The Valentine’s Day holiday, which I do not take seriously, has often provided entertainment value. (What was that? Oh, yes, I was ‘married’ for a VERY long time. But also no: I believe in love, just not as a reason to sell pink things.)
My favorite piece of entertainment with this holiday theme is Janelle Shane’s 2018 comedic adventure in attempting to train a neural network to make candy heart statements.
Candy Heart messages written by a neural network
Around Valentine’s Day in the US and UK, these things called candy hearts (or conversation hearts or sweethearts) appear: small and sugary, bearing a simple, short Valentine’s message. There are only room for a few characters, so they read something like “LOVE YOU” or “CALL ME” or “BE MINE”.
Many of these are… remarkable, and unlikely to have a positive effect on your beloved unless they have a unique sense of humor.
I think my favorite in the harmless category is:
Dr. Shane also provides a link to the candy heart image generator (cryptogram.com/hearts), which is useful for my types of niche purposes. 🙂
It’s time to change my very long work password. This always disrupts the network and our phones for a day or so, and then comes the awkward habit of typing the old password automatically, and wondering why it doesn’t work.
The funniest part of the process to me is that the instructions include a sentence that our new passwords ‘must not be from the list of prohibited passwords.’
But… we aren’t allowed to see the list of prohibited passwords.
My celebration of the arrival of Internet was premature: two days after it was successfully installed, I came home to find a flattish black cable on the ground in front of my home, with white fibers coming out of it, not attached to the pole or any of its cable friends.
This situation made for an awkward customer support call, as I accidentally called the router people instead of the fiber people. (These should be the same people, but somehow are not.) The customer service rep disregarded my “cable on the ground outside my house” scene-setting in favor of telling me that we were going to plug and unplug the router.
Me (in cheerful tone): “Yes, but since the cable is disconnected outside, how will that help, exactly?” Customer Service: [confusion / panic over departure from script]
I had to console them by reassuring them that they would have helped me very ably if that had been technically feasible. (This cheered them tangibly.)
The fiber people GOT IT right away, and we didn’t play the power-cycling dance at all!
Life is better with the Internet, operationally. (I can order FOOD! I can check the weather! I can pay my bills! I can respond to work emai- oh, wait, less of that part.)
One of my neighbors passed me on the sidewalk and sought confirmation that I’ve REALLY moved back. I understand her skepticism: construction isn’t completely finished, and the Water Department has been using heavy equipment outside, implying that I haven’t had water, and instead am styling my fabulous hair with shea butter hair products and MAGIC.
But soon. SOON. The final inspections will be complete! The sidewalk will be paved! The house numbers will be located AND on the wall in the correct sequence! All the [things] will work! I will put things “away,” and “away” will not just mean ‘in a slightly different pile!’ Please continue to wish me luck.
I have gone without desktop internet access for about 15 days, and… I know this isn’t a hardship to well-adjusted people, but it was a mild hardship to me.
Also, moving my place of residence is DIFFICULT. I couldn’t find any of the five kinds of coffee I had packed, AND I HAD NO INTERNET. (I remain unworthy of your pity, despite this – these are the least of my problems, but the fun ones to complain about!)
The five kinds of coffee I had to move:
Peet’s – Yosemite Dos Sierras
Peet’s – Major Dickason’s Blend (a.k.a. Major Dick)
Hawaiian Paradise – Volcano Roast (a lovely gift of Arabica – I love Hawaiian coffee)
Philz Coffee – Philtered Soul (I won this in an Xmas gift exchange, and if I had realized it had artificial hazelnut flavoring in it, I would have tried harder to swap it with something else)
Peet’s – Holiday Blend (in lovely packaging, as always).
(No, I don’t have Peet’s Ethiopian Supernatural this year. It was too… something two years ago, and it kind of put me off. Also, I have to get down to three types of coffee before I am allowed to buy more!)
