One year ago today: November 6, 2024, down by 24 million.
Five years ago today: November 6, 2020, the Reb played piano.
Nine years ago today: November 6, 2016, attentive & polished.
Random years ago today: November 6, 2010, Howard was professor.
Up early enough for several coffee refills, I read the almost terrifying stats on US consumer debt. Since 2018, house prices up 40% but wages just 28%. The overall Bidenflation is admitted to be 20%, but it’s double that for essentials. I chuckle to hear GenXers complain that rent takes 21.6% of their income. When I started, I lived in a semi-heated attic whose rent was half my income. There jerkwads living on credit cards must actually think there will be a loan forgiveness in their future.
Poland has announced military training for all citizens. It’s not a draft, just training, but they must know something Europe doesn’t. The newly elected Mayor of NYC is already begging for money. The Justice Department has finally begun firing judges who release immigrants. The Turkish bit-coin crook who got 11,176 years in prison has been found dead in one. That aroma is coffee with a mix of pizza carton. I downloaded a SVG file and found them easier to work with, as they scale better. They don’t spread out when resized. We’ve getting closer to something.
The maximum cut sizes are too small to assemble by hand, though I will give it a try with hot glue. Because of the laser kerf, it the entire box has to be cut from a single immobile blank. Measurements have to be caliper-accurate. This is damn good progress even if I took time to carefully read all the instructions—which is wise considering this thing turns out to be a precision instrument besides being on the dangerous side.
This mornings unique event will be a small star cut by the laser. This one was cut by 3 passes of the laser set down to 300 mm per second. I found the DFX and SCG files both have the same quirks as all other graphics. They don’t do what you want, so working with them brings up hundreds, possibly thousands of similar files as you try to find one close to your wants. I also found SCG files to mostly an on-line scam operation.
Most sites that say free are not and the ones that are free all have that same “dollar store” font and designs. I tried to find some Xmas ornament or snowflake designs and worst are the sites that let you wade into the process for five minutes first, then when you hit download, it’s a membership or create account situation. If this is your doing, up yours.
It is now 7:30AM and they took the dead stove, bless ‘em, at 30% over the weight limit. Here’s a wakeup call, my utilities are a combined bill with the dominant cost being electricity. My bills follow my fiscal year and here are some totals.
2023: $1,089Most of the increase was due to the base charge of electricity, not usage. In other words this utility has gone up 100% while the government claims inflation is 20%. For those not arithmetically inclined, that means the electric bill has doubled but most people’s income has not. And since it the base charge, you cannot conserve. Next, we do my property taxes.
2024: $1,361
2025: $2,148
Pat-B has e-mailed mentioning he has met a lady. He must know how rare that is these days. He should be careful, however, he does tend to over-trust them, but he’s by no means bad at it. He knows I’d drop everything if he ever wanted to form a duo. Around four of my most successful and memorable gigs were just we two at gigs in the Hollywood (Florida) vicinity. But it’s the same story, he’s good enough to solo, so why bother with a bassist? However, that can sometimes change when one is no longer in it for the money.
Rock Island Arrsenal Museum.
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That hurts, my taxes have increased 2.75 times (from roughly $412 to $1,150 in nine years.) You cannot tell me many people planned for that. They may be living on credit cards, gawd help them if they are that crazy. If I had to choose between taxes and food, pay them damned taxes, or you will have no place to even grow your own. I wrote JZ a letter detailing some of the bigger numbers, since we have a pact to share that information. He’s not a math person, so everything is converted to today’s dollars.
I was invited to a meeting and only four guys showed up, so we relocated to the old club for a few. I brought the sample laser laser cuts and explained how I tweaked the laser settings to achieve that. I further went over why this was impractical, plus the inconvenience of needing a computer meaning an exhaust or filtering system must be considered for any larger unit. Present was a new guy who has taken CAD courses at that college, half-way to Lake Wales. The design phase has always led my list of what I do not like about the laser/3D devices, so I’d be more than glad to have someone else specialize in that.
