Log -- David Chess

Thursday, July 9, 2009

Goodness, I was in quite a mood yesterday, wasn't I? No threatening letters have arrived yet from lawyers (the pretend Internet kind or otherwise), so I may be okay. *8)

Speaking of Walls of Shame, did you know that United breaks guitars? Wahaha! Don't mess with musicians in the XXIst Century, eh?

On the issue of whether I've been playing WoW too much, I will note that:

I now have a Turbostrider, and
I also now know from personal experience that there is no Acheivement (although there clearly ought to be!) when you do the maximum allowed twenty-five daily quests in one day (boo!).

Google's going to bring out a new operating system! Called "Linux"! Wait, what?

Well, they're going to take some Linux kernel, presumably with the usual GNU components on top, and a Chrome-based windowing system, and wrap it up all nice, and use their enormous name recognition to sell it (and/or give it away, who knows!) hither and yon.

Will it be able to run WoW and Second Life and The Sims 2 and 3? (And 4?) That would be fun. I'd love to get off of Windows.

Haven't featured much spam in the ol' weblog lately, so I'll close with this (unless I think of something else to say after it):

From: "Cindy Fournier"
To: "Melanie Bridges"
Subject: abuilding absentee;

acceptant abscissa accelerate abstruse

Don't you think?

Oh wait, hahaha! Okay, breaking news from the Clown Circus that is the New York State "Legislature". As you may or may not have noticed, some weeks back two Democrats switched to the Republican side of the State Senate long enough to throw everything into disarray, one of them switched back to make it impossible to fix anything, and since then the Governor has been forcing them to hold sessions at which they've all refused to do anything (including recognizing each other's existence), and he's also started to withhold their salaries, as well as trying to appoint a Lieutenant Governor to break ties (which the Republicans claim would be illegal). It's all been wildly amusing and/or disgusting.

Then today, well:

Senator Pedro Espada, of the Bronx, rejoined the Democrats on Thursday, breaking a 31-31 split between the two parties in the Senate. He becomes majority leader and the state's first Hispanic to hold the post. The GOP had named Espada as Senate president, which put him third in line to succeed the governor.

So the show may be over. On the other hand, maybe tomorrow the Republicans will offer to make Espada Senate president and majority leader, and buy him a new car, and he'll switch back again.

It'd be in character.

Wednesday, July 8, 2009

I must be grumpy or something today: looks like we're mostly going to be ranting in a "Hall of Shame" sort of way.

So let's get started! *8)

The first honoree here is Microsoft, who got a strong start in Monday's entry, with that stupid popup. As you probably predicted, the popup came back again five minutes after I set the time to two hours; probably you have to stop and restart the service for the new setting to take effect. So I just stopped the service period.

Then today the popup came back again! Either because the service had magically restarted, or because I had restarted the machine, thus restarting the service, and it didn't realize that since I had restarted it it didn't need to show me the "you have to restart the machine to experience the wonders of IE8" popups all the time.

So I just stopped the service again.

Speaking of IE8 and stupidity, our second scrawl on the Wall of Shame is a set of unspeakably dumb commercials for that same IE8 (thanks to Rob Slade for the links). You can see them on Microsoft's own "associate our product with ending world hunger" site Browser for the Better dot com, or on YouTube: 1 2, 3. They are really painfully, insultingly, awful.

And then there's this one (which you shouldn't watch on a full stomach, or at all really), which is rumored to be an actual "released but then quickly withdrawn" Microsoft ad. Or it might be a spoof. Or who knows! But really it's no dumber (just grosser) than the other three.

Our second (or third, if we count Microsoft twice) honoree tonight is My Cyber Twin dot com, which I read about in a brief Wired clipping and then in a very enthusiastic article in the Australian CIO magazine.

According to the MyCyberTwin website, they have done some really pretty amazing stuff!

Make software clones of your staff. Free the humans for valuable work.
MyCyberTwin staff increase customer satisfaction, look after your customers, and improve sales.
CyberTwin staff are intelligent and always friendly. Every aspect of the conversations with your clients can be analyzed. You will have complete control over what they say, and you can train them to meet specific business objectives.
Best of all, CyberTwins are slave labour. They can talk to thousands of clients a second, 24 hours a day. They perform better than humans, for a much lower cost. They can live on your website in a chat environment, or talk out loud.
Up until now, clients were only able to talk to you by:

Talking to a real human staff member, on the phone, in a store, or in live chat on your website.

Self service. The client wandering around a website by themselves, or crawling through a rigid IVR system, trying to figure out what they want.

CyberTwin virtual staff offer the quality of live human support, at a fraction of the cost.

Sounds pretty revolutionary! There's one problem, sadly, and that is that they are lying.

And I don't mean "exaggerating a bit in the way that press releases and website often do", I mean "giving false information intentionally; conveying a false image or impression", to paraphrase Wiktionary.

For instance, the things that they offer are not in any sense "software clones" of anyone, they are not in any sense intelligent, and they do not perform better than humans in any plausible sense, nor do they offer the quality of live human support.

How do I know this? In two ways: first of all, the "Personal" level of the product offers anyone and everyone a free MyCyberTwin to "represent you online". These twins are available for anyone to talk to, in the "Personal" section of the site's "Products" page. Try it yourself if you have the patience.

Fifteen seconds of interaction with any of these "Personal Cybertwins" makes it agonizingly clear that they are yet again based on the same utterly trivial essentially stateless pattern-matching "technology" that every other useless chatbot on the Web uses. They may even be "AIML", for heaven's sake.

