Bill Bennett
I hate the way Linkedin has a whiff of a religious cult about it. But since Twitter went down the gurgler, it’s the most effective way of promoting my web site. Any thoughts on alternatives?
Wild Wheat’s Kawakawa Sour Dough bread is the best commercial bread I’ve ever tasted. The main problem is that you have to get to the shop early. The loaves tend to be sold out by mid-morning.
Something is going on with Google un-indexing pages on my site.
Six weeks ago there were zero “Crawled - currently not indexed pages”. Then one, then a handful. Last week it was nine Today there are 17.
Has anyone else noticed that if you ask Stable Diffusion to produce a “low poly” image… everything looks like it belongs in the same world as the Cybertruck?
Whoever said “a servant cannot serve two masters” clearly never lived in a house with a pair of cats.
On AI art and Stable Diffusion in particular
There’s something wrong with a world where one needs to use the words “no nudity” when setting up a Stable Diffusion AI art prompt.
Surely “no nudity” should be the default? I have many doubts about this technology, the power use is ridiculous and a huge amount of intellectual property theft is nodded through.
Yet nothing is more off-putting and more indicative of moral bankruptcy than the realisation that the assumption that one uses these tools primarily for smut consumption. It’s not just objectification of women, some of the models treat men as sex objects too.
On top of that, what is it with Stable Diffusion models and breasts? Nine out of ten generated images of women have unnaturally large breasts. This adds to the underlying not-quite-safe-for-work vibe.
It is possible to navigate these issues and create safe for work images, but that’s not the prevailing culture of the Stable Diffusion scene. It needs to clean up its act.
From ten years ago on my site, when the Productivity Commission came out in favour of government departments using overseas cloud providers. Not its best moment.
Sitting at the computer while waiting for Stable Diffusion to do its thing is the new “a watched kettle never boils”.
Currently reading a jaunty customer newsletter from a digital service I subscribe to and realised I have absolutely no idea about the jokey cultural references in the text. None whatsoever.
While I realise this is an attempt to connectt with the audience, it actually has the opposite effect on me and now I’m left wondering if I’m compatible with this outfit.
I found my self singing The Ramones “I want to be sedated” on the way to having my wisdom teeth extraction earlier this week.
When I first got my third generation iPad Pro five years ago it was way, way overpowered for every possible app I could throw at it. Today it still does almost everything with plenty of headroom to spare, although it can stumble over a complex Logic Pro project or stutter with Stable Diffusion.
My last vestiges of Englishness are my accent, watching the football team being not quite good enough and wanting the cricket team to win, but only against Australia.
And crumpets. I almost forgot that I love eating crumpets.
One of my enduring memories of a wonderful break in Dunedin was eating the most beautiful fish outdoors at Fleurs in the early spring sunshine when a Sea Lion came and sat about 3m away. It’s a must visit whenever in Otago
Back home from having my wisdom teeth. Removed and catching up on missed Euro 24 games while waiting for the anesthetic to wear off.
This morning’s Turkey - Georgia game was an absolute cracker.
Watching the Euro 2024 game between Portugal and the Czech Republic on The TVNZ iPad app. The app went dark with a fatal error. When I got it running again, the Czech Republic had scored in the ~ 90 seconds of down time.
This is why New Zealand always needed more than The Southern Cross cable network. And could still do with one more international link.
Realised today that the small stash of banknotes and coins I keep for buying strawberries, cherries and other fruit from roadside vendors in summer simply doesn’t get touched for eight months of the year.
Any fool can write a good press release that hits its target audience and creates an impact. Writing one that fails means work. Here’s a guide.
A two minute read on how to get the best technology case studies
In the past 5 years two local businesses I loved closed their doors after the landlord increased rent by much more than the rate of inflation. One shop stayed empty, and clearly not earning rent, for four years. The other shop has been empty two years. The first is now leased, but the tenant told me they pay less rent than the tenant who moved out four years ago earlier.
Historically this has been one of the most read posts on my website, Google Search Console says it is no longer indexed but I just googled and found it. What is going on?