Continuing my regular musings about AI and machine learning this year, you may have asked yourself, “What does that Oatmeal guy think about it?” Okay, maybe you haven’t, but I have. And just like his piece on creativity, he’s come up with something personal, thoughtful, and featuring ratcopters. It’ll make sense when you read it.
Not a long post to start off the week, just a link to a fellow fiction podcaster and creative Stephanie Elie’s post from earlier this year with an important reminder about where your value resides. Rock your week.
Okay, so I mused a lot in Wednesday’s post, so I’ll allow someone else to muse, in this case Dutch YouTuber Tom van der Linden, the man behind the channel “Like Stories of Old.” In the half-hour video below, he goes into what many of us cinemaniacs have often felt, but felt hard to articulate: they’re not making films like they used to… and we may be losing something because of it. What I really…
Okay, yes, what with the news of AI breaking containment when it shouldn’t have been able to do so… and the fact that AI may now be harnessed for new disturbing acts of bio-terrorism, maybe we plucky humans don’t make it out alive. But what if we do? What if the aftermath of this Post-AI disruption era is actually positive? And no, that does not mean I’m about to say, “Gee, nimrods trying to change…
September will be here in the space of a summer cold sneeze, but there’s still a few weekends to hit the beach or go camping. And depending on who’s camping, you simply must consider s’mores. But where did s’mores come from anyway? And why are they called s’mores? I already knew the basic, if possibly apocryphal origin of s’mores as retold by Matt Blitz for Food & Wine, but he also traces the s’mores story…
On this day, a century ago, a wonderfully funny, delightfully off-kilter comedian and satirist was born who would forever change how we think about American history, advertising, and, well, dragons. Yes, I’m talking about the one, the only, the inimitable Stan Freberg. Many of us in the audio fiction world wear many hats and Freberg did so admirably, writing, producing, and acting in the various media he did. If you’re one of my fellow audio…
I’ve been posting musings and plenty of articles videos about AI for a while now. There’s a lot of doom and gloom about the disruption AI is causing and may cause for society. And there’s also schadenfreude at the limits of AI in the face of people wanting AI to be their One True God. So I wanted to pause with some of those sorts of articles and muse about what a possible positive future…
Yes I’ve seen the latest version of The Odyssey, so it’s very much on my mind enough to delve deeper into all sorts of aspects of the tale as I try and pace myself: do I start by re-reading the English translation I have read? Do I start with another? Do I learn Ancient Gree-? yeah, I’ll just stick with English. And speaking of English, it’s a language that’s never met another language it doesn’t…
As my seven or nine regular readers might imagine, I now have something of a backlog of articles about AI and machine learning, as, unlike a large language model, I’m not ingesting hundreds of articles a second and spitting out my pattern-recognized conclusions. So, with the news in the past week of AI companies buying tons of physical books to scan and destroy (in the process of that industrial-level scanning), I was reminded of another…
A few Mondays ago, I noted some novelists that hail from my particular vintage, and it made me think of Gen X a bit more and what hijinks our most invisible of living generations has been up to. On the one hand, separating people into neatly boxed “generations” based on a specific year range feels like trying to slice the river. Birthrates rise and fall across the globe, but people keep on being born day…