Bill Bennett
After five years of, brilliantly, NOT losing the better quality sunglasses I invested in, a feat that, amazingly, lasted all through the Covid lockdown period, I finally put them down somewhere away from home and inadvertently donated them to new owners.
The Guardian: “Analysis by the Sutton Trust suggests that Keir Starmer’s cabinet will have the highest number of ministers educated at comprehensive schools, and the lowest proportion in modern history who went to private schools.”
About time too.
The next job for the United Kingdom is to fix the electoral system. First past the post worked where there were only two or three parties, it is profoundly unfair when some parties get a large vote and next to no seats while less than 40 per cent can mean a landslide.
This looks like an interesting idea, short form audio blogging… no more than two minutes each time. I may give this a try with my website.
I was on RNZ this morning talking technology… you can listen online www.rnz.co.nz/national/…
… and criticise or otherwise comment here. I’m open to anything other than gratuitous abuse.
I watched at least part of every Euro2024 round of 16 knockout games, in most cases the entire game. Austria and Turkey aren’t the most glamorous or feted teams, they don’t have big name stars, but their clash was the most exciting game of the round.
The eight round of 16 games at the Euro tournament have all been a bit lacklustre, there were definitely eight better games during the group stage. Today’s games were the dullest so far in the competition.
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