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New info on Zenith Phonevision
American Radio Library has added a 1955 Zenith promotional brochure that I haven’t seen before. It’s mostly PR puffery, claiming lots of World’s Firsts that weren’t really firsts. It does have some unfamiliar pictures of the Phonevision idea. Phonevision was Zenith’s attempt at subscriber TV. It was tried in NYC on a small audience in…
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Livetech
Caution! Random thought, not intended as logic! When technology is generally sane and non-genocidal, the products of technology look like mammals and birds, like the animals we keep as livestock or pets, the animals we eat. I’ve drawn this analogy with cars. Before 1940 cars were cows or horses, with long noses and ruminant eyes…
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WPA salesmen?
I’ve been focusing on WPA and related work since 2008. This year, for no particular reason, I’ve been focusing on sales and advertising after completely ignoring the subject for 72 years. Got curious about the connection. WPA definitely employed white-collar workers who had been discarded along with the skilled laborers when Wall Street bombed America…
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Not just lenses…
Closely related to my ramblings on the old Islamic insistence on using alidades instead of lenses to observe the universe. Stay as close as you can to the source, don’t distort vision with lenses, don’t distort science with theories, don’t distort business with abstract debt and stocks. RemnantMD on Substack discusses how light controls much…
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Isn’t that illegal?
Yesterday a local house-buying scam sent me an awfully realistic-looking fake check for the appraised value of my house. It had my name, the name of the company, and an amount, all filled in properly. The letter said that I could “turn this into an actual check” by letting them buy the house. Why would…
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Unsophisticated ASM
Continuing the food chain rule in terms of programming. I started programming in assembly language on the early PCs. There was very little “sophisticated food” available for the task I wanted to perform, so I had to write more of the action myself. There was also very little memory and disk space compared to modern…
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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…
Polistra's Mill
Be your own beacon.
Polistra's Mill 