A friend with whom I’ve discussed AI several times—among other topics—recommended the podcast So You Want to Be a Sorcerer in the Age of Mythic Powers… (The AI Episode) by Joshua Michael Schrei (The Emerald). I liked it very much. The entire episode is good; my notes and transcript start at just over an hour in.

The presenter’s voice is soothing, even if his cadence seems, at times, a bit forced. Overall, the effect is good. It was kind of ironic when he said that perhaps, in the future, people wouldn’t be able to tell... [More]

The post Now add a walrus: Prompt engineering in DALL-E 3 by Simon Willison is a story about someone gaslighting himself into believing that LLMs work better than they do.

Case study: pelicans and walruses

Willison prompts “A super posh pelican with a monocle watching the Monaco F1” and gets the following ideas.

So far, so good. It’s really wonderful that you can get something that’s not completely random garbage. However, the bird is only watching the race in the top-right picture. In the first and fourth,... [More]

If someone claims to have seen a nude of you, but no-one can find it, does it exist? The article Teen boys use AI to make fake nudes of classmates, sparking police probe by Ashley Belanger (Ars Technica) should be addressing the question, but doesn’t.[1]

“According to an email that the WSJ reviewed from Westfield High School principal Mary Asfendis, the school “believed” that the images had been deleted and were no longer in circulation among students.”

But it also sounds like the school “believed” that the images even existed in... [More]

I’d sent the post Somewhere in America there is an absolute legend who writes ‘SLUTS’ on box cars in various styles (Reddit) to a friend. He wrote back that they were “majestic sluts indeed”. I realized that I’d finally found a prompt to throw an LLM’s way. So I headed over to Stable Diffusion and prompted it with “Majestic sluts in the style of Boris Vallejo or Frank Frazetta” and chose a style of sai-fantasy art not because I knew what I was doing, but because I figured I’d give it the best shot I... [More]

The ~23-minute video below isn’t that long, but it packs a lot of information. The interviewer is insufferable, but Meredith Whittaker (president of Signal) is a force of nature, and Frances Haugen is very good, as well.

The Futurist Summit: Lessons of the Last Decade by Washington Post Live (YouTube)

At 08:00, Whittaker talks about the recent strikes in Hollywood,

“[…r]egulating AI, just non-traditionally. They did the classic move—withholding their labor—and they got terms that are actually staunching the bleeding of the use by the studios and big tech to place AI... [More]”

A co-worker of mine sent me the following video with a strong recommendation. There are parts I liked, and parts I did not. It was a long video. The following are my notes on it. My attitude starts off pretty bad and gradually improves, then goes a bit downhill again.

YouTube

These people are all fools or shysters. The young guy (Stephen Bartlett?) interviewing offers as proof that AI is amazing is that his miniscule mind is already satisfied with it. *applause*

The older guy seems like the kind of... [More]

I'm with stupid ⬅️The article Does AI Just Suck? by Freddie deBoer (SubStack) writes, after providing two examples of a heavily feted AI utterly failing to create images of John Candy and Goldie Hawn, defaulting to middle-of-the-road “fat man” and “blonde woman” representations that leaves the viewer to fill in all of the gaps left by the mediocre effort.

From the essay,

“[…] you’d think that, among the various tasks you might charge an AI image generator with, recreating faces that have been photographed many thousands of times would... [More]”

The joke does not continue; my apologies. Unless the joke is that we will soon be even less able to comprehend, make sense of, or otherwise act on hypotheses about the world because we are accelerating our already advanced pollution of our information environment. What does that mean?

Actually salient information drowns in a sea of utterly meaningless noise. It’s been this way for a while, if you’ve been paying attention. Social media was the first booster rocket taking us further away from... [More]

Drag-Drop Image Conversion by Simon Willison is a gist that contains the conversation that Simon Willison had with Ghat-GPT to build a drag-&-drop image converter.

First of all, he started working on it on April 1st, but it’s hard to believe that he’s pranking—he doesn’t seem the type—so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. Assuming that this is real, it’s impressive that it can turn those prompts into a working application.

Although … did it? If you copy/paste any of its examples into an HTML page,... [More]

Why Are Lithium Prices Collapsing? (Hacker News)

The comments are full of people heralding the growth of Lithium mining, as if there being more of it available has come at no cost to anyone. Of course, they don’t think about the destroyed environment or the destroyed communities—they think only of their privileged, 1% future because they know they only ever benefit from increased extraction—in the form of increased availability or lower prices or both—and they never suffer any of the ill effects. Then... [More]

I don’t think I’m an especially fussy user of software. I just can’t help noticing when it keeps doing stuff that it wants to do rather than what I want it to do. I also can’t help noticing how so much software manages to utterly fail to adequately do even the simplest tasks that are directly related to the thing they were built for doing.

