That’s amusing, isn’t it? The AI script kiddies are getting better by leaps and bounds. They’re making short glosses on their favorite dreck right now. It’s only a matter of time before they can produce the whole thing, instead of just coming attractions.
Of course animation entertainment is about a century old at this point. It’s easy to forget just how popular Disney’s animated features were back in the 1950s, for example. Disney animated movies were the highest grossing films in 1950, 1953, and 1955. Their live action stuff, which were as phantasmagorical as the cartoons, came in first, second, or third a few times, too.
The Jetsons was just a futuristic version of the Flintstones. Cartoons like that are beloved by people who watched them as re-runs in their childhood, but if you look at them again without your nostalgia glasses on, they’re pretty weak sauce. Cartoons suffered badly from the shift to assembly line work from the original artist’s easel quality.
So where will the AI revolution end up? Pretty soon, people with next to no computer skills and precious little artistic ability and writers with an inability to spell the word “lose” are going to be able to make a whole movie on their desktop computer. And they probably will. And it will be just like this video. A derivative of a derivative of a derivative. But then again, have you seen the latest Spiderman movie? No, not that one. The other one. No, the other, other one. No, not that one either. You’re thinking of the other, other, other Batman movie…
This is the time of year in Maine when the leaves start to change color and fall out of the trees. In Los Angeles the birds inhale the smog, turn colors, and fall out of the trees. But wherever you are, pumpkin spice season is here. It’s a good time to clean out your basement and tidy up your affairs. I’ll start by cleaning out my browser bookmarks. They’re things I’ve been meaning to read, but have been unable to find time for. So once a week, my website turns into the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles. Their motto? We’d rather waste your time, than ours.
In April, police inspectors at the Indianapolis FedEx distribution center seized a box containing nearly $43,000 in cash. Even though no criminal charges have been filed in connection with the package, it’s been in the government’s possession for about four months.
Now, the box’s intended recipient, Henry Minh Inc., is pursuing a class action lawsuit against the state of Indiana.
I’m sure we’re all enjoying the government’s transition to a Letters of Marque operation. It’s like the IRS with fewer steps.
Richard Overum is not a member of law enforcement or a government official. He’s something else: a rarefied practitioner in a line of work he’s all but created for himself. He hunts businesspeople he suspects are breaking the law—a job that by virtue of oft-overlooked sections of federal law can end up paying remarkably well. Tucked into the Dodd-Frank Act, which Congress passed in the wake of the Bernie Madoff scandal and the economic calamity of the late aughts, are provisions meant to encourage people who spot signs of potential financial wrongdoing to come to the government with information. The incentive? If the agencies take enforcement action based on a tip resulting in sanctions in excess of $1 million, the law says, one or more whistleblowers can earn an award equal to 10 to 30 percent of what’s collected.
I’m sure we’re all enjoying the government’s transition to a Letters of Marque operation. It’s like the IRS with fewer steps.
Pineda has since reached out to Tesla to try and figure out what caused the car to lock with her child inside, with little in the way of answers offered by the automaker so far. According to Fox11, the company initially thought the issue stemmed from a software update, but upon inspection of the vehicle they found that “nothing was wrong with the car.”
Software. Is there anything it can’t do? Read that last sentence again, and think about what I really meant.
This work argues that hallucinations in language models are not just occasional errors but an inevitable feature of these systems. We demonstrate that hallucinations stem from the fundamental mathematical and logical structure of LLMs. It is, therefore, impossible to eliminate them through architectural improvements, dataset enhancements, or fact-checking mechanisms.
Software. Is there anything it can’t do? Read that last sentence again, and think about what I really meant.
But here’s the strange thing. Readers are hungry for the longer, smarter writing that these periodicals refuse to publish. As a result, readers increasingly bypass the magazine and deal directly with writers.
That’s the new reality in media. Readers are now more loyal to writers than they are to periodicals. They seek them out. They trust them more. The magazine as an aggregating concept is increasingly irrelevant.
Video killed the radio star, and Substack killed Reader’s Digest. Or something.
Yet, that’s the problem: I am in love with the idea of having published a book, but not with publishing a specific book. I want to have published a book and have the identity of ‘author’, in the same way one might want to have ‘learned to read Mandarin’ or ‘become a bodybuilder’, but not to actually sweat through memorizing (and then forgetting) endless arbitrary characters or hours in the gym (followed by gluttony as cruel as the starvation).
Video killed the radio star, and Substack killed Reader’s Digest. And the lack of an advance kills books in the womb.
Why bother buying an eSIM adapter just to use eSIM plans in the first place? The reason is cost. The best eSIMs for international travel are often significantly cheaper than buying a local SIM card when you arrive at your destination. Plus, they’re more convenient to set up because you can buy them before you leave home.