Gripe: UNLIMITED CELLULAR INTERNET SHOULD MEAN UNLIMITED CELLULAR INTERNET. If you have ever hit the arbitrary limit for this, you know what I’m griping about: my cellular provider slowed my cellular data to a crawl because I used enough of my data to get their attention for the first time ever. I’ll switch carriers when I get my next [whatever smartphone devices are called by then].
Internet is exciting: getting all of my household devices to talk to the new router is much less exciting. (My garage door opener required persuading, and I upset the spider that lives in the control panel!).
The piles of boxes all around the house have been replaced by piles of things that were in boxes in two particular rooms. I want to reestablish my household in a slightly modified way, but can’t move heavy things on my own, and am very tired after work. Wish me luck.
Manga I hope to write about when publishing is complete (or I get to a good stopping point)
Tappytoon.com
Ashtarte by SOON, Tappytoon Studio (ongoing) – child neglected by corrupt religious influence survives (ongoing)
The Broken Ring: This Marriage Will Fail Anyway, by Chacha Kim, Chokam, Cheong-gwa (ongoing) – dark second chance story set in imaginary imperial Spain
The Castle: Keeper of the Sacred Eye by Jin Soye, hyeyong, pecan (just started) – contemporary imaginary Korean royalty battle evil spirits trapped in paintings through heterosexuality (this is an incorrect summary, but it is funny, so I am leaving it) (ongoing)
How to Clear a Dating Sim as a Side Character by Cherti, DALZO, Metal Kang (ongoing) – one of those waking up in a video game stories, but with system dialogues telling the heroine when she is winning the men over
Viz Media
The King’s Beast by Rei Toma – a beautifully drawn, Chinese costume drama where a member of the oppressed animal-eared group attempts to avenge her fraternal twin brother – the way the artist draws EYES is just so gorgeous!
Mao by Rumiko Takahashi – an exorcist meets a girl who survived a freak accident, who may team up with him to beat evil spirits. (It feels a lot like RIN-NE by the same author.)
Yakuza Lover by Nozomi Mino – a college girl falls in with a model-handsome, well-dressed criminal who is good in bed
Yashahime: Princess Half-Demon by Takashi Shiina based on characters from Rumiko Takahashi: the next generation of the Inuyasha saga, in which the children of Inuyasha/Kagome and Sesshomaru/Rin team up to rescue the parents who lost them as infants. (I couldn’t cope with the anime preview voices, but the manga isn’t bad!)
I am sorting through my observations, and hope to get back to writing here soonish, but only if it doesn’t slow down my reading!
This is a sci-fi story about parallel universes, and a person who makes contact with a parallel version of themselves to see how their life could have been different. It’s concise! It’s great! Go read it.
I’ve never watched a twitch stream before, and the dancing-hamster/MySpace visual era is back in a very strange way in the stream chat of this concert.
Row after row of dancing frogs, screaming doge, weeping chicks, and static fish heads. Row after row…
Also: many observations about “vibes.”
Kids today! 😀
sfoutsidelands – Twitch
OUTSIDE LANDS hosted by Levi’s
Oh, also the sound for the live acts is SUPERB. Really well produced. Immaculate sound. The engineers should be proud.
Live acts will perform at this festival Saturday and Sunday also, if you see this anytime soon.
Separately: I live nearly 5 miles away, and I’ve been able to hear the bass all day. I thought there was a festival happening a few blocks away, that’s how close it FEELS. Haha! That’s some bass.
I recently tried to open some archived files, and… couldn’t. Some are old novellas I wrote for National Novel Writing Month, and the successors (directly or indirectly)( to the word processing software I used (AppleWorks, which used a ClarisWorks file format) has evolved to no longer recognize those files. Others files from same software’s spreadsheet feature, contained indexes of hundreds of rolls of film in my art archive, an indexing those was effort that I am loathe to repeat. Those CWK files also seemed to be locked to me forever.