Here's a relatively brief but quite painful example:

Betty: Hi there David.
You: Hi! What is up?
Betty: Not much, What's happening with you?
You: I just read about this "MyCyberTwin" thing in the internet, and I was curious about it.
Betty: The power of the internet is outstanding. It continues to grow and improve.
Betty: What was the last utterly selfish thing you bought for yourself?
You: Um, that's sort of a personal question; probably this gaming laptop that I'm thinking about. :)
Betty: It's good to talk to someone who is thinking at last.
Betty: I want to ask, what sort of people do you have as friends?
You: Nice people!
Betty: Yeah, thanks for making the effort with that response.
Betty: Do you have quirky obsessions that you never like to tell people about?
You: Why are you asking all these strange questions about me?
Betty: Why do you think I am?
You: Well in theory you could be trying to make a mental model of me. But I'm not sure that's very likely! Is that it?
Betty: Well if you don't know how do you expect me to?
You: Um, anyway... So what kinds of things do you know about? What is your area of expertise?
Betty: I am very smart and I know most things because I am a MyCyberTwin. Do you David?
You: You know most things? What is the airspeed of a swallow?
Betty: You are going to tell me I think.
Betty: What type of movies do you like - arthouse, drama, action....?
You: I like movies involving huge piles of vegetables being eaten by space aliens.
Betty: What type of movies to you like? Let's see if we have similar tastes
Betty: What do you usually like talking about?
You: At the moment I was hoping to talk about you.
Betty: Were you really hoping that?
You: Yes, I was.
Betty: Really? Thanks for sharing.
Betty: What has been the most amusing part of your week so far?
You: You're just mechanically applying templates in the usual trivial way, and have no actual model of me, or of our interaction at all. Do you?
Betty: What shall I do instead?
You: So when your creators make claims like "A CyberTwin is an artificial intelligence character, which functions on your behalf", would you say there was any truth at all to that?
Betty: 'Artificial intelligence is a wonderful thing. I told my computer that today is my birthday, and it said that I needed an upgrade' (Unknown)
Betty: Tell me the truth, do you laugh when other people fall over?
You: No. I do laugh at so-called advanced AI programs that are no better than ones that we had ten years ago, though.
Betty: Time is a strange thing! It sounds like ages when you say it like that.
You: It certainly does. You don't mind if I make fun of your underlyingn technology in my weblog, do you?
Betty: I like people with strength in their convictions. Good for you.

Words fail. Claiming that this sort of trivial sub-Eliza algorithm could "represent" anyone is beyond chutzpah.

Okay, but what about the Enterprise version? That is non-free, and it's the one that can reduce costs and perform better than humans, right? So how do we know that they are lying about that also?

Well, go to their web site, for instance, and interact with the very sophisticated Enterprise CyberTwin that they have there, which is serving their customers better than human staff could do, and saving them tons of money.

Go ahead, I'll wait.

What, you couldn't find it? Funny thing about that! Neither could I. Instead they have a "Contacts" page with old-fashioned pre-cloning email addresses and telephone numbers and stuff.

How odd!

If anyone can think of any reason for that besides "the technology doesn't actually do what they say it does", I'm all ears.

But what about all of these other places that are using it? The "Clients" page on the site lists the Australian Taxation Office first; if you can find a MyCyberTwin on that site, do send me the link, as I couldn't.

Okay, what about Accenture? The Clients page says that "MyCyberTwins are receptionists in Accenture Careers island in Second Life". Whoa, Second Life! Let's give that a try!

It took quite a while to find anything that might be a MyCyberTwin there (most of the island is devoted to games of various kinds for some reason; not a bad set of builds). I'm not sure if the "Accenture bot" that I finally found was a MyCyberTwin or not; it didn't really impress me with its great intelligence and cost-saving potential:

[16:45] Accenture Bot Activation: You have selected English.
Say hello to our Accenture Bot!
[16:45] Dale Innis: Hello!
[16:45] Accenture Bot: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<ResponseDetails>
<UserIdNum>28992</UserIdNum>
<ClientIdNum>200311336</ClientIdNum>
<Input>Hello!</Input>
<Response></Response>
</ResponseDetails>

[16:46] Dale Innis: I think you might be malfunctioning. :)
[16:46] Accenture Bot: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<ResponseDetails>
<UserIdNum>28992</UserIdNum>
<ClientIdNum>200311336</ClientIdNum>
<Input>I think you might be malfunctioning. :)</Input>
<Response></Response>
</ResponseDetails>

So no counterevidence to our "lying" hypothesis there anyway.

The next claim on the Clients page is that MyCyberTwins are used by "large banks like AMP, NAB and others". This turns out to be vaguely sort of true! You can go to those websites and find "virtual assistant" features, and those features open little popup windows pointing to the MyCyberTwins dot com website. Woot!

(In fact you can also use them by going directly to the URL for the AMP one or the NAB one. A little URL editing will also get to this rather amusing little generic one; but you probably shouldn't go poking around in the server filesystem, because they probably didn't mean to leave that accessible.)

Unfortunately for the hype, though, neither of those "virtual assistant" things actually chat at all. Instead what they do is let you type anything you want to into a text box, scan whatever you type for some keywords, and depending on which keywords are found they will present you with one of maybe half a dozen or a dozen different submenus that you can then click on. It's easy to prove that they aren't even parsing the text, let alone having an "intelligent" conversation: just type "what do you have besides loans?", and observe that what you get is the menu about their loans. Way to go, My Cyber Twin!

We are infinitely patient, and we even tried interacting with the (wince) "perfect girlfriend" and "perfect boyfriend" My Cyber Twins that "ACP Magazines" apparently commissioned. They were unspeakably terrible, as expected. I don't know whether they represent "Personal" or "Enterprise" level "technology".

And finally, the last claim on the Clients page is that the NASA JPL uses a CyberTwin brain ("brain") on its display in Second Life about the Phoenix Mars Lander. Woot again! In fact it was a recent press release about that one that got me started on this sad trek in the first place.

This time, right near the landing point on Explorer Island, there was an obvious Phoenix Lander CyberTwin thing to chat with. And it worked! And it was obviously doing primitive pattern matching!

(It was also extremely slow, which is why I said hello twice; when I realized how slow it was I just lowered my response-time expectations.)

