Observations from a Hill

Number One Son and I were talking earlier about AI forms of English, and how the tropes that A.I uses in its use of the language are detectable, given that one knows something less than trivial about the stylistics of normal human usages. There is a piece in the Weekend FT of 29/30th August by Elaine Moore on this very subject. NOS pointed out that such odd stylistic traits are possibly now re-entering human speech through a process of normalisation through exposure - errant feedback loops, anyone? [cf. blog posts passim] - which in turn will be further internalised by the LLMs that are feeding off our own usages of the English - or any other language, for that matter - regurgitating and amplifying said tropes on the way. All well and good whilst there are still those of us around who know differently; those of us born and raised before the A.I era. But: What about those who are being born into this era of mutant and mutated knowledge, who will have no other context in which to frame w...

  OK - pictured, one of the images of dry-aged beef that I intended to use for last night's post, but was thwarted from using because of whatever weird server anomaly obtained with Blogger, which was preventing me from uploading locally-stored images from my computer. I still don't know what is causing the issue, but for a brief window, and using a different browser, having cleared all the caches, blah, blah, blah, &etc., I managed to insert the above in this page. However, I'm not holding my breath that the underlying cause of this glitch is actually being addressed. We shall see; but in the interim I'll continue to post as best I can, whilst setting up a parallel site on my own server space with Gandi.net; whose services, based in France, I've been using for ten years now, with no real hiccups or stress. Once I get the ghost site working I'll parallel the two up for a while before finally migrating to the new one and possibly maintaining this one as a back...

There is no planned image on tonight's post because Blogger seems to be having a sodding fit tonight, so here we are. I only seem at the moment to be able to load up previously used images from blog posts past, so here's one of a steak that I've already consumed: I think it might be my retirment day meal. However, imagine, if you will, large and expensive cuts of dry-aged beef on display in one of the better retail meat establishments... I've just subscribed to a butcher's YouTube channel, which seems like probably the least likely statement I might normally have contemplated uttering. But there you go: the prospect of watching a butcher carving up half a ton of prime Scottish grass-fed ninety-day beef in over half an hour of video might not appeal to many, but I do like beef and I do like to watch a craftsman at work. The piece I watched was  this one , and its content is self-explanatory and worth the watch, especially if you buy your meat from the supermarket. Th...

A.I has its uses, undoubtedly; it can simplify workflows, generate images and videos from the written ideas of human content producers which can be genuinely creative, given that the person prompting the A.I model[s] has at least a modicum of creativity themselves. Think brush, paint, canvas, klutz vs. brush, paint, canvas, artistic sensibility. As always with machines and tools of any sort, human skill will always be necessary to initiate a creative and worthwhile process of production in order to lead to a useful or aesthetically pleasing outcome, itself a function of need outwith the scope of any A.I 'awareness'. Without human prompting, what would an A.I model produce in the vacuum of its own virtual space, left to its own devices; and why would 'it' care, assuming that the concept of 'caring' meant anything to 'it' in the first place, except as an abstraction of that very human concept? The problem for A.I is that it genuinely does live [quasi-exist...

As I've mentioned before, I read the Financial Times; always at the weekend, and once or twice in the week. Where other news outlets are politically biassed to a greater or lesser degree, the FT generally sits at one remove from all of that. It follows only the money and reports on what politics is doing to the world of money: "Without Fear and Without Favour" to quote its strap line. Hence, you often come away from reading it with an interesting and illuminating basket of views, almost, as it were, from the sidelines. From today's copy: Pete Hegseth, the US Defence Secretary, seems to be doing his level best to bring the US armed forces to its knees, fuelled by his President's continued 'adventures' in the Middle East and having sacked or forced out just about anyone of worth and/or experience from the military side of US government; which inevitably exacerbates the now stupendous debt mountain being accrued by Trump and his administration as they burn th...

We watched 'The African Queen' again this afternoon, for the umpteenth time, a film that has been a constant part of my movie landscape for as long as I can remember, and one of which I will never tire of watching. I remember exactly where I saw it first: as a young child, one Christmas, at my nan and grandad's house in Rotton Park Road, Birmingham, the house in which I was born nearly seventy-two years ago. The film was, for many years, repeated on TV every Christmas Day or Boxing Day here in the UK, which in retrospect seems an odd choice of seasonal movie programming, given its setting and narrative. It's kind of hokey and arch in its delivery, but it's really carried by Katherine Hepburn's always wonderful performance and the presence she brought to the screen, no matter the rôle played. Bogart was simply Bogart as always; veering between underplayed to mildly frenetic, but always a joy to watch. We have a number of staple go-to old movies in this house; mos...