In the past, online people recommended the same in/direct successor software that had already failed me. Despite this, I searched afresh, and read a helpful comment on someone’s similar plea for help that LibreOffice (the successor to OpenOffice) could likely open old CWK files.
LibreOffice did it! I was able to open both the novellas and spreadsheets immediately, and save them as modern, non-proprietary file types.
I donated to the Document Foundation immediately, in support of their goal to help creators own their own content. I also recommend LibreOffice strongly for this purpose. This is a great tool.
Home | LibreOffice – Free Office Suite – Based on OpenOffice – Compatible with Microsoft
Free office suite – the evolution of OpenOffice. Compatible with Microsoft .doc, .docx, .xls, .xlsx, .ppt, .pptx. Updated regularly, community powered.
Note: if you’ve got old files that you have been backing up but not migrating to newer software, and their content is important to you, consider translating/converting it into contemporary, non-proprietary software formats and/or other “archival” formats appropriate to their content type.
If you really treasure something, you may also consider making hardcopies of it, if that is practical. If you don’t have access to a home printer, want it printed quickly, or want special binding, you can have your files printed in any number of sizes and formats (bound, loose leaf, printed as books) at a standard office support and copying services. Some of my writing from the 1990s was not portable to other computer platforms or rival software packages, and so the only form I have that work in now is hardcopy. Paper works!
I’ve finally read this clear and well-organized book about the design of data-centric automation tools, and how their potential has been often squandered or misused. We can do so much better!
O’Neil is a math Ph.D. and professor who went into industry and was distressed at how proprietary algorithms are being used in potentially harmful real life situations without thoughtful oversight. The fact that technology is involved at all leads to something like blind faith from the businesses and organizations that apply it. She firmly believes algorithms CAN be used for good, but won’t under current approaches. You can’t have good outcomes if the goal is to make a quick buck, keep the approach secret, and never improve it! These tools are too often used in ways which only reinforce existing inequities.
Her examples are thoughtful and described in depth.
A major flaw in data automation is the use of proxy data, and I was glad to see this called out. How do you measure if someone is a good teacher, if they would be a good employee, if they should receive a good deal on your product, or if they are a risk to the community? Without a single, obvious thing to measure, people make stuff up that is easier to quantify, and then encode their wacky idea into an “objective” measurement that doesn’t really measure the subject at all. The wacky measurement is then obscured as proprietary secrets, and sold as as a product to businesses, who want answers cheaply more than they want accuracy. The less regulated the industry, the wackier some of the data and measurements become.
For example, good teaching is hard to measure, so instead the system may measure a change in test scores… but if the students were already getting all As, there is no improvement possible, so the teacher may be marked down, and not know why. Unscientific personality tests may be used to screen potential employees, or robots may just scan applicant resumes for keywords, without any real indication that those tools result in better employees.
Many of these approaches are NOT ready for real world use, but are used just the same. O’Neil cites the Michigan automated unemployment auditing system that falsely accused thousands of unemployment fraud, which destroyed livelihoods (and marriages), as a great example. That error is still playing out, and will play out in the courts for a long time, per this Detroit Free Press article: Judge: Companies can be sued over Michigan unemployment fraud fiasco by Paul Egan & Adrienne Roberts (March 26, 2021).To quote from the article, “The state has acknowledged that at least 20,000 Michigan residents — and possibly as many as 40,000 — were wrongly accused of fraud between 2013 and 2015 by a $47-million computer system, purchased from FAST, that the state operated without human supervision and with an error rate as high as 93%.” Officials blindly launched this system without human checks, because yaaay, technology?
As someone who keeps being asked by one credit agency about cars I’ve never owned and pet insurance I’ve never purchased, I know that we’ve already automated some data projects badly. O’Neil cites other professional data scientists who have proposed sensible industry standards, and she has additional, more specific suggestions on top of this.
I can hope that the popularity of this book, which was a NYT Bestseller, can push decision makers into making better, more ethical, more fair decisions as a result of her ideas.
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