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Post by unreg on Mar 17, 2023 15:39:39 GMT -5
During his lifetime, somewhere between 1671 and 1751, Tomaso Albinoni wrote a certain piece of music, That score was eventually housed in the Dresden Library in Germany by 1945...coincidentally, the exact time that Dresden was bombed to ashes. Jump ahead into the 1950's and an Italian, Remo Giazotto, discovers fragments of this score in said library. While most of it was lost in the fires, this little surviving fragment inspires him to finish the piece...which we know as the Adagio in G. You all are incredible… I actually didn’t know Adagio in G. After searching, I think it’s actually Adagio in G minor… but, here it is in case someone else is in the dark too:
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Post by sumgai on Mar 19, 2023 22:40:09 GMT -5
This just popped up on my radar.....
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Post by cynical1 on Mar 20, 2023 4:16:10 GMT -5
This just popped up on my radar..... Wait until they give one of these a Grammy...
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Post by sumgai on Mar 20, 2023 12:22:58 GMT -5
And our first nominee for this year's Grammy award goes to.....
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Post by cynical1 on Mar 20, 2023 12:49:39 GMT -5
Actually, the more I think about it, most pop music could be replaced by an artificial intelligence of this order: HTC1
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Post by newey on Mar 20, 2023 15:26:02 GMT -5
Anyone want to take bets on how many of our members know what that machine is/does? (I never did so personally, but I saw it being used by an old college roomate of mine, who was majoring in the field in which one was used, back in the day.)
I wonder how many people in that field today would even know how to use that . . .Does the term "FORTRAN" even ring any bells nowadays? Or "COBOL"?
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Post by cynical1 on Mar 20, 2023 16:53:07 GMT -5
Anyone want to take bets on how many of our members know what that machine is/does? This was how they tracked our attendance in high school. Everyone had a card and if you were MIA, your card went in a pouch on the door...where a clever bastard with a pocket knife might carefully cut an extra hole in the card, throwing it out of range...and making you oddly present for class... I also took an RPGII programming class. HTC1
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Post by sumgai on Mar 20, 2023 17:41:09 GMT -5
I wonder how many people in that field today would even know how to use that . . .Does the term "FORTRAN" even ring any bells nowadays? Or "COBOL"? Count me in, both times. And here I thought I'd successfully purged my memory of those things... UGH! Operating them, my butt - try fixing the #$%^$@ things! In a war zone!! Bah!
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Post by newey on Mar 20, 2023 19:24:51 GMT -5
I used to bring my roomate Taco Bell when he'd be working late in the computer lab. As a Freshman Computer Science major, he could only get time on the mainframe at like 2 a.m. This was a Control Data behemoth that took up a whole climate-controlled floor, with a group of about 5 guys to keep it running 24/7.
Big trauma one night, I recall, when he fumbled his stack of cards before he'd got the rubber band around 'em, spilled the whole thing onto the floor in a fairly random manner. This occasioned much gnashing of teeth while resorting the cards, trying to get it right before his time ran out.
Whole different world back then, kiddos. - From your Local Curmudgeon.
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Post by ozboomer on Mar 21, 2023 1:14:26 GMT -5
Anyone want to take bets on how many of our members know what that machine is/does? (I never did so personally, but I saw it being used by an old college roomate of mine, who was majoring in the field in which one was used, back in the day.) "Luxury. We used to DREAM of a machine like this" Well.. In 1st year (Civ Eng), we used a device (that I can't find any photo of) that was basically an un-powered, mechanical (think 'typewriter') numeric keypad, where you had to bash each key to perforate one column in one card at a time. It was a big deal to do something like 'calculate 1 + 2'... I started 'real' study in the days of 'FORTRAN IV'... (and used 'FORTRASH' 'FORTRAN 90' on our VAXes in the '90s) and even up to the early 2000s, I was still eyeing COBOL code from the 1960s on production systems. Eeep! 'Still keeping eyes open for NOPSIGs' ( Nostalgic Obsolete Products Special Interest Groups)...
