Creepy, creepy, creepy
Sep. 16th, 2025 06:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oursin‘I love you too!’ My family’s creepy, unsettling week with an AI toy:
Designed for kids aged three and over and built with OpenAI’s technology, the toy is supposed to “learn” your child’s personality and have fun, educational conversations with them. It’s advertised as a healthier alternative to screen time and is part of a growing market of AI-powered toys.
Can we get a very loud UGH?
I thought I'd linked somewhere to the instructive tale of techbro who made, was it an interactive doll or was it a teddybear for his daughter, that would talk to her, and in very short order she turned the thing off and played with it as Ye Kiddyz have played with dolls since dolls were A Thing (Ancient Sumeria???). Can't find it, however.
Anyone else read Harry Harrison's 'I Always Do What Teddy Says'? which also springs to mind, although that is about plot to subvert conditioning via teddy.
Cover Reveal
Sep. 16th, 2025 10:06 ammarthawellshttps://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/books/2025/09/16/murderbot-book-platform-decay-martha-wells/86165029007/
lolnope
Sep. 16th, 2025 04:02 amyhlee
A particularly hilarious example of low-effort spammer/scammer.
Seriously considering how much spam I could effortlessly screen out if I set up my email to automatically delete ANYTHING with the word "Amazon" in it that isn't on a very small (like, a half-dozen people small) whitelist of family and close friends.
yhlee![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
communal_creators)earlier:
- part 0: preliminaries
- part 1: brief demo: engraving software (Dorico)
Brief walkthrough of the start of a fake piano sketch in Cubase Pro that I'll build into a hybrid orchestral piece using MIDI and VSTs. I don't claim this is good music, just something for demonstration purposes and to talk through some of the technical details. This is musically unexciting but covering DAW basics will make the later hybrid orchestra bits easier to understand, hypothetically.
(Sorry, the audio recorded in mono; I will look at my audio interface settings again.)
For those curious about my usual style(s) of music, my music reel.
Futtock-shroudery
Sep. 15th, 2025 07:22 pmoursinOr, do the details matter?
Concede that sometimes they do, cue here whingeing from me and from others about historical inaccuracies anent the rules of succession, the laws on divorce, etc, which have completely undermined our belief in the narrative we were reading.
But exchange earlier today on bluesky about specific time/place cultural references, do they throw you out -
At which I was, have I not read books involving baseball, and, on reflection, elaborate gambling scams, and I do not understand these at all, but this does not interfere with my enjoyment of the story. Possibly we do need to feel that the author knows what they're writing about and is not commiting solecisms on the lines of 'All rowed fast, but none so fast as stroke' - though apparently this is apocryphal.
I also felt that when I was reading that Reacher novel the other day that perhaps we had a leeeetle more detail than we really required about his exact itinerary whenever he went anywhere - the street-by-street perambulations in NYC, for ex. I am sure one could trace them exactly on a map, and any one-way systems were correctly described, and the crossings in the right place.
Which is sort of the equivalent of where I got 'futtock-shroudery' from, which was reading Age of Sail novels with Alot of period nautical terminology. (On the whole I though O'Brian got the balance on this right.)
There has been a certain amount of querying expressed in the Dance to the Music of Time discussions about some of the significance of parts of London invoked by Nick Jenkins, which is not just geography but Class (there was at least one passage where I was getting strong Nancy Mitford's Lady Montdore dissing on Kensington vibes), connotations of bohemianism, etc.
Sometimes the detail is load-bearing. But often it's not, particularly.
As You Like It
Sep. 15th, 2025 01:42 pmantisoppistnineveh_uk and I went to see As You Like It with Harriet Walter in it. Harriet Walter was playing Jacques. I was pleased to find there was more of Jacques than I remembered. I just remembered him coming on lugubriously every now and then and eventually glumly producing the Seven Ages of Man speech. This is very probably because the only other time I have seen a performance of As You Like It, Jacques was played by Alan Rickman. In 1986. I did As You Like It for A-level (and Hamlet) and I loved it. It's fun. They all go off to the forest and find out stuff and it all ends happily and people disguise themselves as a boy like in Twelfth Night except they aren't all ganging up on Malvolio. At 18 I mostly read it as the story of the devoted loyalty (definitely loyalty yup) of Celia for Rosalind, going into exile with her and everything. In later life I realised that a lot of this came from having seen it with Celia played by Fiona Shaw.
Here are some photographs from the 1985 Adrian Noble production. I feel third along top row does nothing to dispel my teenage view whatsoever. It was just a pity that when they got into the Forest of Arden, Juliet Stevenson as Rosalind had to wear white trousers and braces and at times a bowler hat that made her look like a mime artist. I had also totally not realised until now that Phebe was played by Lesley Manville as an 80's punk shepherdess.
Anyway, back to 2025. Here is a Guardian review with pictures.
This Forest of Arden was conveyed by projections of actual trees on curtains. I liked the trees being real and not metaphorical. It also picked up on the "sweet lovers love the spring" bit at the end and everyone being cold when they arrive by making it clear that at the start of the play it is winter and the Duke's exiled court all had chunky outdoor-wear jackets, scarves and hats and carried rucksacks, which they sat on and handily carried off with them again.
