull away from places where I’m the Product and stick with places where I’m the Customer. Substack has become a Productifier since it started Notes. Just now I totaled up the subscription payments over the last month, and it came to exactly $100. That’s a lot of money for not much pleasure.…
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Random memory
Nice warm Sunday evening. A random picture reminded me of something… When I lived in KC and taught at DeVry, I was renting a basement apt in suburban Overland Park. The apt was large, fairly modern, and stayed cool in summer without air conditioning. The apt above me was occupied by an older couple from…
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Oops, not parody
Still peeving about Trump cult email spam. One persistent theme is pretending to offer me the Vice Presidency. Friend, the Don wants YOU for his VP! Obviously loony, the most absurd Sucker Filter. Just for fun I considered my qualifications. I’m a natural-born American citizen and I’m 74. Two strikes. You must be a dual…
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Colorful GenRad
GenRad specialized in both light and sound. I’ve been featuring sound for a long time, now let’s do light. Polistra and friends are processing food, using a GenRad color comparator to check the quality of tomatoes. The Comparator was simple to use. You’d place the object on top of the viewport, then turn the filter…
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Flashy GenRad
Continuing with GenRad’s light measuring tools. Stroboscopes were a GenRad specialty, going through several generations, with the usual assortment of accessories for different industrial uses. Strobotac was one of GenRad’s widely known brands, along with Variac transformers. Their other products were more obscure, known only in research and testing labs. Polistra is aiming a Strobotac…
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