I read an article today over on The Register about how AI may be entering its ‘model collapse’ phase. The basic idea is that more and more of the content that AI ingests to produce its models is, in fact, AI generated. This means that, at its best, AI’s responses will decrease in quality. This sounds very bad, and very predictable.
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I am interested in virtual and augmented reality technologies. But I have fairly bad eyes with a complicated prescription, and these technologies all cause me some (quite literal) headaches as well as nausea. That limits my interest to the theoretical: I own exactly zero such devices.
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I came across this report of a bug with iOS Messages voice transcription feature and found it to be rather interesting. Cutting to the chase: Messages will silently fail if voice transcription tries to use an ampersand (“&”) as part of a proper name.
The example that started the investigation was a message containing “Dave and Busters”. This is the name of a U.S. restaurant chain with the proper name “Dave & Busters”. The Apple transcription feature smartly applies the correct trademark name using the ampersand, but Messages silently rejects the message containing the “&” as invalid XHTML.
Oh dear, Apple: that is embarrassing. But also all-so-human.
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Irene and I are not people who exercise much. Yet over the years we have collected a stable of expensive exercise equipment, the primary purpose of which is to collect dust.
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I have a healthy fear of high current electrical equipment. Anything over an amp and I’m looking for a way to disconnect the mains and insulate myself. I don’t mess with microwaves or the internals of old CRTs without serious trepidation.
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This has been an interesting year so far. I’ve posted some fairly lengthy diatribes expressing my thoughts and feelings. But I am just a powerless voice in the woods of western Canada, so shaking my fist at the sky is more personal therapy than any kind of action towards solving a problem.
But my life, despite its human difficulties, frustrations, and times of sadness, is actually pretty good. Every once in a while the world spins in a way that restores a bit of my tattered faith in humanity… or just brightens my day. Our Federal election results this week here in Canada are one of those positive rotational incidents.
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My days since retirement have been very relaxed. I don’t fret too much about what I do or do not do, I enjoy an afternoon nap most days, and I wake up around 8:00 am if I feel like it. I rarely feel rushed. “Mañana” is my favourite word.
But I think I have recently hit a new peak of ‘doing nothing’ behaviour. For the past week or so I’ve spent the bulk of the sunny spring days we’ve had sitting on our deck. Sometimes I feel bad about this, considering it ‘wasted’ time, but I think I need to start thinking of it as time well spent.
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I have been pondering what to write about ‘Liberation day’ since April 2- the day itself. Trump unleashed the stupidest tariff war, writing off over six trillion dollars of stock market value in the two days that followed. The stock market isn’t the economy but any time the stock market drops 10% in two days it is time to be concerned.
I’m going to try to break this down a bit for myself and hopefully doing so will help others who are attempting to parse the events. What follows is an expression of my opinion based on actual analysis: you may disagree with me freely, but I am reasonably secure in my understanding of the facts. This is a long one- Buckle up, and feel free to use the table of contents to jump around to what interests you!
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I purchased a cargo trailer a few weeks back shortly after working out my plans for having one. It is a basic 7 foot wide, 12 foot long, 6’6″ tall box on wheels with a cargo ramp on the back and a human-sized door on the side. I got it home from Kelowna on March 10th and have been assembling a few bits and bobs for it since then.
What have I added to the trailer and why? It isn’t a great mystery but owning a trailer is all ‘new’ to me, so I thought I’d capture some of my choices here.
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From time to time I look back at something I wrote on this blog years ago. It sometimes feels like I’m reading the words of a completely different person whom I barely recognize. Other times it seems like past me knew exactly what he was talking about.
Back in June of 2003 I wrote a post in which I tried to explain something of a self-revelation that I had recently experienced. I had felt a moment of tangible… disgust I guess, regarding a cliched phrase that was then and remains today distressingly common.
Have you ever heard “if you’re not growing, you’re dying“? This innocent phrase, at least as interpreted by late stage capitalism, is a rallying cry for never-ending growth in revenue and profits. We are to believe that any business, or individual for that matter, that isn’t making more profit each year than they did before is a ‘failing’ enterprise.
This falls in line with the theory of shareholder value maximization for which Milton Friedman is famous. The ‘Friedman Doctrine’ basically says that any executive’s primary and only fiduciary duty is to increase shareholder value i.e.: raise the stock price. The only way to do this reliably is to perpetually increase profits.
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