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…
O for a Muse of, well, water. I mean not well water, but… Let me try again. Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story OR, y’know, maybe just hook me up with a map. Been a while since me and the boys have hit the Aegean. I’ve had a boss who’s really been tasking me with being clever about a whole lot of land stuff, not so much seafaring navigation. I think…
Continuing my series of posts about AI and machine learning, a big concern is AI taking people’s jobs. In fact, that’s how I first started posting about it, because AI was being touted as a replacement for writing and creating music and the many fun things in life… rather than AI helping do the dishes or laundry. But despite AI being cited as a reason for jobs getting cut, I have been coming across some…
It’s Wednesday, so that means it’s time to continue my posting about AI and machine learning inserting itself, like Clippy on nanobot steroids, into the economy, I’ve already covered one of the big issues people have discovered by being “disruption first” and “figuring out what we’re disrupting” second. I link to a lot of videos and such in my early May post in that regard. For the TL;DR crowd, too much AI implementation is not…
Upon the recommendation of a host of various people, I am working my way through the Dungeon Crawler Carl series which, as many of you clearly know, has its share of bizarre character classes. The author of the series, Matt Dinniman, appears to be around the same vintage as I from the last millennium, so seeing as we’re the smallest generation of living adults, it’s nice to see us unlock some achievements as it were.…