Gloria Obianyo and Amber James had great chemistry as Rosalind and Celia but less so with Orlando and Oliver respectively. This is partly the play's fault, especially for Celia and Oliver who only have about 5 seconds to fall in love after Oliver's had a personality change after encountering a lion, but there could have been more sizzlingness between Rosalind-as-Ganymede and Orlando in the wooing-practice-while-dressed-as-a-boy bits. They had it at court but there was a missing layer of "shit I really really fancy this boy what the fuck is going on" from Orlando in the forest and Rosalind revealing herself as being Rosalind at the end just by wearing different trousers didn't help the suspension of disbelief that no-one had recognised her before.
The Guardian reviewer thinks Dylan Moran as Touchstone was a weak link but honestly so much of Touchstone is just not funny that I think having Touchstone played like he's still Bernard Black in Black Books was a plus. He made it funny. Well done Dylan Moran.
Everyone was good, especially Harriet Walter, obviously, who managed to do All the World's A Stage while eating an apple, but I want to mention Imogen Elliott as a perky, modern Phebe in her first role I think, because she was great and if she turns into Lesley Manville, I want to remember I saw her here first.
I nearly forgot the music. I liked it all being turned into folk songs and Rosalind getting to play a guitar.
Culinary
Sep. 14th, 2025 06:40 pmoursinThis week's bread: the Country Oatmeal aka Monastery Loaf from Eric Treuille and Ursula Ferrigno's Bread (2:1:1 wholemeal/strong white/pinhead oatmeal), turned out nicely if perhaps a little coarser than the recipe anticipates (medium oatmeal has been for some reason a bit hard to come by).
Friday night supper: ven pongal (South Indian khichchari), v nice.
Saturday breakfast rolls: eclectic vanilla, texture seemed a bit off, possibly the dough could have been a bit slacker?
Today's lunch: the roasted Mediterranean vegetable thing - whole garlic cloves, red onion, fennel, red bell pepper, baby peppers, baby courgettes and aubergine (v good), served with couscous + raisins.
*violent eye-twitches setting in*
Sep. 14th, 2025 05:59 pmwychwoodMy boss has set up a new joint task tracker for our 121s and we went through and added numerous things from my to-do list to it on Friday, but she wants to put predicted end dates on them and I just... can't. "OK, can you finish this one in September?" no I can't do anything else in September I'm going to be in a tent. "Shall we say October for this?" no because there's already two things you wanted in September and also in October I'm going to be spending a fortnight testing something single-handed because everyone else is busy. "OK then this one in November?" right but didn't you also want me to guarantee the bespoke work testing before Christmas because this schedule doesn't give me any room for that in September or October and there's graduations to fit in somewhere, so...
She's not actually unreasonable, but also I don't think I've ever quite been able to explain how much of my workday is taken up by "ordinary" things that never get as far as her list of bigger tasks but, crucially, do still need to be done. And most of the bigger jobs require significant blocks of focussed time and I don't have very much capacity for that in any one day, although I can work on boring maintenance tasks OK... anyway, I was feeling extremely stressed on Friday, and it's trying to creep back now except I don't have time because tomorrow I have a half-day away day and then my singing lesson and then a choir rehearsal and then I have to get home and unpack and repack my bag before bed because I have another on-campus day on Tuesday so I can attend a half-day meeting she can't make, and then another choir rehearsal in the evening and sure theoretically I can't explain why I can't find three hours in there to work on live chat, but also...
Time to go and read another book and do my best not to think about it, I think!!1!
yhleecommunal_creators)Earlier:
- part 0: preliminaries (includes partial glossary of terms)
I know there are a lot of people who haaaaaate being forced to sit through video but since audio playback is inherent to the enterprise...This is under a minute, promise.
This is a brief demonstration of the opening of one of my compositions partially engraved (~sheet music typesetting) in Dorico. The two industry-standard engraving apps in media composition scoring are Dorico and Sibelius; Finale used to be a third but was sunsetted to much consternation.
If you come from classical music (especially classical orchestral music), you may be ??? about the score formatting. This is because scores for session orchestra and concert/classical orchestra have different formatting! (See part 0: preliminaries for more detail as to why). Differences for session orchestra you see here include:
- Score is in C (NOT a transposing score for the conductor - nota bene, transposing is "allowed" for octaves), but we won't have e.g. horn in F or trumpet in Bb. ( Read more... )
As for playback:
- Guess what, Dorico and Sibelius at the level of orchestral scores are spendy. :]
- I'm using NotePerformer, which is the standard higher-quality playback engine, especially if you don't have time to mock it up in the DAW (or you're an art/concert composer for whom a mockup is not part of your workflow). But that's also money (~$130 USD).
