• “Ultimately, to figure out what we really need to…

    “Ultimately, to figure out what we really need to worry about, we need better AI literacy among the general public and especially policy-makers.  We need better transparency on how these large AI systems work, how they are trained, and how they are evaluated.  We need independent evaluation, rather than relying on the unreproducible, “just trust……

  • Archiving the Entirety of DPReview Before It’s Gone

    Despite the popular adage about everything on the internet being there forever, every day pages of information and sometimes entire websites are lost to the sands of time. With the imminent shutdown of the DPReview website, nearly 25 years of reviews and specifications of cameras and related content are at risk of vanishing. Also lost……

  • Whole Lotta Rossi — Plain Or Pan

    Chugga chugga chugga goes the 12 bar space age (bachelor pad) blues. In the same way a pot of your granny’s soup comes to be more than the sum of its secretive parts, the far-out music bubbles and squelches and fizzes and farts in all the right places, all gnarly, knotted wood Fender fuzz bass […]…

  • Cliff Claven GPT

    Full credit to CogDogBlog for this writing prompt and his attempt to nail ChatGPT with a known quantity (Fluid Dynamics and Volcanology). Cliff Claven on the other hand just like most other attempts at prompting ChatGPT does escape the same level of scrutiny. But that doesn’t make the rejoinder, “…what else are you gonna do…

  • Fragment — Cheating, Plagiarism, Study Buddies and Machine Assist

    https://wp.me/p1mEF-77x Tony Hirst brief take on the spectrum of cheating, but also how that might be harnessed to measure student performance and mastery. The question isn’t “if” but WHEN are the students going to escalate up to the higher/negative end of the spectrum. Diploma mill, contract cheating, are all very intentional acts. But there’s a…

  • Time to mark the time

    No end of year review here trying to track-back and account for what it IS I actually DO here. No this is just a pole, a fence post, hammered into the ground. This is the fence line between last year and now. Things happened, some were successful. Others were not (to borrow from Sec. Don…

  • Microsoft wants to make Windows 11 faster by decoupling features from explorer.exe

    If you’re a long-time Windows user, you’re aware that several processes or features in the operating system are linked to File Explorer. While explorer.exe should be associated with file management only, it’s also associated with other parts of the Windows experience, like the Taskbar, which isn’t exactly a good thing for performance. Microsoft has been……

  • Time to plumb the depths of the Fediverse

    Mastodon don’t fail me now! It’s that time, the time where people adopt the next big thing. Just like when I got my first FB account in 2005 and sat around waiting for the big wave to come in (2007) I had 1 half-hearted attempt at a Mastadon account, that I let go fallow. But…

  • National Film Board – Universe (1960)

    This film was so novel in it’s day people freaked out at how good it was. The production values were exemplary. No crappy animations, or amateurish attempts at lighting. No. This was space as rendered by Norman McLaren’s National Film Board. And that narration, the voice,… that gentle whispery voice of Canadian stage actor Douglas…

  • The rents are too-damned high: Shkreli-nomics writ large

    From the Martin Shkreli school of product pricing, I give you RealPage: https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-rent. More or less you can subscribe to this service and “anonymously” compare your tenant leases with others in your area. Therefore it’s “NOT” collusion, or price-fixing, or gouging. Let the algorithm do the work of raising the rents. https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-rent