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Everybody Loves...
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: People
- Hits: 81
I thought of him recently, usually passed him on the street, said "hi", all through the summer...he showed up when I was doing Tarot readings (here: https://rodboyle.com/index.php/archives/blog/tarot-on-baker-etc), hadn't seen him for a while...He was the Grandpa Simpson Character. Always polite, chatty, up for a talk.
Apparently passed away. Not a surprise, when I think of people I haven't seen for a while that's usually why.
What caused me to think of him was the latest missing person reported in Nelson: https://www.nelsonstar.com/local-news/nelson-police-seek-missing-man-7741101, whom I half-think I recognize as the "Blue Eyed Samurai" ... I wrote about it, then deleted, Stalker problems. Didn't want to cause any harm - my opinion of him being irrelevant to who he is.
But - if it's the same person (and looks - a bit - to be) he disappeared a short while after my last posting (wherein he came into the restaurant and had his own private rave party and then proved unable to pay his bill). I'm not sure it's him.
Anyways, I recognized I hadn't seen him in a while, and the photo jarred me - I've met him, for sure, and - it's tough to know, a lot of the homeless people here, they come from out of town, just to hang out, party, then disappear the same way, only to show up a few months later on a missing person's list. Who knows where they went after here (if anywhere?).
And this stream of associations brought me on to a few of the other local missing persons cases, many of whom we know - roughly - what might have happened, only lacking the bodies or proof, but there's a curious one that still intrigues me:
https://www.nelsonstar.com/news/missing-nelson-man-found-dead-2-4910599
Which gives no follow up (none that I ever found) as to what passed in his 2 month's before finding. Was he already dead? Hiding out? The lack of answers makes one only the more curious.
***
Anyways, for a town so small we pack well above our weight in missing people/unsolved murders/disappearances. David Lynch Territory for sure.
Dan Yack - Blaise Cendrars
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
- Hits: 408
Antarctica, again, I can't seem to get away from it.
Anyways, the first of 4 more of Cendrars books I ordered arrive, giving me hope the rest are still tied up in the mail.
About an English Shipping Magnate, in St. Petersberg, who having been thwarted in love after an bacchanal at a cabaret wakes up at the feet of a sculptor, a composer and a poet...
...after eavesdropping for some while upon their conversation he conspires to bring them with him for a year to Antarctica to explore the further limits of the Human Condition.
And, Antarctica, I'm beginning to know it as well as if I'd discovered it myself. Things here though turn out very different than they did for Scott, Cherry-Garrard and Shackleton, but I'll wait until the next volume in the series arrives, the "Diaries of Dan Yack", which should apparently clear up any confusion arisen in the first book.
A curious read, not my favourite (it is possible I've had quite enough of the polar climes), back to Cherry-Garrard. Halfway through and I'm thinking it'd be easier just to plant the god-damned flag myself and be done with it, or expire trying...
AI Models collapse when trained on recursively generated data
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Link of the day
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An interesting article on Nature.com about how AI Models collapse when trained on recursively generated data.
Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07566-y
Now, reassuring to us that they still need a diversity of inputs, hence the "I" part of "AI" is not yet complete. In human terms think of it as the conspiracy oriented wing-nut who gets his/her news from a single source and begins to parrot the most God-Awful theories, and even (god forbid) create his own.
What would be interesting is to create robots - in the likes of Boston Dynamics, have them "experience" the world - touch, sight, temperature, sound, taste, etc - and then see what they can tell us - so much of our own perception is based upon our own personal, cultural and even biological biases. What truths underpin the universe that are apparent when we strip those aside? And then monitor their interactions with each other and see how they learn/assimilate other robots "truths".
Reading between the lines there are some curious experiments being done, I'm sure, as we speak.
What is this rock?
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Conversations
- Hits: 110
This was a rather hilarious YouTube recommendation, a geologist invites rockhounds/prospectors onto his show and identifies their rocks. Now, pretty boring, even for me, but worth it for the part where he tries to get some clues as to where this rock came from...
..."on the ground..."
More precisely?
"...in the desert..."
...
"Well, you see, we don't really want to say, be giving away our prime spot and all..."
Now I completely get it, who wouldn't, and the geologist, he sort of gets it, and the rock, it's pretty ugly, just a rock, but to them it's treasure, precious, and they'll go so far as to narrow down the area to a state, or a few hundred square miles, but more than that, well, it's just asking too much.
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