Tim Klapdor responds to some comments from Stephen Downes’s questions re: AI and what it actually does here. This is my fav pull-quote:
….,we perform the gestalt and apply the concepts that sit alongside it. We apply traits and behaviours that don’t actually exist. By doing so we become part of the hallucination of AI.
Years ago, Jeff Bezos famously quipped that “your margin is my opportunity.” This was of course aimed not at Amazon’s customers, but rather its competitors, and it was deadly serious: customers of AWS in those bygone years will fondly remember that every re:Invent brought with it another round of price cuts. This era did not…
Bryan Cantrell doing the work of pointing out what it is actually that “clouds” do here. Per core licensing for apps, services and all the like. What’s the point in that other than rent seeking B.S, especially if there’s no real competition in the market where your software competes. Lastly and this is truly the best pullquote EVAR:
Pretend open source,… so let click that link for you if you’re too busy/lazy to try seeing where this goes. Jay Kreps is the owner of a company named Confluent. They support, develop software as a service known as Apache Kafka. Kafka was a technology created at Linked in for handling “streaming data”, the kind of little messages en masse that a service like LinkedIn uses to handle posts, update to posts, and allow people to “Like” posts at scale. But LinkedIn decided to spin it out as a technology, open source it and let others benefit.
But now Confluent (Jay Krep’s company) offers Kafka to subscribers that want to use it, but not host it. The “license” terms that Confluent wrote up to accompany their product indicates you don’t own the software, you are merely being allowed to use it at the discretion of the real owner (Confluent). So while Apache Kafka is open source, and Confluent offers it to subscribers, that’s the sum total of open source-y-ness (to borrow the Steven Colbert metaphor). There’s no kimono being opened, just a kimono with the words “Open Source” printed on the outside of it. One can subscribe to Confluent, but having done so, cannot “compete” with Confluent using Confluent’s intellectual property (Apache Kafka and any of gimcracks, gewgaws, and jetsam and flotsam Confluent has added to make bits of it ‘proprietary’). So buyer beware if you are trying to develop a software project on someone else’s cloud platform. You may be in for a fight.
If you are the least bit interested in Broadcast TeeVee, RF transmissions, or Linux Home Lab types of topics,… get on over to TVJay’s channel on the YouTubes as fast as you can. I participate as much as I can in the chat. Fun will be had by all. And TVJay might get dispatched, call from his employer to dispatch and save the day!
Tonight’s episode opens with an essay looking back on themes and interviewees for the last 48 episodes (6 seasons in total). And there’s a lot there. But at the heart of it are these sentiments:
You’re Allowed Here
You’re Welcome Here
You Belong Here
This is Yours
Yeah I think I can abide by that. Matthew Desmond who wrote two different books “Evicted” and “Poverty in America”, will be interviewed. Linda Villarosa will be interviewed, she’s an expert on health and health outcomes and how that’s defined by race. Col. Greg Gadson is all about doing the right thing. And of course, Pete Buttigieg who has served at different levels of government is interviewed as a champion of Democracy (capital “D”). And then there’s a 17 year old, Gitanjali Rao (Time magazine’s 2020 Kid of the year) who is already enrolled at MIT, and all about solving problems. Rachel Zoffness is a pain psychologist, who studies chronic pain and it’s rise over time, she’s also trying to change things, and re-frame how we address it as a society. Reminds me in some ways of the general principle in Physics of the “arrow of time”. Things move forward, time in any/all frameworks used to measure what is or model what “might of have been” or “could be”. So looking forward to this series on PBS.
Independent era comes to an end for Hayao Miyazaki’s studio, but it could be the start of a happy future. For nearly two decades, Studio Ghibli has been an independent company. Originally founded in 1985 with the support of Japanese publishing giant Tokuma Shoten, Ghibli has been independent since 2005, during which it’s released eight…
Wowza, this is big news, but media company conglomerates are not unheard of in the entertainment industry. Before Disney owned ABC Television, it was owned by a group called Capitol Cities. Hopefully budgets, and project greenlight decisions won’t be adversely affected by a merger like this one. I dare say the opening of an official Ghibli theme park made this more attractive to Nippon TV. Here’s to the next big Era of Studio Ghibli anime.
