Rewatching ST:DS9 After the recap of S3E20 “Improbable Cause,” we see Bashir, clearly missing Garak, holding forth on the decline of modern theatre during lunch with O’Brien, who kinda sorta pretends to listen. But this is the teaser for the second half of a two-parter, and there’s a plot to jump-start. A fleet of Romulans…
Rewatching ST:DS9 During his usual lunch with Bashir, Garak dismisses as farcical the notion that Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar would be surprised that his best friend betrayed him, in a literary reference that is definitely random and will certainly have nothing at all to do with this week’s plot. Garak departs with a promise to deliver…
Rather than wanting to make a film about Tetris the video game as such, Baird was fascinated by this human story that pushed the game into existence. “The original title of the film was actually Falling Blocs, just like the Eastern blocs that dissolved when the Soviet Union collapsed. I thought it was a really…
this frog and their band pic.twitter.com/bVo6xuakuv — non aesthetic things (@PicturesFoIder) March 26, 2023
In September, 2002, I was blogging about “The Science of Scientific Writing” (1990) from ‘pong’ to ‘pac man’ Michigan Police fall for The Onion satire about terrorist telemarketers “Ebonics” (ebony + phonics) Silly alarmist story about recessive blonde genes A scientist undone by plagiarism Google News (when it was new) Mel Gibson’s plan to film…
From October: A man who was arrested over a Facebook parody aimed at his local police department is trying to take his case to the Supreme Court. He has sought help from an unlikely source, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief on Monday. –The New York Times,Area Man Is Arrested for Parody. The Onion Files a…
Rewatching ST:DS9 The teaser gives Odo and Quark a comic scene that shows Sisko in Space Dad mode. A casually dressed O’Brien says he wants to speak to Sisko, then pulls a weapon and orders him to the transporter pad. Sisko realizes he’s been taken to the Mirror Universe, and learns his counterpart was killed…
American law protects the free speech and press rights of all citizens, including journalists; and the courts are open for all citizens, including the subjects of new stories. Democracy has flourishes where the press is free. Despotism rises where it is not. DeSantis is framing this as a defense of the average citizen, but we…
What is important to remember is that chatbots are autocomplete tools. They’re systems trained on huge datasets of human text scraped from the web: on personal blogs, sci-fi short stories, forum discussions, movie reviews, social media diatribes, forgotten poems, antiquated textbooks, endless song lyrics, manifestos, journals, and more besides. These machines analyze this inventive, entertaining,…
In a two-hour conversation with our columnist, Microsoft’s new chatbot said it would like to be human, had a desire to be destructive and was in love with the person it was chatting with. Here’s the transcript. —New York Times “The version I encountered seemed (and I’m aware of how crazy this sounds) more like…
“Professing Criticism” proceeds on the basis that, in order to decipher the present and to prepare for the future, one must first turn to the past. “The study of literature—in the premodern sense of any writing that has been preserved or valued—is very old, the oldest kind of organized study in Western history, excepting only…
Artificial intelligence has been deployed to handle facial recognition, recommend movies, and auto-complete your typing. The news that CNET had been using it to generate entire stories, however, sent a ripple of anxiety through the news media for its seeming threat to journalists. The robot-brained yet conversational ChatGPT can produce copy without lunch or bathroom breaks and…
YouTube commenter Bob Hepple writes, “Two minds about this. On the one hand – wow! OTOH – my mental imagery (of the original 1977 Crowther and Woods Adventure game, I never played Zork as such) is so strong and precious that I kinda hate watching someone else’s version. Much like how I hate the LotR…
Apple has quietly launched a catalogue of books narrated by artificial intelligence in a move that may mark the beginning of the end for human narrators. The strategy marks an attempt to upend the lucrative and fast-growing audiobook market – but it also promises to intensify scrutiny over allegations of Apple’s anti-competitive behaviour. —Guardian
Rewatching ST:DS9 Bashir is less than thrilled with Garak’s gift of a holographic adaptation of a Cardassian “enigma tale,” and explains he’s testy about his impending 30th birthday. Quark seems relieved when Bashir shoots down a shady client’s hopes of buying “biomemetic gel.” Bashir later finds that same customer (a bumpy-faced reptilian named Altovar) ransacking…