In a groundbreaking move that has both the media industry and my two loyal readers reeling, I, John Band, have decided to embrace the inevitable future. With a nod to my past adventures in experimenting with AI text generators like Grover and Transformer, I've chosen to leapfrog into a new era. Henceforth, all content on … Continue reading Artificial authorship: Why I’m betting my blog on ChatGPT’s wit
Category: Media
Today I have mostly been playing with Transformer, an easy online interface for the 345M OpenAI neural network. The network uses a predictive text model with 345 million parameters to generate plausible endings to any sentences that you give it. I made some lists on Twitter, starting with Borges' Taxonomy of Animals (follow the link … Continue reading A Transformer is turning on its side. Moby looks at its side and decides that maybe Moby will take its side as well!
The UK's worst tabloids are running today on the Glorious Brexity News that the government is planning to spend £500 million on returning British passports to their former glory - changing them from the wicked EU's suspiciously French-sounding burgundy to good traditional English blue/black. The interesting thing about the £500m passport change story is not that it's … Continue reading Don’t believe the 500 million quid passport story until you see it on the side of a bus
I did a thing at Citymetric on the interesting way folks are completely happy for Scottish companies to run the railways in southern England, but lose their minds when Hong Kong companies do the same thing. My favourite self-quote: The RMT, famous for being the least sensible or survival-oriented union in the UK since the National … Continue reading Depends on how foreign your Aberdeens are
One of the most interesting questions after the 2015 UK General Election is, how could all of the electoral polling possibly have gone so incredibly wrong? Labour and the Conservatives were predicted to be neck-and-neck and both short of forming a government on their own, with Labour losing about 50 seats in Scotland to the Scottish Nationalist … Continue reading There was no late swing, and there were no shy Tories
There was a massive fuss last week about the UK Greens' plan to restrict the term of copyright to 14 years, whilst also replacing the current benefits system with a guaranteed basic income that would prevent people with other things to do being forced into paid employment [1]. Suddenly, left-leaning writers who generally claim to … Continue reading On copyright laws and basic economics
The UK's New Economics Foundation, who style themselves as nef because that's the sort of thing that was cool in 2003, are one of the worst think-tanks going [1]. With a couple of weeks to go before the 2015 General Election, they have jumped on the election news bandwagon. Their effort is well up to their normal … Continue reading FPTP doesn’t mean your vote is wasted – just ask a Scot
As I noted last week, celebrated male feminist Sam de Brito wrote an extremely embarrassing article in 2005 praising the pick-up artist seminars organised by RSD, the company that now employs borderline-rapist Julien Blanc. After online political magazine Crikey picked up my story, frog-in-a-sock de Brito issued a petulant denial, both in the comments to … Continue reading Some men never learn
This Sydney Sunday Telegraph piece from a few years back has disappeared down the News Corp memory hole, oddly enough. Before you give it a read, here's a bit of context on the protagonists. RSD is the pick-up artist company that later hired despicable pro-rape arsehole Julien Blanc, of #takedownjulienblanc fame [1]. Sam De Brito … Continue reading Memory hole? Fixed that for ya
The picture is a Banksy mural. It was painted on 30 September 2014, and erased by the end of 1 October 2014. The story was reported by UK media on 2 October 2014 as being "erased after 'racist' complaint", with the implication being that - despite its clear antiracist message - minority groups were offended … Continue reading Not a case of political correctness gorn mad