In the glorious future, every website will be chock-full of semantic metadata. Restaurants won't have a 50MB PDF explaining the chef's vision for organic cuisine - instead, they'll have little scraps of data on the HTML page like: "hasMenuItem":{ "@type":"MenuItem", "name":"Dodo In A Bun", "description":"The legendary extinct bird cooked in tomato sauce, served in a gluten-free bun.", …
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We forced an AI to look at thousands of photos of memorial benches. Just because. Here are the results. #gallery-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 100%; } #gallery-1 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see…
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As part of my MSc I'm taking a short course in Practical Machine Learning via QA.com. The first three days were just about basic stats visualisation using Python. It was great to have a refresher - but I would have expected that to be a pre-requisite. The tutor was excellent - very patient at explaining complex concepts. And the use of Jupyter Notebooks is a gamechanger for taught courses like…
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"Alexa… timer for fifteen minutes." The problem with the English language is that it is full of homophones, or semi-homophones. 15 and 50 sound basically the same. Humans have a hard time distinguishing them. So there's no wonder that voice assistants also have difficulty. Recently, I've noticed that my wife and I have adopted a very specific accent when talking to our Alexa. Certain constants a…
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There's been several long threads recently on Google's crappy info-box. Google doesn't want you to leave the Google page, so Google slurps information up and presents you an answer on the Google homepage. Here's what it typically looks like. OK, that's kinda useful. Search for a thing and get the info without clicking through. But there are times when it goes dreadfully wrong. Sometimes it…
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I've been experimenting with Amazon's Polly service. It's their fancy text-to-sort-of-human-style-speech system. Think "Alexa" but with a variety of voices, genders, and accents. Here's "Brian" - their English, male, received pronunciation voice - reading John Betjeman's poem "Slough": https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/slough.mp4 The pronunciation of all the words is…
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One of my favourite movie moments is in the 1998 movie Antz - when one of the ants turns to camera and says: It's the workers who control the means of production! Even though we're not in the age of the Hollywood Blacklist, it's still rare to see overt - and literal - Marxism on the big screen. "The Mitchells" might be the most insightful critique of Silicon Valley and the AI hype that I've…
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I have a cheap WiFi enabled vacuum cleaner. One morning, I barked "ALEXA! CLEAN THE HOUSE." The gynoid immediately responded with "Now playing songs by Crowded House." The future's ace, innit? So I opened the cleaner's app, hit a button, and heard the sound of a domestic-droid doing its thing. For two minutes. The app spat out this fabulously helpful warning. I trundled downstairs to see…
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From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity. Benjamin argues that automation, far from being a sinister story of racist programmers scheming on the dark web, has the potential to hide, speed up, and deepen discrimination while appearing neutral and even…
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We place a large premium on Human. Mostly because it is what we've always known. But, when given the choice, we often ditch humans for something better. Some random examples… Radio DJs Does anyone actually miss witless chatter between records? Use of Spotify suggests a large number of us don't need a Human to introduce the next record. Or hold a phone-in. Or read out dates of a gig. We m…
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For a domain based on Shakespeare - this blog doesn't talk about The Bard much. Sorry! I forced a bot to read 154 Shakespearean Sonnets. This is what it came up with... 47 Be where thou art, thou art the sea, Till all that belongs to it turn aside, And make another land into thy heart's plot. Let those elements that should guide thy march, Make thee…
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From internationally bestselling icon Jeanette Winterson comes her most highly anticipated new book since Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal?, about the bodies we live in and the bodies we desire Zeitgeist the novel! Trans issues combined with AI and politics. Interspersed with a fictionalised autobiography of Mary Shelley. It's a mixed bag of great ideas, high comedy, and beautiful…
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