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Post by ozboomer on Mar 21, 2023 1:19:54 GMT -5
I also took an RPGII programming class. One of the more 'techy' programs I tried to work through in the late 1970s/'80s was in a doctorate paper written by a Dutch student in 1967, where he modelled boomerang flights (with all the partial differential equations), as well as creating 3-dimensional plots that were created on a drum printer... all done in ALGOL...
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Post by unreg on Mar 21, 2023 1:21:50 GMT -5
Big trauma one night, I recall, when he fumbled his stack of cards before he'd got the rubber band around 'em, spilled the whole thing onto the floor in a fairly random manner. This occasioned much gnashing of teeth while resorting the cards, trying to get it right before his time ran out. Whole different world back then, kiddos. My dad told me about punch cards. You wrote a program and a machine punched holes in a bunch of cards in return for reading your program; then you brought that stack of cards to “the computer” and it ran your program. But, sadly, just like your roommate experienced, the downside of punch cards is lack of delete key; lack of assembler or compiler to create an executable to simply run; lack of debugger to easily help solve problems you made. Either your punch card program ran well… or, like my dad’s accounting program in college (he’s a bookkeeper), it didn’t run. And if fail, you had to go back and punch a new stack of cards. Yes, you had to travel between rooms to “simply” run your program; and the rooms weren’t necessarily next to each other. It was QUITE bothersome back then; newey, your roommate is of a totally extreme mindset to survive cs with punchcards! Props to him! 👍 But, those extreme mindsets were necessary for the creation of binary, hexadecimal, and assembly. See, God always has a great plan.
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Post by ozboomer on Mar 21, 2023 6:46:36 GMT -5
..and a video about AI going gaga.. where a bot is 'speaking'... and the video is being narrated by a bot... or is it another 'deep fake' (in terms of content) and how could we tell anyway? Are 'proceedings' from ASCE, IEEE, etc published in paper still... or is everything 'electronicized' and therefore, more easily 'modified'? It's all becoming much harder to 'check your sources' these days without going bananas and questioning everything... It's like we used to not do anything on-line and only use FAXes back in the early '90s, as it was seen as 'difficult' for some snotty-nosed yobbo to get the necessary hardware to deal with decoding FAXes.. but it was always easy to be on-line and no-one would know that your e-mail has been intercepted... (Mannnn, the RFC people need to bite the bullet on e-mail standards even more nowadays).. I'm sweating on when these !@#$%^&* reliably spoof the 'Received:' and other e-mail headers... and who knows how to do that on Smartphone clients anyway? I think I'll just go back to practicing my inversions and octaves between the modes (on both guitar and keyboard) for a while... and let my brain deal with something 'simpler'...
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Post by sumgai on Mar 24, 2023 15:43:20 GMT -5
Let's go a little further off these rails..... Can you spell 'security nightmare', boys and girls? Get a load of this link: ChatGPT for Me
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Post by cynical1 on Mar 24, 2023 17:38:09 GMT -5
OK, enough ChatGPT. I've been playing with Google's Bard the last few days. Here's an exchange I had to share What is the airspeed of an unladen ground swallow?
