2025-05-09 00:35:00
It was actually a 3.6 mile run/walk at a blistering 13’04” average pace, but I’ll take it.
2025-05-08 02:35:00
What they say: “We want our employees back in the office so they can collaborate and go fast and do great things together!”
What they mean: “Our CEO has no idea how to explain a 21st century cross-regional distributed workforce to the old farts on our board of directors, so we want our employees to spend all day on Teams meetings in our already oversubscribed office buildings packed into oceans of cubicles and soul-crushing open concept spaces like some kind of massively scaled typing pool from the 1940s because that’s what they understand.”
Oh, and get me a coffee, will you? Sugar, no cream. Thanks, toots.
2025-05-07 07:10:00
☔️ It has been raining like crazy around here lately—four days out of seven. So we’ve been watching a lot of television. (See below.)
We got lucky Wednesday with warm temps and sunny skies. So we went for a run in the evening with a group from my wife’s gym. It’s a small group of supportive folks who don’t mind that I “run” slower than some of the old ladies at the mall. But it was nice out and I got a little exercise.
I added dynamically generated OpenGraph images to my blog using the 11ty Screenshots service.
I updated the design of my ham radio blog to use the same basic layout and styles as this one.
The Communicator May/Jun 2025 from SARC ... this might be better than QST!
“I received some feedback today” by Adam Newbold
The Studio I gave it three episodes—that’s my minimum commitment—but this show is just too painful to watch. I quit.
Ben-Hur This adaptation does a really nice job of portraying the fundamental story of the two main characters, Judah and Messala. On the other hand, it does a very poor job of weaving in the story of Jesus. In fact, weaving is the wrong word entirely. It’s bolted on as an afterthought via short scenes near the beginning and at the end. You could cut the two sequences out and be left with a fine film.
Dear Edward This show started strong and kept on going strong right up until the final episode, when the wheels. Just. Fell. Off. So, I put this in the category of “the journey being better than the destination.”
Étoile Finished season one and I’m hooked. Is it great television? No. But it doesn’t need to be. It’s fun, it’s beautiful, it’s quirky, and it works for me. Sign me up for season two.
Hacks Season four seems to be on a slow roll, but I think that’s mainly because I can’t binge watch it the way I did seasons one through three. It doesn’t matter anyway because I’m invested in these characters now and I know there’ll be a worthy payoff by the last episode.
Suits LA (S1E10) Why am I still watching this? They must put subliminal signals in the audio track or something. It’s really not good.
Sunday Morning (Apple Music Chill)
Trump is Enjoying Himself (Radio Atlantic)
That’s it from ‘round here. See y’all next time.
2025-05-06 06:05:00
They turned one of my all-time favorite movies into a new series on Netflix! (I hope it’s good.)
2025-05-05 20:34:00
In a recent toot, Sara made reference to “intellectual property theft” in the context of generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI). This is one of at least several well founded objections that I’ve seen a lot lately. Like many people, I’m still trying to work out a consistent, rational position on Gen AI. This post is not that by any stretch, just some thoughts.
I’m not sure about the term “theft” here. It may be true sometimes but it fails as a blanket characterization of Gen AI. Consider a few hypotheticals: [^sm]
Suppose I am an aspiring artist who has studied Pablo Picasso extensively. I can recite facts about his life and work and I can recognize (and identify and describe) his paintings. I can even recognize cultural references in television shows or everyday conversation. I can answer my friends’ questions about Picasso with some degree of authority.
In the course of studying Picasso, I have learned to understand his form and technique. I’ve similarly studied many other artists’ work. Over time, these explorations have helped me to hone my own personal style. When a teacher gives me an assignment, I can draw on my experience to create something new. As is often the case, the influences are sometimes apparent.
A friend asks me to paint a portrait of him and his partner in Picasso’s signature Cubist style. This is not the type of work I usually do, but I agree since we are good friends. The result is obviously not a Picasso, but the stylistic resemblance is unmistakable.
I realize that I’m pretty good at painting in the Cubist style, so I take my show on the road and begin selling paintings at art shows. Everyone always comments that they just like Picassos. I make a lot of money.
In each of these four scenarios, I’ve leveraged knowledge gained through study. I did not pay Picasso or his heirs for access to this knowledge. [^kw] Did I at any point along the way commit intellectual property theft? If so, where is the line? If a Gen AI model does essentially the same things, are the boundaries different? If so, then why? [^stop]
Does it matter how I acquired my knowledge and skill? What if I had studied at university? What if I was self-taught through watching public television and visiting public libraries? What if I had paid another Picasso expert? Note that in all of these cases, money changed hands in one form or another.
It occurs to me that a key factor is profit. If so, who is profiting? In the first scenario, no one is profiting. One person is asking a question of another person who happens to know the answer. I use Claude this way a lot. [^claude]
There are some genuinely bad possibilities, and we should of course be cautious about those. But there also are some applications that could make the world better. We should not be quite so quick to dismiss or (worse yet) to condemn Gen AI outright. We need to keep moving forward. The world has a way of doing that with or without us anyway.
There seems to be a continuum ranging from “obviously acceptable” to “obviously unacceptable” in the scenarios I contrived above. But there also seems to be a great big, fuzzy gray area in the middle. And finding our way through that vast middle is where the struggle will be.
[^sm]: I recognize the straw man argument here but as I said, I’m still thinking this through.
[^stop]: STOP! You might be thinking, but you’re a human being, and we’re talking about Gen AI models. Aren’t we treating the models exactly the same as my imaginary artist alter-ego? Apart from one of us being human and the other not, what is the difference?
[^kw]: Many (perhaps all?) of Picasso’s works are in the public domain. What if we were talking about Kehinde Wiley instead?
[^claude]: Would it be different if I were paying to use Claude?
2025-04-29 10:05:00
With apologies to the incomparable Tom Gauld.
Source: The original comic , which was posted on Bluesky.
