Apropos, today's MOTD is "The Computer made me do it."

I listened to one last night. It started with a man sitting behind a mic. A gorgeous man, long flowing mane--think vikingish. He looked into the screen and said something like "We have Humans reading Human stories here!", then launched into the story. Great reading voice, deep with good diction. The story was standard pulp fiction, though.

I didn't catch any AI tells until halfway through, when he came upon the word "patterns", only he said "pattrens". It was surprising to me for a self-described "expert narrator" to make a mistake like that. But I know that shit happens, so I just put up a yellow flag and continued. Later on in the story "patterns" came up again. Again, he says "pattrens"--the same way, the same inflection. Red flag. No thumb for you!

I listened to the last few minutes to see if I could find any other tells. No joy. I reflected: When the story started I appreciated the "human interface", but also considered that AI can generate video as well as sound, and the beginning "human" was less than 30" long, so wasn't sold on it. After half the story I was starting to think that the narrator was legit, so it was doing a decent job. I was also thinking "this story is shit" and tiresome.

I did detect the AI pattrens in this, but it's getting harder.

For TrueAI(tm), it must fail to spot the climax and just keep ramblin' along.

That makes sense. What doesn't make sense to me is that I feel that it has gotten worse. I remember thinking that a few years ago that live transliteration seemed to be getting pretty good. I remember testing out early Dragon speech-to-text software and not being impressed, so maybe I had set my expectations so low that that even muddling translations were a real improvement, and I misremember how well it was really doing.

Murph D'Egg is such a boss.

Yeah, could be, could be. They looked at an environment where Fox was knocking it out of the park, and The Supremes determinated that news is entertainment, and doesn't have to be factual. As humans tend to do, they either look for a counter, or decide to adapt to the new environment.

Thanks for the link. I read the discussion here back when the Go decision was made, but did not see Manley's vid at the time.

Heh. Since space is not a Right-To-Repair jurisdiction, maybe they couldn't run diags.

Back to the PTT, I can just see the commander yelling at a Motorola handmic floating in front of his face, curlycord snaking into the dashboard...XKCD could do something funny with it.

Yes. Today it's not the only, nor maybe even the best, information source. But it is still a useful tool. I quite enjoyed watching the Artemis II splashdown a little bit ago. We enjoyed it on the bigscreen on one of the networks, but I monitored it on my comp to be able to hear comms when the talking heads on TV stepped on them. I had it on the NasaTV app on my phone for when I wandered outside. (that worked until the app foobared :( but yt worked :)

Many moons ago I did something similar for business: it took a little time and it was a bit tricky and a little amazing that it worked at all. Nowadays it's commonplace and unremarkable.

I remember Mickey$oft had a short-lived thing, "Digital Nervous System" or some such nonsense, and trumpeted as "DNS". I thought, "Do they really think they can co-opt a standard acronym of the Internet?"

I read that as "parasitical" relationship. Eh, tomayto/tomahto.

I'm reminded of an old Heinlein novel, "Friday". One chapter describes an environment of immersive gambling in all walks of life.

A quick setup with shameless copypasta from the usual source:

"Friday is a 1982 science fiction novel by American writer Robert A. Heinlein. It is the story of a female "artificial person", the eponymous Friday, genetically engineered to be stronger, faster, smarter, and generally better than normal humans. Artificial humans are widely resented, and much of the story deals with Friday's struggle both against prejudice and to conceal her enhanced attributes from other humans. The story is set in a Balkanized 21st century, in which the nations of the North American continent have been split up into a number of smaller states."

Friday is a ""combat courier in a quasi-military organization", traveling across the globe and to some of the near-Earth space colonies."..."Friday travels through the California Confederacy, the Lone Star Republic...and the Chicago Imperium as she attempts to reach her headquarters."

Well, ol' Bob had a lot of fun describing a California Republic, er, Confederacy of the future (no, he didn't go there--it was just a name). The Governor is some old guy who wore a war bonnet, f'rinstance, and "Lottery Day" is a national holiday. People roll dice with cops to see if they're really going to get that traffic ticket. It was one of the lighter chapters in the book, and Heinlein played it for laughs. I enjoyed it and imagine people not from California would enjoy it even more. Anyways, Friday happens to win the big jackpot on Lottery Day (a lot of Heinlein's books work best when the protagonists are independently wealthy). It's a big scene and the entire population breathlessly awaits the televised results. When she wins she gets the great honor of being presented with the winnings by the Governor in front of the cameras (contraindicated for a combat courier). Shenanigans ensue. More stuff like that, then the story moves along.

Ok, so that's the relevant bit. I'll close with this: The book got several awards nods and was a fun read. One critical viewer had this to say, "Heinlein's ability to write a sentence that makes you want to read the next sentence remains unparalleled...Every sentence and every paragraph and page and chapter lead on to the next, but it's just one thing after another, there's no real connection going on. It has no plot, it's a set of incidents that look as if they're going somewhere and don't ever resolve, just stop." Frankly that's one of the things I liked about it. While not a stream of consciousness work like perhaps Vonnegut would do (which would have the same criticisms), it was an adventure story dealing with the random hits of an impersonal universe whose only "plot" is to eventually kill you.

Funny.

But...“People don’t realize just how much time their TV-watching habit–or, shall I say, addiction–eats up. Four hours of television a day, over the course of a month, adds up to 120 hours. That’s five entire days! Why not spend that time living your own life, instead of watching fictional people live theirs? I can’t begin to tell you how happy I am not to own a television.”...when I look at the last paragraph, I think, "He's not wrong."

The sun is behind Earth. The "dark" side of Earth is lit by moonglow and photographed with a large f-stop. I'm assuming that the light in the center is a reflection from inside the capsule. It may not have been apparent to the photographer, but a camera with wide-open aperture can pick up stuff that the eye can't see.

"Sure as shit would have been nice to lead off with those actual professional accomplishments"

WTF? This is NASA. Whatever else you think is going on there, those kinds of things are a given. And the information trivially available.