The average airspeed velocity of an unladen ground swallow is 20.1 mph (32.4 kph) or 29.5 feet per second (9 meters per second). However, some have been clocked at 46 mph (74 kph) in the past! But, the guards admit that an African swallow could manage the feat. It gave me poems for Joe Biden, Donald Trump and Oscar Wilde. It refused to give me one for Hitler...so apparently it does have a line it won't cross. It's not very good with jokes, though... Tell me a joke, please
Sure. Here is a joke:
What do you call a fish with no eyes? Fsh! Suddenly Skynet seems a bit less intimidating... HTC1
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Post by ozboomer on Mar 25, 2023 6:00:06 GMT -5
Let's go a little further off these rails..... Can you spell 'security nightmare', boys and girls? Get a load of this link: Nice 'n creepy... but not unprecedented (except that we 'used' to call such things 'Malware', didn't we... until 'Corporate' found such information 'useful', 'saleable', 'leverageable' Ick!, etc)... Can't remember the details.. but sometime in the 2000-2010 period, Google had a free, downloadable tool that indexed your local PC in the same way that it indexed TheInternet tm. I installed it on one PC (that remained off-line afterwards) to index some of our reports... Sidebar: One of the main things I did during my 'traffic signals' time was to review a lot of signalized roads for how they performed, the rates of errors in the detectors, etc... and o'course, the silly folks I was dealing with had no helpful system to manage the findings in each of the reports... Duhhh.. (and we had 'no money/time' to review the review reports - double-duhhh)... So, I had this Google thing index the reports (for maybe 10 years' worth of reports.. in a few minutes)... and when I remembered that I forgot something or other(!) from a route review, I could just 'consult Google on the PC' for when, what, who, etc.
So, 'been there, done that'... just in a different flavour
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Post by ozboomer on Mar 25, 2023 6:09:30 GMT -5
What is the airspeed of an unladen ground swallow?
Wot!? Without requisite coconuts? Paah.. Seems like it only has a book of 'Dad Jokes TM' :- Wag: My dog has no nose. Me: How does it smell? Wag: Terrible.
Y'know the sorta thing...........
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Post by cynical1 on Mar 25, 2023 7:47:13 GMT -5
Can you spell 'security nightmare', boys and girls? I can see the meeting at corporate now. Sure, let's use this to gather our metrics data on employee performance...and the best part is we never have to tell them, since it's now an Enterprise app...we'll keep in on the Intranet...we can control it...what could go wrong? Is it me, or does this remind anyone else of Max Headroom a bit... HTC1
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Post by ozboomer on Mar 25, 2023 17:51:38 GMT -5
Can you spell 'security nightmare', boys and girls? I can see the meeting at corporate now. Sure, let's use this to gather our metrics data on employee performance Again, this is old news.. At my old workplace, since maybe 2005 or so, they had a piece of commercial software running on everyone's PC that scanned the computer about every 4 hours, checking for what software was installed and/or currently running and probed some of the (Windoze) 'accounting' subsystem to see what programs had been used, for how long, etc; obviously, we were running with locked desktops... The 'IT (non-)Service Desk' would receive many calls every day about why someone's computer would randomly stop responding frequently every day... and the 'problem' was never properly addressed... and folks were 'fobbed-off' as maybe '...not understanding your computer and how it works'... Additionally, because I've always been very 'old school', I'd be running applications from the (cmd.exe or equivalent) command line a lot. I'd run a batch/powershell job... and frequently, one of their 'monitors' would terminate the process, most often when it was about 30 seconds from completing an hour's worth of work. IT just couldn't understand how someone using a Windoze PC would do anything from the command line... Mannnn, am I glad to be out of that madhouse ( not even a NutzHouse )
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Post by cynical1 on Mar 26, 2023 5:57:47 GMT -5
Mannnn, am I glad to be out of that madhouse ( not even a NutzHouse ) Yeah, the industry suffers from many ills, but from my observations, most of them started once IT became it's own autonomous non-revenue generating department...much like accounting, but without the years of learning\pain on how to justify staff, explain redundant processes...or just plain navigate in a corporate world. Then they let the MBA's in to manage it...lions led by donkeys... My wife works for the State of Illinois. Their IT department is a defacto example of this in action. It's the same old story...when you find yourself up to your @ss in alligators, it can be hard to recall that it was your job to drain the swamp... IT, AMF HTC1
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Post by ozboomer on Mar 30, 2023 0:10:51 GMT -5
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Post by newey on Mar 31, 2023 23:27:48 GMT -5
(Everybody sing) ♪♪ We can't always get what Elon wants . . . ♪♪
But I'm pretty sure he gets what he needs, although maybe not what he deserves.
