markjgsmith

2024/07/15 #

• Shoplifting bloke appears to have disapeared the past 2 days, but he’s been replaced by another bloke who basically does the same charade. This bloke has a mobile phone and a backpack, looks much more normal. He stands there for ages looking at his mobile phone, looking confused. Then over to the shop, looking confused. He’s holding a plastic bag with something in it. Then eventually disapears.

  There’s also been this other older bloke on a motorbike that’s stopped two days in a row, yesterday evening with some food gift. He's very grumpy.

  The police did several walk-bys early this morning. That’s unusual. I mention all these things because I know from experience that they will all coalesce into some sort of thing where I get blamed for everything. They always do.

  Even as I write this note, two motorbike gang stalkers drove past and shouted No! at me. And so it goes, everything will be my fault now for the rest of the day. #

• I’ve listenned to several politics podcasts discussing the Trump assassination attempt and though there was much mention of the fist in the air, no one has mentioned the bizare nazi salute thing as he was evacuated from the stage. Was the video I watched a fake?

  Apparently he was shouting 'fight' rather than the f-word, which is what I thought at first. A bit weird but I can see how in the heat of the moment that could happen. But a nazi solute? WTF is that about?

  If it turns out I did watch the official real video, it’s really strange that everyone is just pretending the nazi solute didn’t happen.

  As part of today’s escallations from locals, there has been another photographer (there was one yesterday too), some sexual harrassment and a walk-by past me as I sat in the park earlier loudly saying 'fight fight'. Oh and another police walk-by in the shop / cafe I’m in now. What are the chances? #

• I hope I've reached peak blog post weirdness.

  They seem to be getting a bit weirder everyday.

  Must keep reminding myself we are living in the best days.

  Pretty sure there’s a Beatles song about all this :) #

• There was an interesting interaction between lawyers on a recent Vergecast episode all about music copyright in the age of AI [20:10]:

  Nilay Patel: Professor, let’s say you didn’t have Jonny B Good in the training data, but then you had the entire architecture of Rock ‘n Roll, that is built on Jonny B Good. Could you back your way into Jonny B Good?

  David Pierce: Monkeys and type writers and Shakespeare right? Is that the theory here?

  Nilay Patel: Do you need the seed crystal when you have the whole diamond mine of Rock ‘n Roll?

  Professor Charlie of NYU: That’s a really good question because if you look at this entire era of music where RnB, Rock ‘n Roll, Rockabilly, are all kind of one entity, the music is drawing on 12 bar blues, a very standard song structure, they are often in the same keys that play well on guitar, they are using the same guitar licks, they are mostly using pentatonic scales, they are using the same language, and you might think yeah you could sort of back into that. But the precise rhythms, the exact words? Let’s be clear, the copy is worse, it does not sound nearly as good as the real Jonny B Good.

  He goes on to say anyone defending the AI would lose. But it brings up an important question. Could you train an AI, remember it’s an infinite training regression, that would guarantie a specific output? What if you actually could?

  This is likely bigger than just copyright. It’s much more akin to fate. #

• Isn’t it a bit strange that the EU appears to hate vertically integrated companies like Apple, throwing all sorts of antitrust cases at them, but they also hate crypto, which is basically the opposite of a vertically integrated company? #