If you recall that “Spanish” lady I’ve pointed out that I do not like, she kept butting in with her half-baked politics. She’s got some hidden agenda and some issue to prove that nobody cares about. And she more than once stated that diversity is something that should be shoved down American’s throats. She’s done this before, butt into conversations as if there is some obligation to be extra nice to her. You can always tell when these pushy broads are not in a situationship and being a pest is hardly helping her.
Speaking of dodos, how about the Portland city councilor who advocated free housing for the homeless. She became on when a homeless bum set fire to a shed and burned down her townhome. YouTube continues to get worse by the week, but years ago I cut and pasted a list of documentaries to get to. Many are still there, so I chose this week to watch the series on Shaka Zulu. How did cattle-herding tribes come into conflict with farmers 1500 miles away?
In a way, it makes sense. If there are two neighbors and one forms an army, that group is no longer producing food or working. Where can it get these two things? We know from European history if you don’t keep your army fighting, it begins to decay. What? Where am I? This office hair is, methinks, too comfortable.
ADDENDUM
During my A.I. research this morning, I looked at this NASA site for news on the new Marscopter design. What got me was the cookie screen. Never quite seen anything like that. [It] lists the cookies, who is using them, and allows refusal of each. However, the GenX mentality remains the same—how can they respect your privacy if they don’t know who you are?
I found no examples looking for these A.I. coding mistakes that reputedly are causing manufacturing headaches. That leads me to some familiar predictions about where that is going. Same as when industry degraded from programmers down to coders, I say the same old type of problems will emerge but with new uber-jargon names. It’s a surprisingly easy prophecy because of all the patterns from 50 years ago have remained the same.
We’ve long known the reasons programmers are better than coders is because coding entails a disjoint between reality and performance. To a coder, if it appears to work on-screen, then it works. (Prime example is still GPS.) To compensate for this loss of tech background that a programmer would insist on, they began hiring coders in teams, that would have been around 1990. With rare exceptions, since then software has been “engineered” by departments. When you have more that one person in charge, programmers (such as myself) called this a “gang bang”.
So fast forward two generations. Witness the rise of the “coder class” who often know nothing about the process they are working on. It's become the era of constant patches and upgrades accepted as somehow "normal". Just keep tweaking the code to cover up glitches until that bloats the app, then release version 1.1.1.1, it’s the hive-mind at its peak. Now, introduce A.I. This actually removes intelligence from the loop. Any given A.I. app, as it gains “experience”, begins more and more to behave like the crowd. 50 million brontobytes can’t be wrong.
Or can they? Remember our definition of Internet information, “Fact by majority rule”, and that is exactly the data that coders have been using to train A.I. Think about that for a moment. Coding no longer requires its creator to read, write, tell time, or do basic arithmetic, as in “there’s an app for that.” So now we have teams of coders writing A.I., what could go wrong?
Let’s get to my prediction. Okay, we know the code is created by teams. Remember y’day’s quip that to train a dog, you must know more than the dog? Well, we can no longer assign any superior intelligence to people who cannot read cursive, so let’s peg the average IQ of coders to be same as anywhere else, that is, 100. However, the distribution curve shows there will be at least one person on the team two standard deviations below normal. We don’t know how many teams are out there, but we can presume thousands.
Experience dictates that no person can possibly design code with a higher IQ than he himself possesses. During the 1980s, Japanophiles came up with the idiotic idea that the answer was to form teams. That teamwork has some supernatural cumulative effect, that can beat this IQ limitation. It’s a mentality that may apply to sports teams, but we won’t go there just now. For intellectual pursuits, anybody who has done it knows that a team just drags the superior performers down to ground level.
Hence, I predict the fake A.I. of today will drown itself. The software will initially appear to work well enough to entrench itself into the system, the “MicroSoft” first-to-market ploy. Worse, like what happened with the IRS and TurboTax, the rules will bend to accommodate bad coding. Thus I conclude no code produced by a team can ever rise about the IQ of the stupidest person on that team. The very presence of that one zeke on most every team dictates you will never achieve even average results. Or as Boomers would put it, the convoy can only move as fast as the slowest ship. But what do they know?
