Posts

Up The Proverbial Creek...

-
Image
I wrote the other day about The Great Bishop's Castle Power Outage - actually it lasted little more than an hour, but brought the town to pretty much a standstill - which made me think: how much survival resilience do we actually have, here in the second quarter of the twenty-first century? Answer, practically none. As soon as the power goes down, pretty much every aspect of our lives goes down with it. Which is actually kind of worrying. We were subjected to a freak power outage in the mid-nineties, when we lived in Brynbella, down on the A5, on the outskirts of Bethesda, at Christmas. An ice-storm - a very rare phenomenon in the UK - had taken down every wooden power pole across the tops from Aber. We were amongst a very small number of properties that were still fed with electricity from this very old circuit across the mountain. Suffice to say, we were without power from Christmas Eve, through Christmas Day and beyond: we gave up and drove to the Midlands to stay with parents o...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Abyssal Of Great Ideas

-
Image
I had a thought [shit happens, I know] this morning about chasing down some of the history surrounding our software development back in the '90s/00s: viz the VBase/InfinitImages days of yore. I then thought, why not chuck some questions at Claude AI and see what comes back? So, mindful of the fact that a carefully formed prompt or question posed to a LLM will elicit more sense than a stupid question, I simply stated the following: ' In the 1990s there was a Photoshop plugin called FotoPage which has disappeared from sale - can you research this for me? '. What followed was very interesting, as the AI came up with exactly correct details about both the product and our development of it, and found an archived, compressed version of one of the range on the Tucows archive. It correctly returned the chronology of the software's development, up to and including its year of demise. It then went on to accurately analyse the two principal technical reasons why the product(s) eve...
Post a Comment
Read more

Another Language Dies of Shame...

-
Image
The late, oh, so great, Alex Harvey sang, or rather er habt sprechgesang gemacht '...another tree dies of shame...' on the 1975 Sensational Alex Harvey Band album, "Tomorrow Belongs To Me" in the song "The Tale of The Giant Stoneater". Like so much of the SAHBs output, the lyrical content and intent of the album's songs is so genuinely right on in the original meaning of the phrase - please don't use the term 'woke' in this context - and carries forward to the present day prescient warnings from over half a century ago: the radical shift to the right and neo-liberalism was a mere twelve/eighteen months in the future from the album's release. The environmental and political issues that have dogged us persistently since then are still as thorny and unresolved now as then. I picked up on a linguistic parallel to this today in a book review in this week's New Statesman. In Sophia Smith Galer's new book, "How To Kill a Language...
Post a Comment
Read more

Journey

-
Image
  Our recent stay in Clun and many visits to The White Horse Inn [blog posts passim] prompted me to ease myself back into my family tree researches after a break of over a year - or is it two? Tempus does fugit without due warning at my age. A realisation struck me about the apparent mobility of family members across the Marches, the Midlands and Wales back in the nineteenth century which, given their poverty, I'd always wondered about; when the penny dropped: the railways. Also, when you look at the map, all the areas of concern to my familial archaeology are within relatively short distances of each other, and connected by what was then a comprehensive rail network. Pictured is my latest little acquisition: a facsimile of Bradshaw's Guide of the 1860s, which I bought to try and flesh out some of the travel background of the time. Using this with some of the other books of railway history I have to hand, I hope to get a better flavour for the movements of people at the time in...
Post a Comment
Read more

Nearly Half A Century On...

-
Image
I realised today that I, for the first time in my life, had failed to keep up with current technology: specifically, AI. The move from from chat-based interfaces to multi-modal agentic models over the last few [months, to be honest] has taken me rather by surprise. I've always taken some pride in the fact that I can always [at least cursorily] keep up with things techno-logic-al, and I find for the first time in my life that I've been blind-sided by the breakneck speed of developments in AI and its deployment in real-world situations. I aim to catch up; even at my advanced age there is simply no excuse for laxity in these matters: current knowledge should not be the exclusive domain of the young, don't you know. Anyhow, I decided to dip my toes a little further into the - as yet - little-known waters of agentic AI, and posed a question that models my undergraduate thesis' inquiry [although my dissertation was a good deal longer in the end]: “I need a discursive essay of...
Post a Comment
Read more

Cogito Ergo Sum, I Think...

-
Image
Still feeling a tad jaded and disoriented after our return from the short break in Shropshire last week; yesterday was a long day, and I started today after one of those fevered returns to sleep early this morning which evinced a dream from which I still haven't quite escaped the clutches. However, I opened this week's New Statesman just now to a review of Sebastian Mallaby's recently published book "The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, Deepmind, and the Quest for Superintelligence" [Allen Lane, 480pp £30.00]; and interesting reading it makes, too. Asked by Mallaby if he thinks AI will 'be a bigger change than the Industrial Revolution', Hassabis likens AI more to that most radical human evocation of self and the realisation of such; the making of handprints on a cave wall, tens of thousands of years ago: the very first externalisation of our inner selves; the genesis of human culture and civilisation embodied in an abstraction of self in communication wi...
Post a Comment
Read more

Turn, Turn, Turn...

-
Image
Just a diary post tonight as I've been on the move since the crack of sparrow's fart today and what with the drive home, unpacking, and generally coming down to earth here in Fairview Heights, I really can't bring any depth of thought or perspicacity of perception to the table tonight. We had a good journey back from Shropshire with wall to wall sunshine for the majority of it, save some mist before we left the vales for the main roads back home. When we started loading the car around 07:00 this morning, the temperature was just three degrees celsius, and the car was white over with frost. By the time we crossed the border into Cymru, however, the temperature had risen to a very balmy eighteen celsius. The rest of the day has been glorious, and the garden has started to make its voice heard in our absence: our Clematis arch has started producing blooms [pictured], and will look an absolute picture in the coming week or so. Much work to do in the garden, but the weather look...
Post a Comment
Read more

Followers