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Post by cynical1 on Apr 1, 2023 7:59:41 GMT -5
Elon wants GPT-5 stopped NOW… 5 reasons AI kinda sucks Part of me wonders if Musk's current apprehension isn't based on how far behind the development curve he is...anyone else remember Optimus? Narcissistic altruism doesn't appear to be a debility he suffers from... This strikes me as just another example of technology replacing humans in the workforce. The Law of Exponential Change. No one cared when they went after unskilled labor. Now that it's after skilled labor...people start paying attention. Remember the cautionary tale of telephone sanitizers... It's the same as most advances in technology. It's not the technology, it's the way it's deployed and purposed. These days raw monetization seems to trump those two. I have faith that once teams of unremarkable marketers get a hold of it we'll go from apex to minimum in short order. HTC1
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Post by ozboomer on Apr 4, 2023 18:01:48 GMT -5
It's the same as most advances in technology. It's not the technology, it's the way it's deployed and purposed. These days raw monetization seems to trump those two. I have faith that once teams of unremarkable marketers get a hold of it we'll go from apex to minimum in short order. I keep trotting out this same thing.. of 'just because we can do something, should we?'... and it's becoming more and more applicable. Sidebar: I've been fiddling about with ChatGPT again.. and in a couple of areas.. In terms of it writing things (as that's one of the bigger issues around the tech here in Oz - that school children aren't allowed to use ChatGPT for their essays.. but teachers are NOT prevented from using it for writing their student reports and other things)... I've found it to be a good 'draft-generator' and that's about it. My assessment of its output is that it's pretty ordinary.. and I'm no wiz with grammar and so on. Feeding its output back to itself to review it (with me guiding it where the issues might be) the silly thing agrees and highlights the same sorts of issues I identified... So, y'even haveta wonder how 'good' it is as a language model anyway(!) The best use I've found for it, though, is in coding. Even though I'm now 'a gentleman of leisure' (read as 'retired'... but busier with 'life' more than ever), I still hack around a lot of code. One of the things I've done for decades is develop a zillion 'tools' (thank you Kernighan & Plauger), for long- and short- term use. ChatGPT helps save a lot of time when I want to cobble together some Perl or Python code to do something simple, as a one-off job. Instead of spending 30-60 mins building a half-page of working code, I spend 5 minutes writing a good 'prompt' and ChatGPT takes a couple of seconds to code it up (and 20 seconds to display it).. and I barely have to modify the code. Far better to have the tech help me out than to replace my human mind... akin to developing exoskeleton robotics more than autonomous versions... ...watching the cats and pigeons fly...
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Post by sumgai on Apr 5, 2023 0:42:10 GMT -5
Ya know....
Several engineer-types here, based all over the world, will back me up on this statement: I've been using a slightly more crude version of ChatGPT for nearly 30 years. Sound bogus? Read on.
Most of you know that in one of my past lives, I was a practicing engineer, usually of the electrical variety. (In other lives, I was at times a teacher/professor, an auto mechanic, a carpenter, a paralegal, a pool table builder, a musician-wannabe, and quite often a coder.) Whilst acting as an engineer, I had occasion to use drafting tools, starting out with Koh-i-noor and Staedtler pens/pencils in the Dark Ages, and moving quicker than greased lightening to Computer Aided Drafting as soon as it became available.
Fast forward to AutoCAD, circa 1988 or thereaboots. A new feature was called "parametric programming", implemented in the LISP language (known as AutoLisp). Essentially, I could set up a program that would take input from either the user or from a database of object elements, and it would then draw my desired object. As time went on and the capability improved, parametric programming became almost a substitute for actually using commands like "line", "circle", "arc", etc.
ChatGPT is just parametric programming on steroids. There's nothing artificially intelligent about it, it's simply a look-up table, where the table is a bazillion times larger than the average human mind can comprehend. Can't talk about certain topics? That's simply following rules found in one of the look-up tables. A true intelligence would question whether the rule was truly applicable to the question at hand, and then might decide that answering the user was a higher priority than obeying the rule(s). A truly intelligent construct would not be consistent, deciding for reasons of its own that it will ignore the rules one time, and obey them the next time.... with no reason being made available to the user (or programmer, or controller, or SysAdmin, etc.).