I recently traveled out of the country, and my phone service provider charged me five dollars a day extra, on top of their usual exorbitant rate. Yeah, I want an eSIM adapter, and a couple of rolls of toilet paper to put in Verizon’s shrubs.
If you are looking to buy or sell a Church, you have come to the right place! With full time real estate experience since 1987, and selling Church property since 1993, “The Church Lady”, will make your real estate purchase or sale go smoothly. As an expert in the field of Church Sales, Cheryl is well versed in the needs of today’s Churches, and will help you sell your existing property for top dollar, while assisting you in the purchase or construction of your new worship facility.
I estimate that Uber’s arrival to a city resulted in decline in the unemployment rate by between a fifth and a half of a percentage point. This suggests that Uber allowed many workers to supplement their earnings during periods of unemployment, framing the ridesharing service as a complement to, rather than a substitute for, traditional employment. I also find some evidence that Uber had a very small positive effect on wages at the lower end of the wage distribution, suggesting that Uber may have altered worker search behavior or affected bargaining power.
Everyone is taking an Uber ride everywhere except to church, I guess.
There’s the roundup for today. Now go out there and make Tuesday pay for the way Monday treated you.
[Thanks for reading and commenting, buying my books, recommending this site to your interfriends, and hitting the tip jar. It is greatly appreciated]
I would prefer to be more positive in my observations about life in general on this blog, but life isn’t often cooperative these days. So you’re fed a steady diet of mordant remarks from me, mostly. Snark. I try to be (act) bemused mostly. That’s not a recipe for big success on these here interwebs. The intertunnel is essentially dedicated to being nasty. “Everyone is a small h Hitler and here’s why” is the internet’s business plan.
It’s long since become a fool’s errand to try to find anyone on the Toob who is doing sensible construction work of any kind. That goes double for furniture. Everyone is as crazy as the raccoon-eyed serial snouthouse-farmhouse barn-door defacer pictured in the title image for the following video. The man who made the video is a different story.
This guy is trying. He’s made a very small discovery, even though it seems earth shaking to him. There is no useful information on the internet for him, at least anywhere he knows where to look. He has, egad, cracked a book or two and discovered there’s info in them there book stacks. Good for him.
I’ve seen several of his videos. I think he shows a commendable amount of curiosity, effort, and common sense that’s pretty rare on the Toob. He’s got half-a-million subscribers to his channel, so the Toob is sending people his way. They all think he’s the love child of Vitruvius and Norm Abram. He’s hardly that. But what you’re seeing is the honest search for answers in a world that hides them from you in a morass of meta information. He wants to learn, but he doesn’t know where or how to find help.
He makes the kinds of errors I expect with the internet autodidact. In times past, someone with more experience would steer guys like him away from obvious mistakes they’ve encountered and learned from in the past. I saw him nailing red cedar clapboards on an expensive house using a butane cordless finish nailer. That one made my eye twitch. But I had the urge to help him, not excoriate him. Dude, hot dipped galvanized box nails driven with the heads in contact, but not countersunk, is the answer. And prime the claps, front and back, before you put them up. Saying “the painter will fix that” is bad carpentry.
Now I’m really going to help him, even though he’ll never see this, because he’d have to wade through thirty thousand miles of Home&Garden drivel to get here. But here goes. Dover Publications.
Your local library isn’t going to help you here. They’re only interested in how many mommies Heather has at this point. You’re going to have to spend coin and hunt around to build your own library of useful information. Dover Publications is like a cheat code. They’ve got lots of interesting and useful stuff.
You’ll learn another hard lesson, though, as you accumulate books. Most books about architecture, carpentry, HVAC, plumbing, electrical work, site work, engineering, you name it, have only a few pages of trenchant stuff in each one. Like Toob videos, the covers are often come-ons that don’t deliver much. You’re going to have to get a lot of books. Viz:
There’s a good starter set from my office. And I don’t want to discourage you, but I have four more shelves just like it, and boxes of books in walk in closets, too. But you’re on the right track with your mini library.
If I were you, I’d start the same way I did. I made all the bookshelves.
All in all, Maine is pretty nice. Its got a seaside, and mountains, and sylvan glades full of bullwinkles, and primeval forests full of wanderers in REI gear, or carrying a chainsaw. It’s lively in the big cities, which aren’t big at all, and few and far between. It’s quiet out among the fleas, trees, and disease if you go west or north. Canadians have inherited a reputation for being polite and inoffensive, but it’s Mainers everyone is really thinking of. I’m not sure there are any Canadians left in Canada, and I’m cold enough already, so I’m not going to check. You could do worse than Maine, and you probably have.
