Martin Rodgers

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• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  Some say, "yes", but judge the output for yourself. GIGO applies. https://twitter.com/anitakirkovska/status/1620453954269380612 "Audio is all you need?🔊 A lot of the latest AI models push the boundaries for music/audio generation. Here are 6 new models that were launched this week."...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  So any "app" would have to be better than the multi million dollar classifier that's running on huge clusters with vast quantities of training data. Somehow I doubt it. I also doubt it. That was kind of my point -...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  This sounds to me like fighting fire with RS5000 ACM cladding. https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/31/openai_tool_chatgpt_detection/...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  Regarding song writers, I trust everyone here has read Nick Cave's commentary on a ChatGPT's "Nick Cave" song. TL;DR as a song writer, ChatGPT feels no pain, so he has no use for it at all. I wonder which song...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  My fear in 1983 wasn't that we'd all be nuked. My fear was that some of us might survive, escape from this planet, and spread through the universe like a cancer. Well, I was 17. Today I'm more optimistic. I...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  I learned from one of the biographies I've read of Philip K Dick that he kept a Rolodex by his telephone. He'd use it to keep the details of the last phone conversation he'd had with each caller, so when...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  Oh, they are indeed escape codes. Sorry, I should've made that clear. I don't see anything in the identifier spec that allows arbitrary unicode characters to be written. Strings and comments are another matter, of course. Thanks for prompting me...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  I was hoping nobody would ask that. ;) It's a Scheme compiler for the R7RS Small dialect. The target is ANSI C using libguile, the runtime library from Guile Scheme. Perhaps someday I'll find the time to write my own...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  FWIW, the parsers in my compilers only support backspace except as a character constant. Same with tabs, newslines, carraige returns and space. If the language supports these constants, then the compiler lexer should also. However, some languages support putting these...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  Yeah, I find that unsuprising. Thanks. I've written parsers for things like line input, text editors, compilers etc, and read a lot of code for these things by other people. Most of this code rejects invalid codes, and most non-displayable...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  Ahh, yes. Plotters. I may not have read that review, but I remember reading other plotter reviews, mainly in the early 80s. Now we have these lovely new fabricator machines that look a lot like plotters, but they do more...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  ISTR that there was a terminal trick for weaponising email, and this was first used in the mid-70s (1974?). Some terminals had function keys that could be programmed by embedding codes in the regular text. So it was a trivial...
• Commented on Decision Fatigue
  Whoops, I misspelled danah boyd. The name should be all lowercase. Sorry....
• Commented on Decision Fatigue
  Danah Boyd's research has an interesting explanation for the pics of food and drink. She called it the "cupcake code" and described how young people use it to communicate with each other without their parents or teachers realising. It's simply...
• Commented on I can't even
  From The Register: Readers may remember Johnson resigned in July. Having been in power for two and a half years, he at least left enough of a tech legacy for The Register to review. Lasting just six weeks, Truss gives...
• Commented on London Bridge
  Those like me who regularly check into the site, but rarely post should probably make rather more effort to contribute rather than just consume Please imagine me nodding vigorously at this point. we all need to make more effort to...
• Commented on London Bridge
  Some of us can't ignore rented accomodation, as that's all that's available to us. So few/none of the arguments over LED/heat-pumps/whatever apply to us. As I can only speak for myself, I'll say I skip all these arguments. That makes...
• Commented on London Bridge
  In my experience, going back to the 80s, that's never been a problem. Mine adapt fast enough (less than one minute) to never be a problem. Even at their most light-reducing, I don't have a problem indoors. Perhaps my eyes...
• Commented on The gathering crisis
  Some of us don't have the option to leave....
• Commented on The gathering crisis
  I remember what happened to Glorfindel in Peter Jackson's movie. I didn't mind, of course. I simply smiled and thought, "Oh, poor Glorfindel." Yet another victim of the movie-making process. However, I remember a 12yo telling me how he was...
• Commented on The gathering crisis
  Sure, NASA. I'd like to share your optimism but I doubt WRENs would have the same appeal for a Hollywood audience, at least not without some heavy rewriting, as has been noted. Otherwise your points about Hidden Figures may apply....
• Commented on The gathering crisis
  Thanks for the amusing movie pitch. I can imagine clueless audiences and movie critics loving it. I can also imagine varieties of reactionaries hating it. ISTR the word historians like to use is 'counterfactual'. Of course, I'm not a historian...
• Commented on The gathering crisis
  Yes, that sounds very much like the group I read about. ISTR they beat a Royal Navy admiral 5 times out of 5. Then the admiral discovered that the U-boat commander who beat him was a woman. I think that...
• Commented on The gathering crisis
  Yes, indeed! Thanks. Were they the group that worked out how the U-boats were evading depth charges? I read about them sometime in the last year, I think, probably following a link from a post on this blog....
• Commented on The gathering crisis
  Here's a grim possiblity: there may be no system of government that can deal with the complexity of this problem. We may have reached the limits of what the human brain can cope with. BTW, the World Population Clock says...
• Commented on The gathering crisis
  Ok, that does look rather dumb taken out of context. ;) So how do we align public debate with reality? Right now it seems driven by whatever trollbots are promoting on social media networks, amplified by the algorithms used by...
• Commented on The gathering crisis
  I'd like to echo Greg here. If Foxessa is reading this, please come back. Some of us value your contributions, even if we don't all respond. However, please also see below. I'm no historian. Not even an armchair historian. My...
• Commented on The gathering crisis
  Nope, I'm still not seeing a connection. I did not use the words "social" or "society" or "status" in 768, probably because I wasn't talking about society or status. I see no point in this line of communication. Please don't...
• Commented on The gathering crisis
  If you can see a link between a heirarchy of needs and social structure, please explain it, but I fail to see one. Sure, two things may be heirarchies, but that similarity doesn't go any further. There's also a heirarchy...
• Commented on The gathering crisis
  While that's a fun read, I detect a few straw man arguments. Few people today would use Maslow's heirarchy exactly as he defined it, and I strongly doubt anyone here would do that or is doing that here. Please let's...