Observations from a Hill

  We've had a very full day here today. We went over to Nantlle Vale to have a look at the old quarries there and walked miles through the ruins and jungle-like tramways and tunnels. To paraphrase our visiting friend Sarah: an Angkor Wat for the Industrial Era; nature reclaiming its own from the spoils and spoil-heaps of the decades of mineral extraction that enriched the land-owning classes in this, our country of Cymru: Tir Ni [Our Land]. The place is at once magical and a tad intimidating: danger lurks everywhere in the precarious slate tips and derelict buildings, and as I've mentioned before, no more so than in the flooded quarry hole of Twll Balast, a toxic waste dump simply waiting to become a major environmental issue, and already a suspect in issues affecting bodies of water adjacent to it. Anyway, that's another subject which demands closer scrutiny and another day on which to address it. We went from there to the Cwellyn Arms at Rhud Ddu for a drink and drove Num...

This has got to be a diary post tonight as I'm totally fashed [reference: A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess] and frankly beyond it all. We've had an old friend staying in the cottage and tonight's meal was underscored by conversation comprised of the collective memory of at least three generations of the family, anchored in the presence of my mother-in-law, now ninety-nine years of age. The existence of so many people hinged on the chance meeting of said mother-in-law and her to be beau on the craggy excrescence of Crib Goch, so very many years ago in the 1940s. That she survives to this day, as do her offspring and subsequent generations, is a testament to the human spirit. Long may we prosper...

Number One Son and I were talking earlier about AI forms of English, and how the tropes that A.I uses in its use of the language are detectable, given that one knows something less than trivial about the stylistics of normal human usages. There is a piece in the Weekend FT of 29/30th August by Elaine Moore on this very subject. NOS pointed out that such odd stylistic traits are possibly now re-entering human speech through a process of normalisation through exposure - errant feedback loops, anyone? [cf. blog posts passim] - which in turn will be further internalised by the LLMs that are feeding off our own usages of the English - or any other language, for that matter - regurgitating and amplifying said tropes on the way. All well and good whilst there are still those of us around who know differently; those of us born and raised before the A.I era. But: What about those who are being born into this era of mutant and mutated knowledge, who will have no other context in which to frame w...

  OK - pictured, one of the images of dry-aged beef that I intended to use for last night's post, but was thwarted from using because of whatever weird server anomaly obtained with Blogger, which was preventing me from uploading locally-stored images from my computer. I still don't know what is causing the issue, but for a brief window, and using a different browser, having cleared all the caches, blah, blah, blah, &etc., I managed to insert the above in this page. However, I'm not holding my breath that the underlying cause of this glitch is actually being addressed. We shall see; but in the interim I'll continue to post as best I can, whilst setting up a parallel site on my own server space with Gandi.net; whose services, based in France, I've been using for ten years now, with no real hiccups or stress. Once I get the ghost site working I'll parallel the two up for a while before finally migrating to the new one and possibly maintaining this one as a back...

There is no planned image on tonight's post because Blogger seems to be having a sodding fit tonight, so here we are. I only seem at the moment to be able to load up previously used images from blog posts past, so here's one of a steak that I've already consumed: I think it might be my retirment day meal. However, imagine, if you will, large and expensive cuts of dry-aged beef on display in one of the better retail meat establishments... I've just subscribed to a butcher's YouTube channel, which seems like probably the least likely statement I might normally have contemplated uttering. But there you go: the prospect of watching a butcher carving up half a ton of prime Scottish grass-fed ninety-day beef in over half an hour of video might not appeal to many, but I do like beef and I do like to watch a craftsman at work. The piece I watched was  this one , and its content is self-explanatory and worth the watch, especially if you buy your meat from the supermarket. Th...

A.I has its uses, undoubtedly; it can simplify workflows, generate images and videos from the written ideas of human content producers which can be genuinely creative, given that the person prompting the A.I model[s] has at least a modicum of creativity themselves. Think brush, paint, canvas, klutz vs. brush, paint, canvas, artistic sensibility. As always with machines and tools of any sort, human skill will always be necessary to initiate a creative and worthwhile process of production in order to lead to a useful or aesthetically pleasing outcome, itself a function of need outwith the scope of any A.I 'awareness'. Without human prompting, what would an A.I model produce in the vacuum of its own virtual space, left to its own devices; and why would 'it' care, assuming that the concept of 'caring' meant anything to 'it' in the first place, except as an abstraction of that very human concept? The problem for A.I is that it genuinely does live [quasi-exist...