First publicly release footage of Hayao Miyazaki’s newest anime movie is accompanied by reveal of U.S. theater release date. The marketing in Japan for Studio Ghibli’s latest anime, The Boy and the Heron (also known as How Do You Live?), was unprecedented, not just for anime movies, but for the film industry as a whole. […]
December 8 , 2023. Mark your calendars for what is likely to be th LAST anime Hayao Miyazaki ever makes. I have been reading reviews of it in English from Japan. And it sounds amazing.
Now one might ask themselves, who-what-now? What’s this graph and photonics thing. But honestly check it out. This is not a Nvidia product, no-way man! It is an Intel research project looking at speeding up very niche style application. It’s not in production, it’s not ready for prime time. But it is just as ground-breaking as those massively parallel CUDA enable graphics cards NVidia started playing around with back in the 2010s. And who doesn’t like cool new interfaces, like an optical connect that has connections to each individual core?
I’ve read a number of David’s blog entries on various topics, some related to Silicon valley and entrepreneurship and some on digital archiving. But as always David’s got great sources of info and can gather the facts and write on them authoritatively. I had NO idea video games as an industry was @$85B USD a year. But more importantly David’s commenting on an article some weeks back on the lack of access to the back catalog or classic library of games (by Kelsey Lewin of the Video Game History Foundation – https://gamehistory.org/)
Olia Lialina is among the best-known participants in the 1990s net.art scene – an early-days, network-based art pioneer. Her early work had a great impact on recognizing the Internet as a medium for artistic expression and storytelling. This century her continuous and close attention to Internet architecture, “net.language” and vernacular web has made her an important voice in contemporary art and new media theory. Lialina is credited with founding one of the earliest web galleries, Art Teleportacia. She is cofounder and keeper of One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age archive and a professor at Merz Akademie in Stuttgart, Germany, and a GIF model.
(from the presentation introduction)
While we participants were very nostalgic going through all the example websites Olia presented, the point was NOT to be nostaligic about the past web. The point was it’s not in the past, but just a path among many that large numbers of people have followed. The paths are still there, but some are disappearing (and Olia is attempting to archive as much as possible). The hope being that folks will still try to own their websites, and set a flag there for people to discover and engage in. There is quite a collection of websites with background/midi/mods in them. All of which still work and playback when you view them through archive. No doubt these are efforts of individuals seeking to express themselves and find like minded folks. It wasn’t about necessarily being an influencer or being monetized on a platform. But now that’s all changed. But to Olia’s credit, she’s archived a number of those sites of Geocities that popped up after 1995. https://blog.geocities.institute/about. And it’s good to see what the breadth and scale of that community was. So having attended the presentation and taken away some of Olia’s ideas of how to think of the web, I can help but stick on the Wix ADI (artificial design intelligence) section at 46:16 in the YT of the presentation: https://youtu.be/O1cKASjX85w?t=2776
The headline is grabby, borderline click-baity. It breathlessly touts all the design and so forth and what Wix has done harnessing a ChatGPT-style front end where you “wish” into the prompts what you want and pass judgement on the results. Prompting as you go. No need to learn anything other than how be a prompt engineer for Wix AI. But I will give TechCrunch credit along with the author of the article (Kyle Wiggers). There is a “downside” near the end,…
As The Verge’s James Vincent wrote in a recent piece, generative AI models are changing the economy of the web — making it cheaper and easier to generate lower-quality content. Newsguard, a company that provides tools for vetting news sources, has exposed hundreds of ad-supported sites with generic-sounding names featuring misinformation created with generative AI.
From Kyle Wiggers article on TechCrunch, “Wix’s new tool can create entire websites from prompts”
So imagine if something as big, and variety filled as Geocities suddenly sprung up, whole, overnight?! And it was just one low quality, auto-generated, placeholder of site, purporting to be a community but just empty of individuals laboring away making the thing. Wouldn’t it just be a kind Internet Pollution, prompted into existence on a massive scale? Almost like the Pacific Ocean Guyre, swirling about where all the plastic floating debris gathering. How would you know? How could you tell? And worse yet, what if it’s got payments, transaction, eCommerce all built-in. The AI is a might lever, the attractiveness is there. But the potential for Internet Pollution is too. And I would say, thank goodness for folks like Olia, who are able to know/verify their sources and draw from teh web that was. Because it’s soon to be overwhelmed by the tsunami of prompted web that will be.
Carpet Bomberz Inc. 