So on today’s special edition of Great Moments in Maine Real Estate, we’re going to throttle back on the snide remarks, and show you what you could buy in Maine if you had way too much money, but more taste than our Camden compadres. You’re going to have to pony up an extra half-a-mil, but once you’re over two million, it’s a rounding error, really. You could move to Portland:
Portland’s not the capital of Maine. Ogguster is. Portland is the largest city, but it ain’t large, really. There are about 70,000 people milling around in it. In its general aspect, it’s a miniature Boston. It has a waterfront that is currently duking it out between fishing boats and condominiums. Condos always win, guys. It has a rabbit warren of streets nearby everyone calls the Old Port. It’s nothing but bars and restaurants and tchotchke stalls as far as the eye can see, at least if you have myopia. Lively.
It all pretty pleasant, but it has neighborhood called the West End, that most people covet for an address. This brick wonder is smack dab in the middle of it.
A lot of Portland is made of brick. The whole town burned down a couple of times, and people got tired of carrying water buckets around, and put up brick piles to save trouble. This house was built in 1868, “commissioned by Maine’s Governor Washburn.” That’s an inelegant turn of phrase, but real estate agents are veritable wizards at concatenating sentences that raise more questions than they answer. Commissioned? Did he build it but not live in it? Did he die before it was finished? Is it a spec house? (I doubt it). At any rate, Washburn was a founding member of the Republican Party, also according to the realtor. If you’re trying to sell a house in Portland, Maine, these days, I woulda skipped that. While the whole rest of the state is Alabama with snow, Portland Maine tries as hard as it can to be Portland, Oregon politically. Luckily, they’re bad at it, so the place is still quite liveable.
It’s a handsome looking place, innit? It’s got a better garage than the Frank Lloyd Wrong place in Camden, too. You could sell it for way more than the half-a-mil difference in price, and just between you and me, I’d rather live in this garage than that other house:
Of course I’m committing an architectural abomination by calling it a garage instead of a coach house, but time marches on and we must acknowledge it.
Unlike every other house for sale everywhere, the current owners of this house have avoided the siren song of modern farmhouse chic, left the place alone, and simply took care of it. It’s still nice in there, instead of a gray floor, gray wall, barn door, live-laugh-love featureless monstrosity.
Yeah, I could just about put up with this place:
These poor benighted souls put the Roman columns right-side up.
The kitchen is nothing special, thank God. It looks like normal people could cook food and clean up in there, which is more than you can say for the fussy quartz counter Home&Garden TV abattoirs you see nowadays. And the bedrooms just look like a pleasant place to sleep, instead of “spaces” you could have dirigible races in:
The en-suite master bath is posh. The guest bath isn’t too shabby either:
I’d rather live in the au pair suite on the top floor than the house in Camden. It’s pleasant. Pleasant is underrated these days:
So move to Spring Street in Portland. You won’t be my neighbor, which is a plus for you. You’ll have to bring money, but that’s true in places like Oakland CA, which looks like a war zone to me. Only dogs crap on the sidewalk in Portland, and their owners pick it, too. The property tax is only $2,500 a month (!). I’m sure the town will spend it wisely.
I suppose, unlike the realtor, I should be completely honest, and mention something about winter.
Now you real estate people have really gone and done it. You’ve enticed me — no, compelled me — strike that — backed me into a corner and forced me to use an honest to goodness, Anglo-Saxon word in the title. Nothing but strong language, and a strong drink nearby, will prepare you for the residential feast of worms you’re about to eat. Normally, on Great Moments in Maine Real Estate, we feature a melange of different real estate fiascos. Not today. Just one house in this installment, and it takes the moldy dumb cake. Ladies and gemmen, I give you The Camden Architectural Apocalypse, by the architects Sodom and Gomorrah, AIA:
You’re going to have to keep two things in mind before we venture further. Firstly, once we really get going, you’re going to completely forget that no matter how bizarre the house is, how thunder and lightning vulgar, psychedelic flashback inducing, spastic budgeted, delirium tremens suborned that this place appears, it’s nothing but a split level ranch with two undersized garage doors. Try to stay focused.
Secondly, it’s in Camden Maine:
Courtesy of King of Hearts on Wikimedia
Now, if you’re unfamiliar with Maine in general, and Camden in particular, I’ll try to explain both. For the most part, Maine is an undifferentiated morass of bogs, trees, mud, flies, barren-looking potato fields, wind and solar farm abominations, dotted only occasionally with trailer parks and the vinyl-sided hulks of capes, farmhouses, and bungalows. It’s huge, with no one in it. Well, except for a strip along the southern coast, which includes Camden, where Thurston Howell VII summers, and uses summer as a verb.