The kind of content I routinely watch on YouTube involves a fairly limited set of subjects: music, chess, history, engineering & science; mathematics to a degree, and of course, food . Of the latter I follow a couple of corking Indian cooking channels: Latif's Inspired, which is mostly devoted to Bengali-style cooking, and the Curry Academy, which covers, in the main, British Indian Restaurant [B.I.R] cooking. I watched a couple of their 'casts this evening, one from each channel. The first was from the Academy, outlining a method of cooking an authentic 1970s British Indian Restaurant base gravy, to a recipe from a chef who started his career and honed his craft in that decade: Chef Din. Now, as anyone who frequented B.I.R restaurants back in the day will attest, the curry sauces back then had a very particular flavour and texture that one seldom finds these days, and for which I, for one, harbour nostalgic longings for. I've written before about my first exposure to S...

I've mentioned The Lads here many times, and as recently as the other day: the extended group of [formerly school-] mates that continued long after we had left secondary education, until we became our own diaspora spread far and wide around the UK and the world. Some of us survivors of this once extensive clan still stay in touch via email, the boomer's choice of remote communication. We sometimes get to meet up in person, in ones and twos, although a much larger gathering was formed at the funeral our dear friend Johnny Kyte [blog posts passim]: with representatives a number of the 'sub-tribes' that formed the Venn diagram of friendships within the larger 'super' grouping that was 'The Lads', which, by the time we hit the pubs of Birmingham in earnest back in the early-mid seventies, became very much a larger, mixed gender grouping, as we all started relationships and most got married. We had an email round yesterday to that effect, as it is sixty years...

We went over to Ynys Môn today for a drive out with Carol & Kev who are staying in the cottage for a few days before the next paying guests arrive; fetching up at Pringles - one of the most godawful retail experiences imaginable and to which coach-loads of ageing and aged people [don't say a word] flock in their hundreds every day during holiday seasons. Needless to say it was not my idea, but a pint in the pub opposite before was sufficient fortification to soften the blow. I simply studied the many shelves of fine whiskeys on offer, decided that all were far too expensive for my current pocket and went and sat in the car as the sun turned to showers, listening to Radio Four. We had previously paid a visit to Hooton's farm foods, passing the fields of sunflowers on the way, and bought some veg for tonight's soup; and then went and ate our sandwiches in the car-park of Plas Newydd, before deciding that the café there was effectively a no-go area of similarly old people,...

It's interesting to reflect that the 'internet' - as we would over-simply characterise that huge, sprawling, multi-layered, complex and nuanced network - that we all take as much for granted as we do [at least in the more privileged pockets of humanity] electricity or running clean water - almost never came into being. By which I mean the World Wide Web; those layers of software abstraction and network protocols that seamlessly enable us to suck network bandwidth in the form of cat videos and AI slop. Oh, and some useful stuff as well. Its creator, Tim Berners-Lee had a hard time convincing anyone that his idea actually had any merit at all, and if the naysayers had had their way, the notion of the Web as we know it would have been still-born there and then. But by the August of 1991, the World Wide Web had just one thousand users - all at CERN, where Berners-Lee worked, and the first ever website garnered no more than around  ten visits a day.  This truly was the ground be...

I watched Andy Burnham's first turn addressing Parliament at the sharp end this afternoon, and I have to say I was impressed both by his confidence and the message he was keen to convey. It's interesting to reflect - especially in the light of Keir Starmer's decision to step down as an MP - that, although I voted for Starmer's leadership and was very sceptical about Burnham's challenge for that leadership, that I feel I've been completely wrong on both counts, and it's not an uncomfortable feeling: I like to admit my mistakes where I can. It's good to know you're in the wrong and it's good to admit the fact when faced with it. I was wrong to assume that Starmer's legal background would carry the day in debate: the converse in the political arena proved to be true: he has a good heart, but is no politician. I thought initially that Burnham's challenge was born of ambition and hubris, but I genuinely now believe this not to be the case. I a...