NotePerformer is pretty credible with a lot of orchestral instruments. You still have to massage its output. For example, in Sibelius [not shown] you can set playback to molto espressivo (LOTS OF FEELING) vs. senza espressivo (NO FEELINGS EVER!!!) (etc). My experience is that particular instruments can be less "real"-sounding and the "vocalists" (both SATB choir and associated "solo" voices) are absolutely terrible, as in "my vacuum cleaner sings more credibly than this" terrible.
Aside: There are some good vocal VST libraries for specific use cases. I hate that I am often able to straight-up identify "Oh yeah, XYZ floating ethereal ~Celtic Twilight vibes soprano 'ahhh' ululation in this trailer/score/whatever was $SPECIFIC_VST_LIBRARY" because, apparently, I have no life; but this is not unusual in this field.
I know at least one full-time composer/orchestrator/musician who straight-up bounces NotePerformer output and then processes that in the DAW (reverb etc) and, you know, this person makes a living doing this. So that's one route one can take.
Why, you ask, can't we just export this score-stuff into a DAW with all the fancy (...spendy) VST instruments and "paste in" nicer/more individualized instruments? Dorico (and Sibelius) do in fact export to MIDI and MusicXML. [1] This is a very reasonable question that will be the topic of the next walkthrough (part 2), mainly because it's a surprisingly (annoying) complicated topic as to why this is rarely straightforward. (Let me tell you all about negative track delay...)
[1] Missed these glossary items earlier! ( brief explanations of MIDI and MusicXML )
Happy to answer questions, although I have no idea if anyone else finds this interesting. :p
a few notes on ratelimiting
Sep. 14th, 2025 04:31 amfanfhttps://dotat.at/@/2025-09-14-ratelimit.html
Last year I wrote a pair of articles about ratelimiting:
Recently, Chris "cks" Siebenmann has been working on ratelimiting HTTP bots that are hammering his blog. His articles prompted me to write some clarifications, plus a few practical anecdotes about ratelimiting email.
( Read more... )
September is nearly half over...
Sep. 13th, 2025 06:26 pmsartoriasWith library going away I've resorted more to TV, and I couldn't resist going back to watch Nirvana in Fire yet again. Between my last rewatch and this time, some team of actual humans (No AI) had gone through the, ah, somewhat problematical subtitles and cleaned up spelling, grammar, and meaning, clarifying a lot of small stuff that watchers who did not know Mandarin could only guess at.
It's just brilliant. Even though on this watch I see the problems with the end starting a bit sooner than I remembered, and I still believe that one more episode would have pulled together all the dangling bits and tightened up the emotional arcs, still the overall emotional velocity absolutely rams you straight through and beyond. For a couple of days I couldn't do anything but go back to look at scenes (some for like the twentieth time, or more). Not perfect, but even after ten years, for me it's the best television show ever made.
Well, back to your regularly schedule chaos.
not good spinning demo: EEW 6.1
Sep. 13th, 2025 01:04 pmyhleeDreaming Robots' Electric Eel Wheel 6.1 e-spinner with some sacrificial Rambouillet/Gotland wool blend. Sorry about the mess; too hot to go outside with this. I don't claim this is good spinning, just a brief demonstration of Getting The E-Spinner To Do A Thing.
current stitching
Sep. 13th, 2025 10:50 amthistleingreyA few days ago, I noticed that the roving from the spindle workshop had introduced very tiny critters to my active knitting projects, kept adjacent. Off they went to chill, one ziploc bag in the freezer and the rest waiting at the back of the fridge. That meant starting a different knitting project. I squelched my initial idea of fine-gauge, two-color brioche for a shawl (to use up certain yarn skeins) and chose the pattern from my Ravelry queue that scares me the most.
Yesterday I washed a swatch, the start of the first sleeve. I guess the designer pulled very tightly on his recently discontinued yarn, of a type that snaps if you look at it funny (BT Shelter). I'm using a yarn with slightly more heft, gained via the last of my in-kind shop samples, and I was able to have a second go at a sleeve on smaller needles ( before a minor accident )
Rubbish
Sep. 13th, 2025 04:34 pmoursinSeem to have been seeing a cluster of things about litter, and picking it up, lately, what with this one Lake District: Family shouted at for picking up litter, and the thing I posted recently about the young woman who was snarking on the Canals and Rovers Trust about what she perceived as her singlehanded mission to declutter the local canal bank: "Elena might feel alone in tackling London's litter waste", and then this week's 'You Be The Judge' in the weekend Guardian is on a related theme:
Should my girlfriend stop picking up other people’s litter?
(She is at least throwing it away in a responsible fashion: I worry about the couple whose flat is being cluttered up with culinary appliances where one feels maybe the ones that aren't actually being used anymore could be rehomed via charity shops before they are buried under an avalanche of redundant ricecookers etc).
As far as litter and clutter goes, National Trust tears down Union flag from 180-year-old monument. Actually, carefully removed, and we think there are probably conservation issues involved: quote from NT 'We will assess whether any damage has been caused to the monument'. See also White horse checked for any damage caused by flag. We do not think respect and care for heritage is uppermost in the minds of people who do these jelly-bellied flagflapping gestures.