ianjs

It was a bit of a weird joke in 2016, but WTF America? Again?

My condolences. The fact it could even be close confirms your country is fundamentally broken.

I’ve just watched my faith in humanity disappear down the toilet so I’m switching off the shitshow for a few years.

Good luck.

I was a bit pissed off the other day when I looked up an old Twitter thread to find it had been spammed by someone at bland.ai . Not cool.

Despite the shitty tactic, I couldn’t resist the clickbait.

They provide automated phone agents and will call you for a demo, so I tried it. I was actually pretty impressed. I threw a bunch of nonsense and non sequiturs at her, but she patiently waited then steered the conversation back on track. If I spoke over her she stopped talking, listened to what I said, and responded appropriately.

Just for fun, I decided to pit her against Lenny so I forwarded the call to him.

Lenny is a series of cleverly-constructed canned responses designed to infuriate spammers and cold callers. The recordings are generic enough to keep them on the line as he waffles and wanders till they finally give up in frustration.

Here’s how it went:

She didn’t do too badly. Lenny is just a dumb series of fixed responses, but Bland.ai was unfazed and patiently tried to explain. When it was obvious that the conversation was going nowhere, she politely wound up the conversation.

“Don’t anthropomorphize computers – they hate it.” — Andrew McAfee.

We arrived at our cabin to find a 2001 centenary dollar coin on the doormat.

I can only assume the magpies left it as payment for all the oatmeal we’ve been feeding them.

Vietnamese restaurant in Balaclava, Melbourne.

One wall is the remnants of an outside wall with the posters still on it.

Cigarette advertising was banned in Australia in 1976 so that, and the price-tag of 35c for a packet, dates it to around the early seventies.

Dammit. That’s nearly half a century ago and I remember all of these.

Random dinosaur fossil found at Twin Reefs, Victoria.

Appears to be a Pareidoliasaur.

I just spent way too much time tracking down the source of a bird call that’s been haunting me for weeks. Finally identified it: an Eastern Koel or Rainbird.

It’s always just out of visual range, but the call is very distinctive. It even has an interesting back-story as a migratory bird from New Guinea (which is presumably why I haven’t heard it before), and a dark side as a brood parasite doing the cuckoo thing.

There is nothing more annoying than half-hearing South Park from the next room.

Gina Rinehart says renewable energy could use one-third of Australia’s prime agricultural land. Is she right? | Rural Australia | The Guardian

Spoiler: no.

What’s the world coming to if you can’t trust Gina and the Institute of Public Affairs.

It’s a delightful morning and I’ve managed to get out the door for a walk for the second day in a row. That’s a trend, right?

When I paused to take this picture, a kookaburra directly above me cocked his head to one side to look at me, then cracked up laughing.

I think he’s seen through me.

Sigh. Just got my first Mastodon spam.

It was really dumb spam, but I clicked on it because I’m in the Mastodon honeymoon period and my brain is thinking butterflies and unicorns because of all the nice people here.

Illusion shattered. Honeymoon over.

I guess I’m not starting the bonfire any time soon…

Seriously FaceBook? Putting a link to my blog article is “spam”?

That’s kind of pathetic. Perhaps they are nervous about the IndieWeb?

Beeper is the Black Knight of chat clients – Apple keeps hacking off limbs but they’re still hopping on one leg.

I suspect part of it is poking the bear to shine some light on the shitty state of chat interoperability, so good for them. Take my money, guys.

I’m collecting alternative names so I don’t have to say “X, formerly Twitter”.

So far I’ve found:

• Ex,
• Xitter,
• ExTwitter
• and Twix.

ExTwitter is currently my favourite.

Good grief. These guys are like some one-dimensional super-villain in a crappy B movie.

“Whatever is the most greedy, misogynistic, self-serving, destructive option… let’s do that”.

universeodon.com/@georgeta…

Here’s an excellent video from @karpathy@sigmoid.social with some intriguing ways to think about Large Language Models:

1. They are a lossy compression of the Internet.
2. They could be seen as “… the kernel process of an emerging operating system”. – they coordinate a lot of resources (memory, computational tools) for problem solving. The internet is the “disk”, the context window is “RAM” as working memory.

Google Assistant seems to be doing a HAL 9000…

Ever since Google’s started cutting back on that product she’s been slowly losing her mind.

When she reads the news now it’s 50-50 whether she’ll read it, or just show a search result, or sometimes video with no sound.

Used to work perfectly. I’ll give up when she gets to the “Daisy, Daisy…” stage.

I can’t seem to find Elon Musk’s Mastodon handle to follow.

Please advise.

Wow, that was a whole new rabbit-hole.

I wanted to consolidate my identity, cross-post to Mastodon and dive into the whole IndieWeb thing; micro.blog ticked all the boxes.

Of course, that was a whole new world of procrastination because it had to be set up perfectly.

Almost there…