Category: Rantđź—Ł
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Midjourney 2023/09/23: A Dinosaur sitting at a Victorian-style Restaurant
Prompt: “a dinosaur sitting at a Victorian-style restaurant, at a table with biscuits and sipping tea, digital art, high resolution” I was thinking about making some coffee on this Saturday morning, and that inspired a random thought: would dinosaurs seem more respectable when dressed for the victorian age … sipping tea?Also posted here –> on…
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Movie watching is entering a hybrid mode
I love going to the movies. Before the pandemic it was all I would do over the weekend. But more than that, I also love streaming content in my living room. That might sound paradoxical to many, but I love both things: theaters and Netflix. More paradoxically, I caught on to bingeing Downton Abbey (the…
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Spatial Computing does not scare me. Artificial Intelligence does.
The past six to eight months have been a study in contrasts, in tech. Roughly eight months ago (may have been earlier), OpenAI put out a simple looking demo, backed by incredible engineering and technology, but little to no product finesse. ChatGPT was a roaring success. It heralded a new age in AI, a new…
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Productivity gains swing both ways
Productivity gains that we make with technology, apply to both good and bad actors of this world. I was watching Skyfall yesterday. It is my favorite Bond movie. I love the scene when M quotes Tennyson to a Parliamentary hearing, while fending off questions about the relevance of the double-O section. It is a well…
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A (pithy) case for skipping GenAI while composing emails
When the goal is communicating or collaborating with another human to get something done, I suspect that nothing will substitute the manual acts of reading and writing (pithy?) emails. Think about that for a moment … are we really going to automate away the acts of reading and writing to machines? And whatever happens to…
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GPT: Humanity’s mirror, on the internet
Reading the responses that we are getting from GPT and its likes (Bard for instance), is like staring at ourselves in the mirror. I am specifically talking about the so-called imaginary nonsense these systems are capable of spewing out, which i am guessing is in large part due to the training data used to build…
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News sources are poor at building trust
I just got roped into a user survey by the NYTimes. And one of their questions was pretty revealing: “Of the following sources, which do you think is the most trustworthy for news? Select one.” I picked “other” and wrote in Wikipedia. And I skipped every other news source that was listed as an option…
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It’s my life, and I will wear a mask
This is my New Year’s Eve rant. I am also ranting after a long time. New York Times is always a good source of irritable analyses and discussions nowadays. I recently read a piece that is titled: “The Last Holdouts: It can be tough being a committed mask wearer when others have long since moved…
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Cantonments and Campuses
Why do army cantonments look like 18th century Britain? What does that even mean? What works about them? What can we learn from them? Have army campuses influenced corporate and college campuses? In a long rant that is more of a discussion I got together with an old friend from college to chat about army…