Love and Large Language Models

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We went to see the Fantastic Four movie last night. It was OK. Before the film they had a bunch of adverts, including one for Google Gemini, one of the many AI assistants being forced down our throats at the moment. I found this one particularly depressing when it showed the sample query “How do I know if I am really in love?”. Ugh.

This is not what you should use AI for. AI is for things like “how do I unblock a toilet”, or “how do I create a tuple containing only one element in Python”. Not for affairs of the heart. I guess that the creators of AI have decided that most of us don’t need to unblock toilets or create tuples very often (unless our lives have taken a particularly strange turn), so they are moving into other aspects of the human condition.

Please don’t use the tool for things like this. For one thing you need to remember that one of the aims of an AI assistant is to keep you talking as long as possible (a bit like a hostage negotiator) and to do this it will tell you things it thinks you might like to hear. For another, remember that, since you aren’t paying for the service, Google will soon move on to monetising your engagements, so questions about love might well end up resulting in your next searches returning lots of adverts for chocolates and underwear.

I must admit I quite enjoy talking to AI when I’m doing stuff with it, and it is not a huge step to starting to think that the software understands me and cares what I am doing. But it doesn’t and it doesn’t. It just wants to keep me talking.

Back to Cassettes

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Back in the day I had a way with the typewriter…

After my recent purchase of an old Hi-Fi system I’ve dug out a bunch of nearly fifty year old cassettes I recorded back in the 1970’s. Now, you might have heard that old tape falls apart, loses its signal and all the oxide comes off. Not in my experience. All the tapes I’ve tried so far work fine. My particular favourites are the things that I recorded from the weekly chart show. They have survived perfectly, complete with FM static and extra interference when a car drove past the flat or the chap upstairs turned on his hairdryer.

If you happen to have a bunch of old cassettes lying around I’d strongly advise you to dig them out and have a listen.

Making a black burger at Pots on Pier Street

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Ready for firing

Apparently outings where you do stuff are now the thing. With this in mind, I recommend Pots on Pier Street off Humber Street in Hull. We did some pottery painting a while back in Leeds, which was great fun, and now we can do it much closer to home. We went along this afternoon.

The setup is great, the support impressive and I got the chance to make a black bun version of my previous work.

Tip Tripping

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They have barges down on the river

Went to the rubbish tip. An affair of badly chosen (massive roadworks) and implemented (turned wrong way) routing. But the tip is in a nice place, down by the river at the far side of a bridge not operated by a troll. Or at least I couldn’t see one.

Non-troll operated bridge

The tip is self-service, lots of labelled bins waiting for their particular type of rubbish. I really hope that they don’t tip all the bins into one big skip at the end of the day.

I’d taken the pass you are supposed to show when you want to throw things away but nobody asked me for it. Maybe next time. Looking at what’s in the garage, there will be a next time….

Live Aid at 40

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I didn’t get to see much of Live Aid back in 1985. I was working in Paris for a couple of weeks, teaching American students how to program the BBC Micro. Skills which I’m sure they found useful when they got back to the ‘states. The flat I was staying in didn’t have a telly, so I only saw bits and bobs in bars and whatnot when we went out. We watched some of the concert last night, when the BBC reprised the show. I really enjoyed it. Random observations:

  • Leather trousers were big in 1985, which must have been lovely in the heat of Wembley stadium in July.

  • It was interesting to watch the camera operators waving around enormous broadcast cameras to get close ups of the performers. This must have been quite ground (and back) breaking for the time.

  • Apparently Queen spent three days honing their 16 minute set. It really showed. Freddy Mercury was a genius.

  • You could pay your donations in a Giro bank account at you local post office. Imagine that.

  • They had the famous actor (and Hull University Honorary Doctor - I was at the ceremony) John Hurt on and asked him his favourite band. He gave a very diplomatic answer which was fortuitously (for him) cut short by the next band starting up. America had Jack Nicholson. And Bette Midler.

  • Nobody in the crowd was holding up a phone to record the show. I wonder why that was?

Go See Pride and Prejudice in Scarborough

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As everybode kno I consider myself a very cultured person. I’ve watched most of the Marvel movies and I know the numbers and pilots of all the Thunderbird craft. Last night I went to the theatre to further burnish my cultural credentials. We saw Pride and Prejudice at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough.

I did a bit of due diligence before we set out and, after discovering that the story does not include any aliens, car chases, superheroes or “14 minutes to save the earth” moments, I took the precaution of ordering beer and ice-cream for the interval. At least that way I would have something to look forward to during the evening.

As it turned out I needn’t have bothered (although the beer and ice-cream was very nice). The play was awesome. The production was enthusiastically acted and imaginatively staged. The best thing about the way it was done is that it was definitely not the “Lizzy and Darcy Show”.(showing knowledge of the actual plot - go me).

All of the accompanying characters were very well rounded out and you got an understanding of how difficult it was to make your way through those times if you had made the mistake of being born without any money to your name. Lots of great lines from the book made it onto the stage, and the casting was inspired, including a few of the actors “doubling up” on characters which worked incredibly well.

If you think that classic literature, or plays aren’t your thing you really should go along to see the play and have your mind changed. It won’t cost you much more than going to see the latest superhero reboot (which will be on telly soon anyway) and you can order beer and ice-cream for half time. Win win.

Thunderbirds are Go - ish

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Over the weekend I thought I’d show a young guest the joys of the Thunderbirds TV show. They were suitably impressed (or very polite). However, I wasn’t able to show the higher quality version with the better sound and pictures, even though I remember watching this just after I bought the TV series from Apple TV a few years ago. All that Apple TV serves up now is the original 4:3 version with the mono soundtrack.

I’ve had this before with digital media. An album that I bought will lose tracks, or they will change into different versions. Or a service will vanish leaving me with nothing for the money I spent with them. Such is modern life I suppose. In the meantime I’ve spent thirty quid on a Blu-Ray version of the show. Come the digital apocalypse at least I’ll still be able to watch the adventures of Scott and Virgil and the rest of International Rescue.

South Yorkshire Aircraft Museum is awesome

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We didn’t really set out to visit South Yorkshire Aircraft Museum, we were really on the way to Doncaster Gaming Market. But we had tickets for the 1:00pm entry and some time to spare so we went along to look at aircraft and helicopters for a while.

They’ve got a lot of stuff under cover, plus a whole bunch of aircraft and helicopters outside.

There are also loads of exhibitions and displays, including an aircraft control room. There’s also lots of material about the blitz and what it was like to go through. Thought provoking stuff and well worth a look.

Tidying up the home page

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I’ve done some tidying up of this site. I’ve got rid of the word cloud thing, which served only to remind me that I’ve written lots of posts about things that no longer exist. In its place I’ve put some links to things that are ongoing and folks might find interesting.

If you think there are other things I could do which would improve “The Rob Miles on-line experience” please let me know in the comments.

Update: I’ve put the tag cloud back. You can now find it on the top menu. I’ve also added a “Bad Jokes” link.

Current Flow

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You know that feeling when you put a teacake in the toaster, push down the lever and everything goes out. I do. It happened at teatime today. Turned out that a wayward raisin had bridged the gap between the element and the case of the toaster causing a current flow (yay!) which tripped the circuit breaker. It took me three goes to fix it, but now I can make toast again.