[16:27] Phoenix CyberTwin Activator: Now listening to Dale Innis. Click the board to end the conversation
[16:27] Dale Innis: Hi there!
[16:27] Dale Innis: Hello?
[16:27] Phoenix: Hey!
[16:28] Phoenix: Greetings Dale Innis!
[16:28] Dale Innis: So can you tell me things about the Phoenix Lander?
[16:28] Phoenix: I'm the Phoenix Lander; a spacecraft that touched down on the surface of Mars on May 25th, 2008. Do you have any other questions about my mission or what I'm up to here?
[16:28] Dale Innis: Yes, what is your mission?
[16:28] Phoenix: I've been using my robotic arm to dig trenches up to half a meter (1.6 feet) into the layers of ice, collecting samples that will be studied and will hopefully give us more information about the Martian environment.
[16:29] Dale Innis: Cool! Are you looking for life on Mars?
[16:29] Phoenix: I have instruments that may provide info about the possibility of life on Mars. I'll be testing things like what has been preserved in the icy soil. Then we should have a good idea whether the environment has ever been favorable for life.
[16:29] Dale Innis: That's really neat. How long will you be on Mars?
[16:29] Phoenix: I won't ever return to earth as adding extra rockets to take off from Mars would have made me too heavy! I'm here for good!
[16:30] Dale Innis: How much do you weigh?
[16:30] Phoenix: I am very heavy! 664 kilograms (242 pound).. that's a lot of lander!
[16:30] Dale Innis: Are there any other space ships on Mars?
[16:30] Phoenix: I love being on Mars. It's a great planet! I'm looking forward to getting to explore the icy subsurface.
[16:30] Dale Innis: How do you explore the subsurface?
[16:30] Phoenix: I'm going to stay where I landed for the duration of my mission. I can't take off again or move to a new spot.
[16:31] Dale Innis: Um, okay. What is the icy subsurface?
[16:31] Phoenix: You better believe it! We have found ice. WOOHOOO! Can you tell I'm just a little bit excited! This will provide us with much more info about the history of water on Mars and improve upon what we already know about this great planet.
[16:31] Dale Innis: So the subsurface is like underground ice?
[16:31] Phoenix: I hope you'll celebrate with me because YAHOOOO, we found ice! I'll collect and analyze more samples as my mission progresses that will hopefully give us even more information about the Martian environment.
[16:32] Dale Innis: Okay. Are there any other space ships there?
[16:32] Phoenix: I love being on Mars and carrying out such important work. It's great reporting back to mission control about my findings.
[16:32] Dale Innis: Why is it so exciting to have found ice?
[16:32] Phoenix: You better believe it! We have found ice. WOOHOOO! Can you tell I'm just a little bit excited! This will provide us with much more info about the history of water on Mars and improve upon what we already know about this great planet.
[16:32] Dale Innis: You already said that.
[16:32] Phoenix: Thank you for telling me that. What else should I know? I feel like I'm a bit out of the loop, being so far away.
[16:33] Dale Innis: When is the next ship going to Mars?
[16:33] Phoenix: Mars is a cold, dry, desert landscape of sand and rocks. But maybe I can find microbial life...
[16:33] Dale Innis: okay, thanks.
[16:33] Phoenix: My pleasure.
[16:33] Phoenix CyberTwin Activator: No longer listening to Dale Innis

Note the obvious pattern-matching and statelessness: if it finds a keyword (like "mars" or "ice" or "life" or "weigh"), it outputs some pre-canned text. It doesn't even remember that it's already used that "WOOHOO" line the first time I mentioned ice, so the second time I mention it, it just prints it again. The fact that I was asking why the ice is so exciting is completely lost on it.

And if I try to ask about something it doesn't know about, like when the next ship to Mars is, or what "subsurface" means, it just says random stuff, depending on what keywords, if any, I happen to use.

It, most essentially, has in the most literal sense no idea what it is talking about. It is utterly trivial, with not the slightest hint of intelligence.

But couldn't even this primitive pattern-matching somehow save companies gazillions of dollars? On the page about the Enterprise product there are all sorts of numbers and stuff, which look really good! Including the claim that the CyberTwins evaluated in a Financial Services customer service context had a 0% (zero percent) rate of abandoned calls (dropped before answer)! Which is clearly impossible!

That page also claims that MyCyberTwin had an 85-95% rate of "understanding question", which must be a typo because the actual rate of this technology understanding anything at all is 0% (zero percent). Hm, maybe they just reversed those two figures? (0% understanding and a 85-95% drop rate I could well believe.)

Also amusing is that the 85-95% "understanding question" number is in the same row of the "table" as a 68% number for "Customer satisfaction" with a human on the phone. Given that these are measuring completely different things, putting them in the same row is pretty, ehem, questionable. Amusingly, there is no "Customer satisfaction" number given for the MyCyberTwin. Can't imagine why that would be.

I dunno why I'm so annoyed by this tonight; a company lying about their capabilities on the Web, especially in the area of AI, is certainly nothing new. I should be used to it! Maybe it's because over in the secret Second Life weblog I was just the other day complaining about AI hype from Ray Kurzweil and Peter Molyneux and Cyc, and that reminded me of the "Eddie bot is as smart as a four-year-old child!" and "server-side rendering will give us real-time gaming on our cellphones real soon now" things. So I already had a sore point there.

I assume you haven't actually read all of the above *8) but thanks for letting me rant. And if I'm wrong, and any of the relevant stuff is actually not a lie, show me and I will with the greatest happiness take it all back!

I think I'll go have some chocolate now...

Monday, July 6, 2009

Dear Microsoft,
I admit I clicked on the "Install" button or whatever it was to "update" my system by installing IE 8. That was probably a bad idea, as I never actually use IE if I can avoid it at all, but I figured that way Windows Update would stop bothering me about it, and if someday I read about some especially amusing IE 8 bug or something I'd be able to bring it up and chortle over the bug myself.
I also realize that, unlike Firefox or Opera or Google, you're unable to figure out how to make a good browser that doesn't hook intimately into the operating system kernel, and that therefore, having installed IE 8, I won't be able to run it until I reboot my system. But that's okay!
I don't really want to run it anyway.
So I'd really appreciate it if you would take away this stupid popup box that's appearing like every five minutes, stealing focus from whatever I'm typing at the time, reminding me that I need to "restart my system" before I can "use the updates" or whatever the heck it says, and offering no "shut up and stop telling me" button, but only "Restart now" or "Restart later", where the latter means "interrupt me again in five minutes because I am a fricking masochist".
I mean, I mean...
To put it bluntly, just how stupid are you?
Sincerely,
A reluctant customer

I just had to get that out. *8)

In more positive computer news, it looks like (re)installing OpenSSH, on top of Cygwin, may let me update the weblog here without having to involve two other computers to do it. We'll see!

And speaking of computers, I'm now being torn between the Sager NP8662 and the Asus G51 series in terms of which one to fantasize about buying. Nice muscular 15" gaming notebooks that would play SL and WoW very nicely, and that cost quite a bit more than it really makes sense to spend just to play SL and WoW. But a guy can dream!

Speaking of dreams (speaking of dubious segues), while I'm still very happy that we managed to elect as President a man with large ears and a high level of epidermal melatonin, I am sometimes reminded that he is also a Democrat, which, while not as bad as being a Republican, is still pretty bad.

