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GAH!

I’ve spent my whole evening trying to get my Chromecast to talk to my phone. It all started when I wanted to show a clip off Xwitter to Uncle B and ended an hour and a half later in tears. Metaphorical ones, but still.

Why is technology such shit?

We have a new wifi router, which was the start of the problems. I put in the new password, no soap. Then I thought maybe the Chromecast was trying to connect at 5GhZ when it’s an original and can only do 2.5GhZ. So I tried going into the router and renaming the two connections so I could tell which one it was trying to open. And that broke everything.

I know just enough to fuck everything up completely.

Anyway, I’m going to add alcohol to this mix. That always helps. Good weekend!

March 15, 2024 — 8:44 pm
Comments: 3

They’ve deep-sixed their own product

There’s been much hilarity this week about Google’s Gemini and its allergy to images of white people. They’ve had to pause marketing of the image generator.

Someone asked Gemini to explain how it works and it did. Basically, when you ask Gemini to make a picture, your prompt first goes to the language model, which is instructed to insert words like “diversity” into your phrase before passing it to the image generator.

This is an extremely dumb and crude method of getting the result they thought they wanted. There’s no attempt to distinguish between plausible diversity and historical impossibilities, which leads to hilarious images like a racially diverse Waffen SS. And my personal favorite: a 17th Century English king eating watermelon (Gemini couldn’t recognize the racial stereotype because the model itself had injected race).

I can’t get over how crude this bodge is. The irony is that if they hadn’t messed with it, it looks like they had a pretty good image generator on their hands. They have damaged their product, perhaps fatally.

February 22, 2024 — 7:13 pm
Comments: 8

Ow! My butt!

Oh, man…I’ve just sat through an interminable Zoom meeting. My backside ain’t built for this.

At the start of the meeting, I was invited to try the new AI Companion, which I was told would create a synopsis of the meeting for me.

“Great!” I think, “it can do the minutes!”

It can’t, no. It can tell you things like whether your name was mentioned, which I guess might be useful if you were reading news on your phone the whole time and wanted to know if you’d been assigned a job.

I asked it to catch me up and it gave me a one-paragraph synopsis of a 90-minute meeting – which, to be fair, was surprisingly accurate. But useless.

It sounded like something a gifted middle school student would turn in for a book report.

November 7, 2023 — 8:24 pm
Comments: 3

Public service

In the thread below, OldFert asks if there is any way to watch Tucker without a Twitter account. I didn’t know, so I made one. You can watch videos with a direct link.

Episode 1 June 6 Topic: Ukraine
Episode 2 June 8 Topic: Taboos
Episode 3 June 13 Topic: Trump’s arrest
Episode 4 June 15 Topic: Wannabe dictator
Episode 5 June 20 Topic: Hunter Biden
Episode 6 June 22 Topic: RFK’s campaign
Episode 7 June 28 Topic: War in Ukraine
Episode 8 June 30 Topic: Rachel Rick Levine and Mark Milley

I’ll try to remember to post a link when he resumes. He hasn’t done any in July; he’s on vacation. He also did an interview with Russel Brand that was supposed to be good, but Russel Brand makes my teeth itch so I haven’t watched it. I’ll find and post the link if desired.

You were allowed to explore hashtags without an account, if you could get past the login screen. Click a tweet to squeeze past and then click Explore in the upper left corner. I’m getting a 404 now, though, so it looks like he’s plugged that hole, too.

July 11, 2023 — 5:45 pm
Comments: 7

My needs are simple

My favorite podcast app is shutting down. They’re being absorbed into the subscription service of their parent company (SiriusXM). Because of course they are.

I hate monthly fees.

I’m bummed because I paid for it. Eh, it was a one-time fee and a long time ago – it doesn’t owe me anything – but I’d gotten used to it and I can’t find a substitute I like.

What I want from an app is simple: when I subscribe to a podcast, I want it to go all the way back to the first episode and play the lot, in order, remembering what I’ve already listened to. Download to listen offline is useful, too – my garden activities sometimes take me out of range of the wifi.

I’ve tried several that I shall not name because my phone is in the other room and I’m too lazy to go get it. One didn’t let me sort from oldest to newest, so I had to scroll past pages and pages manually. One gave me a free period after which it wanted to charge a modest annual fee – but give us your credit card information up front, luv. (I actually did give them my payment details, but my time anxiety was so grievous, I deleted the program almost immediately).

One – and I remember it was the Google one – would only play one episode of the thing I wanted to hear, after which it switched me to a podcast from the front page that it apparently really, really wanted me to listen to.

I’m sure I could learn to drive any of those apps eventually, but remember: lazy.

At the moment, I’m on the free version of Spotify. I get the feeling it would much rather I listened to Taylor Swift, but it’s doing okay with podcasts so far.