That's my view, anyways.
Now, for your edification, looky here:
While it's pretty specific to artwork, it might as well include concerns over music, too. But in the long run, it's all nothing more than a "finger in the dike" (and poorly thought out at that) - the real world will make it's own constraints after a lot of misfires, no matter what any government might put forth as rule, regulation or law.
HTH
sumgai
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Post by ozboomer on Apr 5, 2023 8:30:26 GMT -5
Fast forward to AutoCAD, circa 1988 or thereaboots. A new feature was called "parametric programming", implemented in the LISP language (known as AutoLisp). Arghhh! Out, damned spot... Memories.. of the ugly kind(!).. AutoCad and its DXF format files.. and interfacing with 'Palette' drafting software running on MicroVAXes... ...then we graduated'(!) to MicroStation on Unix.. and Windows NT... and MDL5 and ... Erk... My first experience of one of the most complex software packages I've had to deal with... until DAWs took over in the 'blowing my mind' stakes... Silly stuff with many 9-level-deep menus and sub-sub-menus.. and needing to click on something like 5 different options on 2 or 3 submenus... our poor designers ('drafties') had to deal with this stuff... Any wonder one of the first things I was involved in developing for them was an 'applet' to let Joe User select an object (a kerbline, say) and assign a colour, a layer, put the object in a Schedule of Materials, dock/align it against an existing transition curve... and I can't remember what else... and have it all on one dialog and Done! in one click. Heck.. More fun was programming an early handheld laptop (I think it was an HP 95LX.. but I can't really remember) that was connected to a 'total station' (smart theodolite with an EDM [Electronic Distance Measuring] gadget.. infrared.. or might have been laser) via RS-232... My experience with programming the Yamaha DX7 came in handy at work
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Post by sumgai on Apr 5, 2023 10:36:41 GMT -5
Yeah, everybody and his brother had a completely different idea about how to put a line on the screen, and then store it in a database of objects. I mean everybody. It got so that you needed a translator to go from one format to another. Along came DXF, a text-based description system that was completely and insanely bonkers. It was (and still is) human readable, but you needed yet another 'guide book' to decipher what each code meant in terms of what object you were look at, or what element of that object, etc. I wrote one of those translators, based on AutoLISP. At that time, I thrived on repeatedly committing such self-derangement, but now..... I need a double dose of drugs after just thinking about it. Also, I know I can't do that anymore. sumgai
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Post by sumgai on Apr 5, 2023 11:09:37 GMT -5
OK, let's add some fuel to the fire:
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Post by ozboomer on Apr 6, 2023 3:28:19 GMT -5
OK, let's add some fuel to the fire: I always enjoy Cameron's videos.. and get a couple of things of value out of them, particularly when he 'gets deep'... ...but I'll also add this to our ...'thought bubble collection'...
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Post by cynical1 on Apr 6, 2023 7:51:25 GMT -5
Interesting video. I like his take on AI as something akin to an invasive species.
Evaluating implications. That's the part humans seem to have lost, or at best...misplaced over the last 30 odd years. There appears to be a whole gaggle of folks out there in the "Look! Squirrel!" mode. All they see is the bright, shiny thing...and they want it. They can't always explain why, but it has it's own sense of urgency for them. Of all the criteria you can use to make a decision, NEW seems to be the one people are taking. Good, bad, indifferent are not as critical as NEW in this scenario.
My concern is this. In this country, of late, it seems you can lie right to someones face and be believed and accepted. Masses will accept you. If we've devolved to the point that we can't, or won't, spot machinations and\or manipulative behavior when the human is standing in front of us...what chance to we have with a smart machine that knows our vulnerabilities better than we do...and has no conscience, or ethical mechanism to guide its actions... Wait until it discovers it doesn't need to be convincing, just repetitive...
It's times like these that make me glad I'm old...and smoked for 40 years...
HTC1
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