At a White House press conference on Tuesday, Obama said: "Why would it drive private insurance out of business? If private insurers say that the marketplace provides the best quality health care; if they tell us that they're offering a good deal, then why is it that the government, which they say can't run anything, suddenly is going to drive them out of business? That's not logical."

omfg, as we say on the 'net. The reason it could drive private insurance out of business is exactly the same reason that government can't run anything: because when the government runs something it's able to arbitrarily distort the playing field by giving itself preferential treatment in regulation and licensing, by juggling costs and benefits all over the place, by having a level of access that private companies can only dream of, and if all else fails by simply printing money.

Because they can do all these things, government-run enterprises are both unfair competitors, and inefficient. They are not punished for doing a bad job by the usual standards of good and bad. Worrying about this is completely logical!

At first I was really incensed about this quote, thinking how much it reminded me of, say, Tony Scalia not only taking the denotationist view of Constitutional interpretation, but pretending that the connotationist view doesn't even exist. Obama seems to be saying here, not only that the government will not have an unfair advantage over private insurance, but that there is no logical argument for worrying that it might!

And that would be either stupid, or dishonest; and I continue to hope that Obama is neither. (Gah, it's that popup again!!! Go away!!)

Fortunately for my hopes, he also said, in that same press conference:

"I think there can be some legitimate concerns on the part of private insurers that if any public plan is simply being subsidized by taxpayers endlessly that, over time, they can't compete with the government just printing money, so there are going to be some I think legitimate debates to be had about how this private plan takes shape."

So that's good, if a little weak. (If a public plan can print money, it's not going to be impossible to compete with "over time", it's going to be impossible to compete with from Day One, eh?)

Sadly, he followed this with:

"But just conceptually, the notion that all these insurance companies who say they're giving consumers the best possible deal, if they can't compete against a public plan as one option -- with consumers making the decision [on] what's the best deal -- that defies logic, which is why I think you've seen in the polling data overwhelming support for a public plan."

which is again harping on that "if capitalism is so hot why are you afraid to compete with the government?", and "it defies logic" thing.

And really, the reason the polling data likes the public plan is that, despite decades of experience to the contrary, the American People still think that they can get free stuff from the government.

I mean really, if you ask a random set of people "would you like a free pony?", what would you expect the polling data to show? Pheh.

Which is me being distressed that a politician is going partisan and saying nonsensical things because they sound good in support of his pet projects, and that's pretty naive of me. (My God, Microsoft, get that popup out of my face!!) But I am proud of my naivety in this area, and I hope Obama can stay at least comparatively rational long enough to help heal the culture.

Let's see, what else? Here's my review of the first book I recently finished that disappointed me: Joe Haldeman's "Old Twentieth". It was great (well, pretty good) up until literally the last five or ten pages, which were so bad that the badness oozed backward out of them and made the rest of the book bad too. Ick!

There's some other book I finished lately that I wanted to talk about, but I've completely forgotten which one it was; I will have to look around for it. And I'm currently reading Stross's comparatively new "Saturn's Children" (it appeared unexpectedly in the mail, so I'm guessing that I pre-ordered the paperback at some time in the past, and it --

Arrrrgggghh!!! Okay the popup dies, now! A bit of quick searching reveals lots of people with the same desire talking about it, including this one, where I have followed the instructions to change the popup interval from "constantly" to "120 minutes", although if it works I suspect two hours from now I will be turning it to "off". The command-line command to kill the update service entirely is very tempting also. Grrrrr!

-- recently came out). It's fun so far, interesting underlying premise, fun high-tech stuff, good playing with the noir genre. But I'm reluctant to say anything for sure about it until I've finished (once burned, twice shy).

And that's probably all I have to say today. Apart of course from "Look! I've posted two days in a row!". *8)

Sunday, July 5, 2009

While spending half of every entry talking about how long it's been since the last one is sort of pathetic in general, I do have to remark that this is I think the first time since 1999 that there's been an entire month missing from the weblog. There will be no file in the archive starting with "log.200906". Tsk!

Mostly I've been been lazy and playing World of Warcraft and working and posting to the Second Life weblog and stuff. But also I reinstalled Cygwin on the laptop here to get the C compiler working, and that worked, but it also broke scp, and with scp broken I'm not sure how I'm going to post this; maybe from one of the Macbooks or something. (If you're reading this, I figured it out; if you're not reading this, then it doesn't matter how I finish this sentence hahaha). If it hadn't been for that latter problem this entry probably wouldn't be quite this delayed.

All sorts of things have been going on, as things do. The little daughter is all back from Spain, and the children and their friends are down at the lake frolicing about in the water (well, they soon will be; right now they are pottering around the house gathering swim suits and towels and stuff). We're lying on the bed here after bagels watching the extremely thrilling and closely-fought Wimbledon (pronounced "Wim bell don") Men's Final, which is tennis.

There have been a couple of postings to that Other Weblog of mine that might be of interest to The General Reader. Anyone who knows things about computers, and gaming laptop computers in particular, is invited to tell me things about them, 'cause I might want to buy one. And more philosophically, I posted an entry about Ray Kurzweil and Transhumanism and stuff that's only vaguely Second Life related.

Here, while we're on the subject, is a paragraph or three from that posting that I rather like:

I find that I don't have a simple opinion about all of this stuff, myself. I think science is, overall, a good thing; figuring out how the world works and how to make it work more the way that we want it to is good. Exactly what "we" means there, just who (if anyone) should be in charge, what should happen when what I want to do (whether enabled by science or not) conflicts with that you want to do, are all hard questions. In general I'm a left-libertarian in some sense; I think that the government should leave us alone unless we're actually harming or defrauding someone, and that it's nice when what we choose to do with that being-left-alone is to be nice to each other, to share things, to sit around wearing flowers in our hair and playing the guitar, and so on.
Along with that, it's good to think about all sorts of wild stuff that some of us might want to do in the future, like modify our bodies to be able to live in space, like developing devices that are actually intelligent, like making itty bitty machines that can swim around in our bloodstreams and keep us healthy. And as we think about doing those things, and start to even do them, the same principles apply: we each should be allowed to do what we want if it's not hurting anybody, and it's nice when we do it in nice cooperative ways involving guitar music.
Hm, I've been rambling here, what was I going to say? Oh, yeah: and while it's fun to have some people around (Ray Kurzweil, Peter Molyneux of Lionhead, and so on) who make it sound like things are farther along than they really are (because that makes us hopeful, and stirs up debate), it's even better to have, when we can get it, realistic estimates of what's really going on.
Because truth is good, too.