Do you have a favorite podcast app? Why do I anticipate most of you boogers telling me you don’t listen to ’em?

July 10, 2023 — 7:49 pm
Comments: 19

This is probably not good news, huh?

Any error with BIOS in it scares me shitless. I got this message on boot about six weeks ago. After I click the continue button, I get one of those awful ARE YOU REALLY TOTALLY POSITIVE YOU WANT TO HIT THIS RECKLESS BUTTON, FOOL? messages and then it pretends to give me a firmware update.

I say pretends, because I got the message again a week ago and then I got it five times in a row this morning before it finally booted into Windows. This is at work, mind.

I know a little weasel who’s getting a new desktop computer.

First, I’m having our tame IT guy come have a look, though. If I get a new machine, it’s positively going to be Windows 11 and I don’t know if a machine can be ghosted from a Windows 10 to a Windows 11.

If not, I’m going to spend weeks tracking down and re-installing apps. Imagine the world’s smallest “yay!”

The other computer at work, which is much newer, ‘upgraded’ itself to 11 without asking. I can’t see anything new about except, as usual, they’ve moved all the buttons around to different locations.

Why they do this?

April 25, 2023 — 7:19 pm
Comments: 20

I don’t mean to brag…

I’m one of the Community Notes contributors on Twitter now. I mean sure, anyone can sign up, but it was ages before I got confirmation.

They claim they get a balanced set of opinions, which probably means Elon has sicced an AI on my posting history to decide if I add enrichment.

The irritating part is shooting down a bunch of notes I agree with because the tweet doesn’t need a damn note.

And alas, Spoony is gone for good this time. I looked through my old posts today and, my goodness, she got herself into a lot of scrapes. Up a tree, on the roof, in a hedge. She disappeared for more than 24 hours once and I was sure that was it. Turns out, she was in the kitchen the whole time, standing silently in the corner.

The strangest of all my chickens.

Sorry about this. I try not to post when I lose one. I hate to be a downer. Some days, Twitter feels like one long montage of dead dogs and cats.

April 12, 2023 — 6:29 pm
Comments: 5

thispersondoesnotexist does not exist

Well! Uncle B was combing through his old bookmarks (the browser equivalent of rearranging your sock drawer) and discovered that thispersondoesnotexist.com is gone. Or, rather, the URL was bought by Stability AI and redirects to their product.

Confirmed by Reddit r/TPDNE a month ago. Though they don’t seem to know the story.

Stability AI’s product is called Stable Diffusion and it does a similar job to TPDNE, among other things. You’ve probably seen some illustrations created with it.

They offer a free Photoshop plugin, which got me all excited, but it only works with Photoshop 23.5 or newer.

I think my version is 9. Poop.

Anyway, TPDNE was always good for a fascinating half hour. The faces it generated were scary good – for the most part. It had problems with glasses, earrings, other people in the shot.

People used it a lot for things like fake Twitter profiles. I wonder if that played a part in its demise.

Oh, thiscatdoesnotexist is gone, too. It sucked.

March 30, 2023 — 7:49 pm
Comments: 5

The future is soon, maybe

Lookee here. I asked Brave a question and I got an AI answer. And it’s right, too. I’m not sure that I buy all the wonderful things AI will do for us, though.

Microsoft’s Bing AI sounds like a lunatic. Arguing, insulting, gaslighting…even flirting.

ChatGPT is the soyest of wokesters. I’ve signed up to play with ChatGPT, but I’m having trouble getting myself properly registered. It’s an email thing.

Oh, that thing I was asking about? The Key? It was a really stupid VR freebie. Twenty minutes of dark but unimpressive imagery and the final reveal is – surprise, the main character is a refugee. Then the narrator reads a bunch of statistics about refugees while you stand in one place staring out the window of her former hovel. There were no decisions at all, that I remember, and the only difficulty was moving around because the controls were retarded.

I’ve come to the conclusion that free VR content is the way it is because creators can get government grants to make it.

March 2, 2023 — 7:41 pm
Comments: 4

How many fingers am I holding up?

The is AI, naturally. I don’t know why, but it really cannot work out fingers, teeth and how many legs a cat has got. (Pinched from Reddit, where I believe the key phrase was “The correct number of fingers”).

I spent an enjoyable hour browsing this Twitter account for funny AI generated images. It’s amazing what it can do, and what it can’t.

Then I spent another happy hour playing with the AI programs themselves. That is, until I uploaded a picture of myself. I AM NOT THAT OLD AND WRINKLY – thank you! – stupid computer program.

You can try it yourself on Craiyon or DeepAI or DreamAI. I’m sure there are many others. Just…be careful uploading a selfie.

February 8, 2023 — 8:28 pm
Comments: 5