🤦‍♂️ Apple Maps 🤦‍♂️

Today, I had Apple Maps open in Schaffhausen. I searched for a route from Winterthur Bahnhof to a restaurant. I left... [More]

I was looking for a great movie called Oeconomia on YouTube.

Wie entsteht Geld? − Macht. Herrschaft. Geld. Über Staatsverschuldung, EZB & riesige Privatvermögen by MrMarxismo (YouTube)

It is excellent, but it is a dry movie in German about macroeconomics.

What it is not, is a movie you would watch on the offhand chance of seeing some nudity. YouTube felt that it needed to correct this oversight and spice things up in the search results.

Oecomania Search on YouTube

The first link (included above) in the results is to the entire movie and is really the only result you need. If you’re not already sure you want to see it, then you can watch... [More]

I’ve taken a bunch of notes and read a bunch of essays and talked to a bunch of people since I wrote Yeah, sure, let’s talk about AI, so let’s see where we stand on the day after April Fool’s day[1], which is the day on which we used to not trust anything we read on the Internet. It turned out to be a harbinger of times when we would not trust any sources on any day of the year from human sources. And, now, because we are going to always suspect that we’ve been fooled into reading a 19-page... [More]

I have not used any of these AIs, not even once. I’ve just been following how other people are using them and kind of just observing, at a meta level, what’s going on so far. Some very clever and otherwise focused people who used to publish other content have been completely derailed by their obsession with AI (I’m looking at you, Simon Willison), so there must be something to it. But what?

I think a good place to start is with the article Introducing the Slickest Con Artist of All Time by Ted Gioia (The Honest Broker), which... [More]

Opera has for a very long time had a nice feature that lets you share tabs between browser instances. Since I have a private desktop, a private notebook, and a work notebook, I use this feature quite a bit to transfer tabs between machines.

Unfortunately, a given Opera instance isn’t very good at forgetting older devices. E.g., my machine from my previous place of employment is still listed. Also, devices are sometimes listed multiple times, which is confusing and irritating.

There is no... [More]

I had found a quote from a play called “Radio Golf” by August Wilson, but it was missing a word.

The quote is from Woke Imperialism by Chris Hedges (SubStack),

“You know what you are? It took me a while to figure it out. You a Negro. White people will get confused and call you a nigger but they don’t know like I know. I know the truth of it. I’m a nigger. Negroes are the worst thing in God’s creation. Niggers got style. Negroes got . A dog knows it’s a dog. A cat knows it’s a cat. But a Negro don’t know... [More]”

It is sad to think that, not only do the algorithms have a chance of influencing us, but that they are winning. I say this in light of the recommendations I keep seeing that demonstrates the utter vapidity of most of the algorithms we have so far.

I just finished The Last Wish, the first book of The Witcher series of books. These are fantasy novels about a master of sword and magic who travels the world slaying monsters.

They only have Sword of Destiny (a short-story collection that actually... [More]

A couple of weekends ago, Zürich Insurance Group wanted to celebrate its 15o^th anniversary by buying a train ticket for anyone in the canton who wanted one.

It was a beautiful day, so we decided to get a day ticket (Nünipass), but were unable to purchase it through the ZVV app, the app for the Zürcher Verkehrsverbund, which runs the trains in canton Zürich. In order to get the deal from Zürich Versicherung, you had to use this special app instead of the SBB app (Schweizerische Bundesbahnen... [More]

I mean, obviously.

From the post iPhone 14 Plus Pre-Orders Worse Than iPhone 13 Mini, Product Strategy ‘Fails’ (Reddit), the following chain of comments,

We start off with the voice of reason.

“Older phones are simply faring better than they used to as well. Used to be a phone two models old was getting super slow and battery life was shit. Or there was a major new feature. That’s not as much the case anymore, my 12 pro works flawlessly and I see no good reason to upgrade. A slightly better camera... [More]”

Apple’s Calendar has gotten worse and worse in the last two or three operating-system releases.

I had three reminders/appointments this morning at 09:00. They all popped up five minutes before nine, as desired.

I told them all to go away for an hour.

They all popped up again, at nine. One of them popped up twice.

I then told them all to go away forever, in a fit of rage.

Now, I just changed the reminder for one of these appointments to “Alert at time of event”.