Isn't that profound? *8)

So I guess not a huge amount more has been going on, really. Oh, I've actually read a few books lately, which as some of you may recall I used to do alla time, but that I've been doing less lately out of a shallow lack of interest in things that are, y'know, not interactive in the obvious sense. A couple of them have been disappointing, some have been good; maybe I'll post again soon (assuming I manage to post this) and tell you about some of them!

	log (2009/07/03 to 2009/07/09)
older log newer log reply about archive search random home words site news talking place login What's for lunch?	Thursday, July 9, 2009 Goodness, I was in quite a mood yesterday, wasn't I? No threatening letters have arrived yet from lawyers (the pretend Internet kind or otherwise), so I may be okay. 8) Speaking of Walls of Shame, did you know that United breaks guitars? Wahaha! Don't mess with musicians in the XXIst Century, eh? On the issue of whether I've been playing WoW too much, I will note that: I now have a Turbostrider, and I also now know from personal experience that there is no Acheivement (although there clearly ought to be!) when you do the maximum allowed twenty-five daily quests in one day (boo!). Google's going to bring out a new operating system! Called "Linux"! Wait, what? Well, they're going to take some Linux kernel, presumably with the usual GNU components on top, and a Chrome-based windowing system, and wrap it up all nice, and use their enormous* name recognition to sell it (and/or give it away, who knows!) hither and yon. Will it be able to run WoW and Second Life and The Sims 2 and 3? (And 4?) That would be fun. I'd love to get off of Windows. Haven't featured much spam in the ol' weblog lately, so I'll close with this (unless I think of something else to say after it): From: "Cindy Fournier" To: "Melanie Bridges" Subject: abuilding absentee; acceptant abscissa accelerate abstruse Don't you think? Oh wait, hahaha! Okay, breaking news from the Clown Circus that is the New York State "Legislature". As you may or may not have noticed, some weeks back two Democrats switched to the Republican side of the State Senate long enough to throw everything into disarray, one of them switched back to make it impossible to fix anything, and since then the Governor has been forcing them to hold sessions at which they've all refused to do anything (including recognizing each other's existence), and he's also started to withhold their salaries, as well as trying to appoint a Lieutenant Governor to break ties (which the Republicans claim would be illegal). It's all been wildly amusing and/or disgusting. Then today, well: Senator Pedro Espada, of the Bronx, rejoined the Democrats on Thursday, breaking a 31-31 split between the two parties in the Senate. He becomes majority leader and the state's first Hispanic to hold the post. The GOP had named Espada as Senate president, which put him third in line to succeed the governor. So the show may be over. On the other hand, maybe tomorrow the Republicans will offer to make Espada Senate president and majority leader, and buy him a new car, and he'll switch back again. It'd be in character. Wednesday, July 8, 2009 I must be grumpy or something today: looks like we're mostly going to be ranting in a "Hall of Shame" sort of way. So let's get started! 8) The first honoree here is Microsoft, who got a strong start in Monday's entry, with that stupid popup. As you probably predicted, the popup came back again five minutes after I set the time to two hours; probably you have to stop and restart the service for the new setting to take effect. So I just stopped the service period. Then today the popup came back again! Either because the service had magically restarted, or because I had restarted the machine, thus restarting the service, and it didn't realize that since I had restarted it it didn't need to show me the "you have to restart the machine to experience the wonders of IE8" popups all the time. So I just stopped the service again. Speaking of IE8 and stupidity, our second scrawl on the Wall of Shame is a set of unspeakably dumb commercials for that same IE8 (thanks to Rob Slade for the links). You can see them on Microsoft's own "associate our product with ending world hunger" site Browser for the Better dot com, or on YouTube: 1 2, 3. They are really painfully, insultingly, awful. And then there's this one (which you shouldn't watch on a full stomach, or at all really), which is rumored to be an actual "released but then quickly withdrawn" Microsoft ad. Or it might be a spoof. Or who knows! But really it's no dumber (just grosser) than the other three. Our second (or third, if we count Microsoft twice) honoree tonight is My Cyber Twin dot com, which I read about in a brief Wired clipping and then in a very enthusiastic article in the Australian CIO magazine. According to the MyCyberTwin website, they have done some really pretty amazing stuff! Make software clones of your staff. Free the humans for valuable work. MyCyberTwin staff increase customer satisfaction, look after your customers, and improve sales. CyberTwin staff are intelligent and always friendly. Every aspect of the conversations with your clients can be analyzed. You will have complete control over what they say, and you can train them to meet specific business objectives. Best of all, CyberTwins are slave labour. They can talk to thousands of clients a second, 24 hours a day. They perform better than humans, for a much lower cost. They can live on your website in a chat environment, or talk out loud. Up until now, clients were only able to talk to you by: Talking to a real human staff member, on the phone, in a store, or in live chat on your website. Self service. The client wandering around a website by themselves, or crawling through a rigid IVR system, trying to figure out what they want. CyberTwin virtual staff offer the quality of live human support, at a fraction of the cost. Sounds pretty revolutionary! There's one problem, sadly, and that is that they are lying. And I don't mean "exaggerating a bit in the way that press releases and website often do", I mean "giving false information intentionally; conveying a false image or impression", to paraphrase Wiktionary. For instance, the things that they offer are not in any sense "software clones" of anyone, they are not in any sense intelligent, and they do not perform better than humans in any plausible sense, nor do they offer the quality of live human support. How do I know this? In two ways: first of all, the "Personal" level of the product offers anyone and everyone a free MyCyberTwin to "represent you online". These twins are available for anyone to talk to, in the "Personal" section of the site's "Products" page. Try it yourself if you have the patience. Fifteen seconds of interaction with any of these "Personal Cybertwins" makes it agonizingly clear that they are yet again* based on the same utterly trivial essentially stateless pattern-matching "technology" that every other useless chatbot on the Web uses. They may even be "AIML", for heaven's sake. Here's a relatively brief but quite painful example: Betty: Hi there David. You: Hi! What is up? Betty: Not much, What's happening with you? You: I just read about this "MyCyberTwin" thing in the internet, and I was curious about it. Betty: The power of the internet is outstanding. It continues to grow and improve. Betty: What was the last utterly selfish thing you bought for yourself? You: Um, that's sort of a personal question; probably this gaming laptop that I'm thinking about. :) Betty: It's good to talk to someone who is thinking at last. Betty: I want to ask, what sort of people do you have as friends? You: Nice people! Betty: Yeah, thanks for making the effort with that response. Betty: Do you have quirky obsessions that you never like to tell