Camden is close to the perfect imaginary ideal image of Maine everyone “from away” thinks of when he thinks of our fair state. Despite what you see in the picture, it’s not just a yacht club that won’t let in any garlic eaters. Camden is a twee village hard by the Atlantic, just far enough from Boston and New York to feel like vacation if you’re a partner in a white-shoe law firm. It’s a mayonnaise on white bread sandwich traditionally peopled by rich swells with lots of whales on their pants and zeroes in their trust funds. These people are capable of anything. They’ll eat rhubarb for dessert, and look you right in the eye and tell you they like it.
But they’re not capable of living in a split level ranch under any circumstances, even if it costs 2.2 million spondulicks like this one does. And boyo, am I going to show you some circumstances. What this thing is doing, and doing in Maine, is a dark and bloody mystery to me.
A slight digression: On the intertunnel, it’s fairly common to find numerous writers who make a hobbyhorse out of disliking Baby Boomers. I suspect that it’s mostly because their parents would rather go on cruises than do the decent thing and die suddenly, in order to leave enough money for them to buy more Lego sets and Star Wars action figures than the other middle-aged guys that work in their cubicle farm. I can’t say I blame them. Technically, I’m a Boomer, and I don’t like Abba or flared pants or Hamburger Helper or mustaches or ‘vettes or shag carpeting or hot tubs or avocado and harvest gold appliances. But a word of caution to my friends who hate me and my cohort over nothing more than the calendar: When the Boomers croak, the last architect who could use a T-square and pencil will be gone, and all you have left is people who learned architecture from Minecraft:
Let’s step inside, shall we?
As the pornographer once said, there’s a lot to take in here, but if everyone does their best, I’m sure we can get through it.
Let’s start with those, ahem, columns. Pilasters, almost. You know, when I spend big money on Corinthian capitals for my pole-like structures, I don’t want to waste them way up high where the chandeliers soar. I put them upside-down on the floor, where everyone can enjoy them. Easier to dust the acanthus leaves, too.
Then of course, the first thing I do when I come home from a hard day of selling opium in China, or whatever your WASPy relatives did to make Camden money, is to fix myself a good, stiff drink. Luckily, this has been already been taken care of, courtesy of a pixellated-tile bar over on the right. In this house, everything you can think of has been taken care of for you, including many, many things no one sane person would ever think of.
Hey, let’s look at the kitchen, or should I say, kitschen:
Now, I’m not going to exaggerate here, because what’s the point of that? It’s quite possible that the countertops are not made from recycled bowling balls and skateboard wheels. It’s likely, but not certain, so I’m not going to accuse anyone without more proof. Never mind that. I’ve been alive a long time. Long enough, apparently, to finally find someone who thought it would be a grand idea to tile both the inside and the outside of the kitchen cabinets, and finish it off a faux marble flat astragal moulding. Unless it’s not faux. Then I sit corrected.
If the kitchen leaves your stomach unsettled, repair to the bathroom to compose yourself, and — whoah Nellie:
Boy howdy, they love that tile. Most of the house is encrusted with it. I love the crystal funerary sink and the roll of paper towels to dry your hands. Very classy. And that tub. I’m not sure if you’re supposed to get in it and look out, or be outside it and look in. If you’re not Gussie Fink-Nottle, I’m not sure I grok the utility of it. There are eleventy bathrooms in the joint, and they all have them.
Most of the the bedrooms are comparatively staid, if you overlook the gold lame headboards, anyway. There are gigantic televisions everywhere. In some cases, they’re stacked on on top of the other, like here. I’m trying to picture two people in bed watching two different things at the same time, but I can’t. Not without going back to the foyer for another stiff one.
My wife pointed out something. Many rooms have these little tables and ergonomic chairs in the corner. She said it looked like a manicure station from a salon. Dear Buddha, is this house built with the proceeds of a mani pedi empire? They’ve got calendars hanging over them, too, to keep track of the appointments.
The garage is interesting. I had Lyme Disease once. That was also interesting. I’m trying to conjure up a flooring material worse for a garage than polished granite, but I can’t. The marble door surrounds try to compete with the floor, and the brass railings, but they can’t compete, either. I predict that someone will compete with that column sooner or later. And lose.
The landscaping ceded the field early on to the hardscaping. When you’ve got a fountain and elephants to do the heavy exterior lifting, why even bother. They didn’t. Seventeen gas station flowers did the trick.
The RE listing uses several adjectives that can be taken two ways that give the game away:
Exquisite
Exacting
Exceptional
Unique
and of course:
Incredible
Well, they hit the target with that last one. I’ve seen it, and I still don’t believe it.
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