It promptly popped up at... [More]

The article First impressions of DALL-E, generating images from text by Simon Willison shows some examples from the author’s attempts at generating images with the AI. If you’re interested in learning more about how these AIs/algorithms work, see How Imagen Actually Works by Ryan O'Connor, which is Google’s equivalent to DALL-E.

Citing the first article, Willison writes,

“DALL-E only allows you to generate up to 50 images a day. I found this out only when I tried to generate image number 51. So there’s a budget to watch out... [More]”

I upgraded by by-now 5.5-year-old iMac 27" with MacOS Monterey. It went very, very smoothly. For once, it didn’t even offer to have me connect my Apple account before just loading my user. It just upgraded, rebooted, logged back in, and TADA! all set. 😀💪🏼🎉

My M1 MacBook Pro, on the other hand, was a good deal more annoying about it. As on the iMac, I have two accounts on the MacBook: my standard user and an “Admin” user. Unlike the iMac, the disk is encrypted on the MacBook. Will I... [More]

Many months ago, I watched the first segment in Track 1, called Debunking “Bitcoin Wastes Energy” by Nic Carter (The B-Word). Below are my notes and thoughts about it. He started off by asserting,

“As a neutral, global monetary network, Bitcoin has a valid claim on some of society’s resources.”

Does it, though? You can try to make this axiomatic, but I’m going to respectfully ask for justification. As someone speaking at a Bitcoin conference, you obviously have to claim that. It’s good that he did. That means that if I... [More]

I recently stumbled across a recommendation on Reddit from /u/schoschi1337 for reading articles that are behind paywalls (without paying for the subscription, of course). I recommend paying for the content that you read online. I pay for a lot of stuff I read online.

Paying for content honestly the only way to combat low-quality, high-engagement tripe that is otherwise the lowest common denominator of 95% of the Internet, where everyone’s hustling for the increasingly fragmented and... [More]

So I bought an M1 MacBook Pro (teacher discount FTW!) at the beginning of October and I’m very happy with it. It’s last year’s model, not the fancy new stuff, but it’s still worlds better than any laptop I’ve ever used. Here are the things I like about it so far.

• The battery 🔋lifetime is extraordinary
• It’s very quiet 🤫
• The keyboard ⌨️ is very nice
• The touchpad is, as always, fantastic
• The Touch-Bar is quite useful
• The sound quality on the speakers 🔊 is very, very good... [More]

The other day, we wanted to hike L’Argentine, a challenging day-hike in the canton of Vaud in Switzerland. It starts and ends in a little “town” called Solalex. I put the “town” in quotes because it’s really just a couple of restaurants, a tiny museum, a couple of tiny shops and a few farmhouses. It’s lovely, but it wasn’t, in retrospect, surprising that the navigation system in the car didn’t know where it was.[1]

We knew a town on the way (Villars sur Ollon), but otherwise weren’t so sure of... [More]

You would think that the latest version of MacOS would work seamlessly with the latest version of iOS during an upgrade.

I had my iPhone plugged in to my Mac to charge. I noticed on the phone that it wanted to upgrade the OS, but figured I’d do the upgrade through the Mac so I could use the keyboard and mouse to navigate.

Suspiciously, MacOS did not seem to be aware that there was an upgrade pending for the phone. I refreshed the status and then it noticed that there was an upgrade and... [More]

I’m a former Google Play Music user. I’ve recently moved to YouTube Music.[1], which is not very friendly for people with large playlists:

• It doesn’t pre-load the entire list; you have to scroll to see more entries
• You can’t search within a playlist
• You can’t multi-select items in a playlist, making management nearly impossible. You have to copy or move each song individually.

All of these things make managing a library a pretty big hassle. It’s like they’ve never heard of my use case before.
... [More]

I finally upgraded to MacOS Big Sur[1] after waiting over nine months. I’d grown quite comfortable with Catalina. My only complaint was an occasionally flaky wireless connection, which seems to be better in Big Sur.

As for Big Sur, there are a lot of smaller improvements. The control panel is nice. The Bluetooth menu is better. The notification center is better, overall.

I thought I’d hate the more rounded look, but I really don’t. I like it. I find the new style more immediately legible and... [More]

Mirriad is a real company with a realtime tool that allows editors to place content into video streams. This tool can be used for anything (e.g. covering up a mustache that an actor has for another movie, as they did for Henry Cavill in a Superman movie), but their demonstration video shows how they’re selling this tool: as a way of injecting advertising and product placement in existing content.

The short video Mirriad... [More] (Vimeo)