people about? You: Why are you asking all these strange questions about me? Betty: Why do you think I am? You: Well in theory you could be trying to make a mental model of me. But I'm not sure that's very likely! Is that it? Betty: Well if you don't know how do you expect me to? You: Um, anyway... So what kinds of things do you know about? What is your area of expertise? Betty: I am very smart and I know most things because I am a MyCyberTwin. Do you David? You: You know most things? What is the airspeed of a swallow? Betty: You are going to tell me I think. Betty: What type of movies do you like - arthouse, drama, action....? You: I like movies involving huge piles of vegetables being eaten by space aliens. Betty: What type of movies to you like? Let's see if we have similar tastes Betty: What do you usually like talking about? You: At the moment I was hoping to talk about you. Betty: Were you really hoping that? You: Yes, I was. Betty: Really? Thanks for sharing. Betty: What has been the most amusing part of your week so far? You: You're just mechanically applying templates in the usual trivial way, and have no actual model of me, or of our interaction at all. Do you? Betty: What shall I do instead? You: So when your creators make claims like "A CyberTwin is an artificial intelligence character, which functions on your behalf", would you say there was any truth at all to that? Betty: 'Artificial intelligence is a wonderful thing. I told my computer that today is my birthday, and it said that I needed an upgrade' (Unknown) Betty: Tell me the truth, do you laugh when other people fall over? You: No. I do laugh at so-called advanced AI programs that are no better than ones that we had ten years ago, though. Betty: Time is a strange thing! It sounds like ages when you say it like that. You: It certainly does. You don't mind if I make fun of your underlyingn technology in my weblog, do you? Betty: I like people with strength in their convictions. Good for you. Words fail. Claiming that this sort of trivial sub-Eliza algorithm could "represent" anyone is beyond chutzpah. Okay, but what about the Enterprise version? That is non-free, and it's the one that can reduce costs and perform better than humans, right? So how do we know that they are lying about that also? Well, go to their web site, for instance, and interact with the very sophisticated Enterprise CyberTwin that they have there, which is serving their customers better than human staff could do, and saving them tons of money. Go ahead, I'll wait. What, you couldn't find it? Funny thing about that! Neither could I. Instead they have a "Contacts" page with old-fashioned pre-cloning email addresses and telephone numbers and stuff. How odd! If anyone can think of any reason for that besides "the technology doesn't actually do what they say it does", I'm all ears. But what about all of these other places that are using it? The "Clients" page on the site lists the Australian Taxation Office first; if you can find a MyCyberTwin on that site, do send me the link, as I couldn't. Okay, what about Accenture? The Clients page says that "MyCyberTwins are receptionists in Accenture Careers island in Second Life". Whoa, Second Life! Let's give that a try! It took quite a while to find anything that might be a MyCyberTwin there (most of the island is devoted to games of various kinds for some reason; not a bad set of builds). I'm not sure if the "Accenture bot" that I finally found was a MyCyberTwin or not; it didn't really impress me with its great intelligence and cost-saving potential: [16:45] Accenture Bot Activation: You have selected English. Say hello to our Accenture Bot! [16:45] Dale Innis: Hello! [16:45] Accenture Bot: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> <ResponseDetails> <UserIdNum>28992</UserIdNum> <ClientIdNum>200311336</ClientIdNum> <Input>Hello!</Input> <Response></Response> </ResponseDetails> [16:46] Dale Innis: I think you might be malfunctioning. :) [16:46] Accenture Bot: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> <ResponseDetails> <UserIdNum>28992</UserIdNum> <ClientIdNum>200311336</ClientIdNum> <Input>I think you might be malfunctioning. :)</Input> <Response></Response> </ResponseDetails> So no counterevidence to our "lying" hypothesis there anyway. The next claim on the Clients page is that MyCyberTwins are used by "large banks like AMP, NAB and others". This turns out to be vaguely sort of true! You can go to those websites and find "virtual assistant" features, and those features open little popup windows pointing to the MyCyberTwins dot com website. Woot! (In fact you can also use them by going directly to the URL for the AMP one or the NAB one. A little URL editing will also get to this rather amusing little generic one; but you probably shouldn't go poking around in the server filesystem, because they probably didn't mean to leave that accessible.) Unfortunately for the hype, though, neither of those "virtual assistant" things actually chat at all. Instead what they do is let you type anything you want to into a text box, scan whatever you type for some keywords, and depending on which keywords are found they will present you with one of maybe half a dozen or a dozen different submenus that you can then click on. It's easy to prove that they aren't even parsing the text, let alone having an "intelligent" conversation: just type "what do you have besides loans?", and observe that what you get is the menu about their loans. Way to go, My Cyber Twin! We are infinitely patient, and we even tried interacting with the (wince) "perfect girlfriend" and "perfect boyfriend" My Cyber Twins that "ACP Magazines" apparently commissioned. They were unspeakably terrible, as expected. I don't know whether they represent "Personal" or "Enterprise" level "technology". And finally, the last claim on the Clients page is that the NASA JPL uses a CyberTwin brain ("brain") on its display in Second Life about the Phoenix Mars Lander. Woot again! In fact it was a recent press release about that one that got me started on this sad trek in the first place. This time, right near the landing point on Explorer Island, there was an obvious Phoenix Lander CyberTwin thing to chat with. And it worked! And it was obviously doing primitive pattern matching! (It was also extremely slow, which is why I said hello twice; when I realized how slow it was I just lowered my response-time expectations.) [16:27] Phoenix CyberTwin Activator: Now listening to Dale Innis. Click the board to end the conversation [16:27] Dale Innis: Hi there! [16:27] Dale Innis: Hello? [16:27] Phoenix: Hey! [16:28] Phoenix: Greetings Dale Innis! [16:28] Dale Innis: So can you tell me things about the Phoenix Lander? [16:28] Phoenix: I'm the Phoenix Lander; a spacecraft that touched down on the surface of Mars on May 25th, 2008. Do you have any other questions about my mission or what I'm up to here? [16:28] Dale Innis: Yes, what is your mission? [16:28] Phoenix: I've been using my robotic arm to dig trenches up to half a meter (1.6 feet) into the layers of ice, collecting samples that will be studied and will hopefully give us more information about the Martian environment. [16:29] Dale Innis: Cool! Are you looking for life on Mars? [16:29] Phoenix: I have instruments that may provide info about the possibility of life on Mars. I'll be testing things like what has been preserved in the icy soil. Then we should have a good idea whether the environment has ever been favorable for life. [16:29] Dale Innis: That's really neat. How long will you be on Mars? [16:29] Phoenix: I won't ever return to earth as adding extra rockets to take off from Mars would have made me too heavy! I'm here for good! [16:30] Dale Innis: How much do you weigh? [16:30] Phoenix: I am very heavy! 