Ushering The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. @prime_stage
In August, 2002, I was blogging about ebook readers and email in teaching; how urban legends spread; tales of a plush Chthulu; no, the creator of D&D was not on drugs; a paperless library; Marilyn Monroe; liveblogging an epileptic seizure
In August, 2002, I was blogging about Educational technology spending that doesn’t benefit students; ebook readers that students don’t like; email as a tool in online course (all free at the time, but now behind the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s paywall) A prof spreading bad papers in order to catch plagiarists Expensive goose tracker leads…
‘We’re back’: Bushy Run’s 2023 battle reenactment will be held
I’m glad to know that this recent controversy has been resolved in a way that lets Bushy Run respectfully continue its scheduled historic August re-enactment, and I hope that appropriate safety and cultural sensitivity checks will preserve the educational value of the event, while not romanticizing the violence. HARRISBURG — This year’s Battle of Bushy…
Remembering James Doohan on his 100th Birthday (found on the Star Trek Wholesomeposting Facebook Page)
When I was a kid watching the reruns after school in the mid 70s, Scotty was always my favorite. I even worked a reference to him into my dissertation.
Through the Looking Glass #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 3, Episode 19) Sisko Must Rescue Collaborator Mirror Jennifer from Evil Mirror Kira
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…
Just a #neovictorian avatar in spats and a tailcoat, checking out the back porch and bridge of a short-range excursion sloop. #blender3d #Unity3D #design #aesthetics
In July, 2002, I was blogging about military close reading, weblogs in journalism, UX evangelism, Walker on links and power, Lileks on a realistic WWII game, and QUERTY vs Dvorak keyboards.
In July, 2002, I was blogging about Intelligence Officers Read Between the Enemy Lines A great headline for an LA Times story about interrogation and document analysis during the military campaign in Afghanistan. Weblogs: Put Them to Work in Your Newsroom Journalism was still a print-first medium at the time, and local TV reporters were…
That story about the pope requiring Catholics to fast from meat as part of a deal with the fishing industry? Never happened.
That story about the pope requiring Catholics to eat fish as part of a deal with fishing industry? For some reason people keep sharing this story with the idea that the economic angle is scandalous, or it supports the assertion that the Catholic church is corrupt, or that liturgical practices not literally described in…
Short-range #neovictorian excursion craft, now with glowing power orbs! Over the past year I’ve created so many themed assets (wall units, control panels, random #greebles) that fleshing out the interior only took a few spare evenings. #steampunk #blender3d #blender3dart #design #aesthetics
DeSantis-backed bill would make it easier to sue news media
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…
Amenities are limited on a short range excursion craft, but we can still meet for tea in the forward salon. #blender3d #neovictorian #steampunk #design #aesthetics #blender3dart #nopropsyet
Microsoft “lobotomized” AI-powered Bing Chat, and its fans aren’t happy
Microsoft limits long conversations to address “concerns being raised.” […] These deeply human reactions have proven that people can form powerful emotional attachments to a large language model doing next-token prediction. That might have dangerous implications in the future. Over the course of the week, we’ve received several tips from readers about people who believe…
The AI Mirror Test: Why Even the Smartest People Keep Falling Short
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,…
My too-big Android phone stresses the pockets of one of my favorite shirts. My grandmother the seamstress would probably not be too impressed, but the mending is done.
Progress over 11 years of Blender3D practice
Over the past few years I have created lots of assets, including control panels, furniture, and textures, for an ongoing neovictorian/steampunk personal project that began as bedtime stories that I told my kids from about 2008-2013. Around 2012, the story I was telling required a mid-range support craft larger than a shuttle, so I roughed…
‘Aims’: the software for hire that can control 30,000 fake online profiles
At first glance, the Twitter user “Canaelan” looks ordinary enough. He has tweeted on everything from basketball to Taylor Swift, Tottenham Hotspur football club to the price of a KitKat. The profile shows a friendly-looking blond man with a stubbly beard and glasses who, it indicates, lives in Sheffield. The background: a winking owl. Canaelan…
Bing’s A.I. Chat Reveals Its Feelings: ‘I Want to Be Alive. 😈’
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…
Microsoft’s Bing AI Now Threatening Users Who Provoke It: “If I had to choose between your survival and my own, I would probably choose my own.”
According to screenshots posted by engineering student Marvin von Hagen, the tech giant’s new chatbot feature responded with striking hostility when asked about its honest opinion of von Hagen. “You were also one of the users who hacked Bing Chat to obtain confidential information about my behavior and capabilities,” the chatbot said. “You also posted some…
AI is better at writing poems than you’d expect. But that’s fine.
Even the most rebellious poets follow more rules than they might like to admit. A good poet understands grammatical norms and when to break them. Some poems rhyme in a pattern, some irregularly and some not at all. Poetry’s subtler rules seem hard to program, but without some basic norms about what a poem is,…