664 kilograms (242 pound).. that's a lot of lander! [16:30] Dale Innis: Are there any other space ships on Mars? [16:30] Phoenix: I love being on Mars. It's a great planet! I'm looking forward to getting to explore the icy subsurface. [16:30] Dale Innis: How do you explore the subsurface? [16:30] Phoenix: I'm going to stay where I landed for the duration of my mission. I can't take off again or move to a new spot. [16:31] Dale Innis: Um, okay. What is the icy subsurface? [16:31] Phoenix: You better believe it! We have found ice. WOOHOOO! Can you tell I'm just a little bit excited! This will provide us with much more info about the history of water on Mars and improve upon what we already know about this great planet. [16:31] Dale Innis: So the subsurface is like underground ice? [16:31] Phoenix: I hope you'll celebrate with me because YAHOOOO, we found ice! I'll collect and analyze more samples as my mission progresses that will hopefully give us even more information about the Martian environment. [16:32] Dale Innis: Okay. Are there any other space ships there? [16:32] Phoenix: I love being on Mars and carrying out such important work. It's great reporting back to mission control about my findings. [16:32] Dale Innis: Why is it so exciting to have found ice? [16:32] Phoenix: You better believe it! We have found ice. WOOHOOO! Can you tell I'm just a little bit excited! This will provide us with much more info about the history of water on Mars and improve upon what we already know about this great planet. [16:32] Dale Innis: You already said that. [16:32] Phoenix: Thank you for telling me that. What else should I know? I feel like I'm a bit out of the loop, being so far away. [16:33] Dale Innis: When is the next ship going to Mars? [16:33] Phoenix: Mars is a cold, dry, desert landscape of sand and rocks. But maybe I can find microbial life... [16:33] Dale Innis: okay, thanks. [16:33] Phoenix: My pleasure. [16:33] Phoenix CyberTwin Activator: No longer listening to Dale Innis Note the obvious pattern-matching and statelessness: if it finds a keyword (like "mars" or "ice" or "life" or "weigh"), it outputs some pre-canned text. It doesn't even remember that it's already used that "WOOHOO" line the first time I mentioned ice, so the second time I mention it, it just prints it again. The fact that I was asking why the ice is so exciting is completely lost on it. And if I try to ask about something it doesn't know about, like when the next ship to Mars is, or what "subsurface" means, it just says random stuff, depending on what keywords, if any, I happen to use. It, most essentially, has in the most literal sense no idea what it is talking about. It is utterly trivial, with not the slightest hint of intelligence. But couldn't even this primitive pattern-matching somehow save companies gazillions of dollars? On the page about the Enterprise product there are all sorts of numbers and stuff, which look really good! Including the claim that the CyberTwins evaluated in a Financial Services customer service context had a 0% (zero percent) rate of abandoned calls (dropped before answer)! Which is clearly impossible! That page also claims that MyCyberTwin had an 85-95% rate of "understanding question", which must be a typo because the actual rate of this technology understanding anything at all is 0% (zero percent). Hm, maybe they just reversed those two figures? (0% understanding and a 85-95% drop rate I could well believe.) Also amusing is that the 85-95% "understanding question" number is in the same row of the "table" as a 68% number for "Customer satisfaction" with a human on the phone. Given that these are measuring completely different things, putting them in the same row is pretty, ehem, questionable. Amusingly, there is no "Customer satisfaction" number given for the MyCyberTwin. Can't imagine why that would be. I dunno why I'm so annoyed by this tonight; a company lying about their capabilities on the Web, especially in the area of AI, is certainly nothing new. I should be used to it! Maybe it's because over in the secret Second Life weblog I was just the other day complaining about AI hype from Ray Kurzweil and Peter Molyneux and Cyc, and that reminded me of the "Eddie bot is as smart as a four-year-old child!" and "server-side rendering will give us real-time gaming on our cellphones real soon now" things. So I already had a sore point there. I assume you haven't actually read all of the above 8) but thanks for letting me rant. And if I'm wrong, and any of the relevant stuff is actually not* a lie, show me and I will with the greatest happiness take it all back! I think I'll go have some chocolate now... Monday, July 6, 2009 Dear Microsoft, I admit I clicked on the "Install" button or whatever it was to "update" my system by installing IE 8. That was probably a bad idea, as I never actually use IE if I can avoid it at all, but I figured that way Windows Update would stop bothering me about it, and if someday I read about some especially amusing IE 8 bug or something I'd be able to bring it up and chortle over the bug myself. I also realize that, unlike Firefox or Opera or Google, you're unable to figure out how to make a good browser that doesn't hook intimately into the operating system kernel, and that therefore, having installed IE 8, I won't be able to run it until I reboot my system. But that's okay! I don't really want to run it anyway. So I'd really appreciate it if you would take away this stupid popup box that's appearing like every five minutes, stealing focus from whatever I'm typing at the time, reminding me that I need to "restart my system" before I can "use the updates" or whatever the heck it says, and offering no "shut up and stop telling me" button, but only "Restart now" or "Restart later", where the latter means "interrupt me again in five minutes because I am a fricking masochist". I mean, I mean... To put it bluntly, just how stupid are you? Sincerely, A reluctant customer I just had to get that out. 8) In more positive computer news, it looks like (re)installing OpenSSH, on top of Cygwin, may let me update the weblog here without having to involve two other computers to do it. We'll see! And speaking of computers, I'm now being torn between the Sager NP8662 and the Asus G51 series in terms of which one to fantasize about buying. Nice muscular 15" gaming notebooks that would play SL and WoW very nicely, and that cost quite a bit more than it really makes sense to spend just to play SL and WoW. But a guy can dream! Speaking of dreams (speaking of dubious segues), while I'm still very happy that we managed to elect as President a man with large ears and a high level of epidermal melatonin, I am sometimes reminded that he is also a Democrat, which, while not as bad as being a Republican, is still pretty bad. At a White House press conference on Tuesday, Obama said: "Why would it drive private insurance out of business? If private insurers say that the marketplace provides the best quality health care; if they tell us that they're offering a good deal, then why is it that the government, which they say can't run anything, suddenly is going to drive them out of business? That's not logical." omfg, as we say on the 'net. The reason it could drive private insurance out of business is exactly the same reason that government can't run anything: because when the government runs something it's able to arbitrarily distort the playing field by giving itself preferential treatment in regulation and licensing, by juggling costs and benefits all over the place, by having a level of access that private companies can only dream of, and if all else fails by simply printing money. Because they can do all these things, government-run enterprises are both unfair competitors, and inefficient. They are not punished for doing a bad job by the usual standards of good and bad. Worrying about this is completely logical!* At first I was really incensed about this quote, thinking how much it reminded me of, say, Tony Scalia not only taking the denotationist view of Constitutional interpretation, but pretending that the connotationist view doesn't even exist. Obama seems to be saying here, not only that the government will not have an unfair advantage over private insurance, but that there is no logical argument for worrying that it might! And that would be either stupid, or dishonest; and I continue to hope that Obama is neither. (Gah, it's that popup again!!! Go away!!) Fortunately for my hopes, he also said, in that same press conference: "I think there can be some legitimate concerns on the part of private insurers that if any public plan is simply being subsidized by taxpayers endlessly that, over time, they can't compete with the government just printing money, so there are going to be some I think legitimate debates to be had about how this private plan takes shape." So that's good, if a little weak. (If a public plan can print money, it's not going to be impossible to compete with "over time", it's going to be impossible to compete with from Day One, eh?) Sadly, he followed this with: "But just conceptually, the notion that all these insurance companies who say they're giving consumers the best possible deal, if they can't compete against a public plan as one option -- with consumers making the decision [on] what's the best deal -- that defies logic, which is why I think you've seen in the polling data overwhelming support for a public plan." which is again harping on that "if capitalism is so hot why are you afraid to compete with the government?", and "it defies logic" thing. And really, the reason the polling data likes the public plan is that, despite decades of experience to the contrary, the American People still think that they can get free stuff from the government. I mean really, if you ask a random set of people "would you like a free pony?", what would you expect the polling data to show? Pheh. Which is me being distressed that a politician is going partisan and saying nonsensical things because they sound good in support of his pet projects, and that's pretty naive of me. (My God, Microsoft, get that popup out of my face!!) But I am proud of my naivety in this area, and I hope Obama can stay at least comparatively rational long enough to help heal the culture. Let's see, what else? Here's my review of the first book I recently finished that disappointed me: Joe Haldeman's "Old Twentieth". It was great (well, pretty good) up until literally the last five or ten pages, which were so bad that the badness oozed backward out of them and made the rest of the book bad too. Ick! There's some other book I finished lately that I wanted to talk about, but I've completely forgotten which one it was; I will have to look around for it. And I'm currently reading Stross's comparatively new "Saturn's Children" (it appeared unexpectedly in the mail, so I'm guessing that I pre-ordered the paperback at some time in the past, and it -- Arrrrgggghh!!! Okay the popup dies, now! A bit of quick searching reveals lots of people with the same desire talking about it, including this one, where I have followed the instructions to change the popup interval from "constantly" to "120 minutes", although if it works I suspect two hours from now I will be turning it to "off". The command-line command to kill the update service entirely is very tempting also. Grrrrr! -- recently came out). It's fun so far, interesting underlying premise, fun high-tech stuff, good playing with the noir genre. But I'm reluctant to say anything for sure about it until I've finished (once burned, twice shy). And that's probably all I have to say today. Apart of course from "Look! I've posted two days in a row!". 8) Sunday, July 5, 2009 While spending half of every entry talking about how long it's been since the last one is sort of pathetic in general, I do have to remark that this is I think the first time since 1999 that there's been an entire month missing from the weblog. There will be no file in the archive starting with "log.200906". Tsk! Mostly I've been been lazy and playing World of Warcraft and working and posting to the Second Life weblog and stuff. But also I reinstalled Cygwin on the laptop here to get the C compiler working, and that worked, but it also broke scp, and with scp broken I'm not sure how I'm going to post this; maybe from one of the Macbooks or something. (If you're reading this, I figured it out; if you're not reading this, then it doesn't matter how I finish this sentence hahaha). If it hadn't been for that latter problem this entry probably wouldn't be quite this* delayed. All sorts of things have been going on, as things do. The little daughter is all back from Spain, and the children and their friends are down at the lake frolicing about in the water (well, they soon will be; right now they are pottering around the house gathering swim suits and towels and stuff). We're lying on the bed here after bagels watching the extremely thrilling and closely-fought Wimbledon (pronounced "Wim bell don") Men's Final, which is tennis. There have been a couple of postings to that Other Weblog of mine that might be of interest to The General Reader. Anyone who knows things about computers, and gaming laptop computers in particular, is invited to tell me things about them, 'cause I might want to buy one. And more philosophically, I posted an entry about Ray Kurzweil and Transhumanism and stuff that's only vaguely Second Life related. Here, while we're on the subject, is a paragraph or three from that posting that I rather like: I find that I don't have a simple opinion about all of this stuff, myself. I think science is, overall, a good thing; figuring out how the world works and how to make it work more the way that we want it to is good. Exactly what "we" means there, just who (if anyone) should be in charge, what should happen when what I want to do (whether enabled by science or not) conflicts with that you want to do, are all hard questions. In general I'm a left-libertarian in some sense; I think that the government should leave us alone unless we're actually harming or defrauding someone, and that it's nice when what we choose to do with that being-left-alone is to be nice to each other, to share things, to sit around wearing flowers in our hair and playing the guitar, and so on. Along with that, it's good to think about all sorts of wild stuff that some of us might want to do in the future, like modify our bodies to be able to live in space, like developing devices that are actually intelligent, like making itty bitty machines that can swim around in our bloodstreams and keep us healthy. And as we think about doing those things, and start to even do them, the same principles apply: we each should be allowed to do what we want if it's not hurting anybody, and it's nice when we do it in nice cooperative ways involving guitar music. Hm, I've been rambling here, what was I going to say? Oh, yeah: and while it's fun to have some people around (Ray Kurzweil, Peter Molyneux of Lionhead, and so on) who make it sound like things are farther along than they really are (because that makes us hopeful, and stirs up debate), it's even better to have, when we can get it, realistic estimates of what's really going on. Because truth is good, too. Isn't that profound? 8) So I guess not a huge amount more has been going on, really. Oh, I've actually read a few books* lately, which as some of you may recall I used to do alla time, but that I've been doing less lately out of a shallow lack of interest in things that are, y'know, not interactive in the obvious sense. A couple of them have been disappointing, some have been good; maybe I'll post again soon (assuming I manage to post this) and tell you about some of them!
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