M Thomas Apple Author Page

Science fiction, actual science, history, and personal ranting about life, the universe, and everything

Booooooring

February 22, 2024
MThomas

What bores you?

What doesn’t?

OK, I guess I’ll play along…

  • Boring people
  • People who talk a lot but say very little
  • Morning “news”
  • Talk shows
  • Game shows
  • Most TV, to be quite honest
  • Pop music. Of any era.
  • Dancing
  • Politicians
  • Business people
  • Pointless paperwork
  • Activities that require no thought or skill
  • Card games (seriously…sorry, I just don’t get the attraction)
  • Long lists about boring things (hey!)

Two weeks of no posting 🤦‍♂️

December 20, 2023
MThomas

Sorry, everyone. It’s been a very stressful and exhausting stretch this month.

Family issues, health issues, work issues…

I need a serious break.

(Yet) another apology for a brief absence

November 19, 2023
MThomas

Dear readers,

Sorry to have been absent for a couple of weeks.

Things just got busy at work and at home. And influenza really is strong this year, as predicted (I found out long ago that teenagers – especially guys – completely ignore suggestions regarding ways of avoiding illness due to an unwavering belief in their invulnerability).

I’ll try to make it up to you over the next couple of days.

In the meantime, here’s an Apple IIe showing the matrix (“all I see is blond…brunette…”).

Bringer of Light first draft completed (finally!)

September 10, 2023
MThomas

Way back in 2015, my good friend Rami Z Cohen came to me with an idea for a story. He had written two or three scenes about a group of asteroid hunters who stumbled upon something bizarre. The idea of mining asteroids was news at the time (and still is, although probably too expensive right now and not a worthwhile investment until we actually get some people in space who need metals without relying on NASA/ESA/JAXA/ISRO/etc).

I was more interested in philosophical aspects of finding that we are all (as the late great Carl Sagan loved to put it) “star stuff” (he meant carbon being created by supernovas, but we also know that asteroids are the way we got amino acids to rain down on ancient Earth).

So Rami and I began to email ideas back and forth for a few weeks, then we started to flesh out his characters and plot. I wrote a synopsis and outline and we hashed out the background.

Continue Reading

Dear Diary – January 4, 2019

August 31, 2023
MThomas

It’s a lie. It’s all a lie.

When you believe in a lie, you fool yourself. When you say it with conviction, you fool others.

Get enough people fooled, and you got yourself a new religion.

AI “loses its mind” when fed AI-created drivel

August 19, 2023
MThomas

Source: https://twitter.com/tomgoldsteincs/status/1677439914886176768 (@tomgoldsteincs)

In other words, without “fresh real data” — translation: original human work, as opposed to stuff spit out by AI — to feed the beast, we can expect its outputs to suffer drastically. When trained repeatedly on synthetic content, say the researchers, outlying, less-represented information at the outskirts of a model’s training data will start to disappear. The model will then start pulling from increasingly converging and less-varied data, and as a result, it’ll soon start to crumble into itself.

https://futurism.com/ai-trained-ai-generated-data

So, as more and more lazy people ask AI to “write” for them, the programs get less and less accurate…

Or, as the authors of the study conclude, “…without enough fresh real data in each generation of an autophagous loop, future generative models are doomed to have their quality (precision) or diversity (recall) progressively decrease.”

I.e., the use of AI-generated content to train AI doesn’t work, and since there is already way too much AI-generated garbage all over the internet, it’s almost impossible to sort out which is which when the AI-creators “scrape” data from the web.

So…

See, machines can’t replace us entirely — their brains will melt!

But then again, that might not be so hopeful after all. When AI takes over the world, maybe it won’t kill humans; perhaps it’ll just corral us into content farms… 

At least we won’t wind up as batteries.

Yet.

PS. I find it both hysterically amusing and disturbing that my blog program offers an “experimental AI assistant.” Granted, the program does let you know that AI-generated content accuracy is not guaranteed, but wth would I want to use AI for a personal blog? The whole purpose of a blog is to WRITE. AI-generated text is not writing. It is intellectual property theft.

Everybody I know needs it!

August 15, 2023
MThomas

If you were going to open up a shop, what would you sell?

OK, OK, in all seriousness, I would probably open a jazz café / restaurant. But only on the weekends.

We live at the foot of a mountain trail, and it’s really popular with retired folks and young families.

My wife and I have already begun thinking about our “second life” after retirement, and I’ve been frankly bored with the whole EFL teaching thing for a while now.

But pizza and the Duke? Yeah. That’d work.

UA what?

July 28, 2023
MThomas

US Congress: We want the truth!

Former military pilots: UAP is real!

Me: Wtf is a “UAP”?

And no, I have no idea why Jetpack/WordPress did that

July 5, 2023
MThomas

Post once, get them twice!

No idea why my post about UV appeared twice.

Maybe it’s something to do with my connection speed on the train home…

And by the way, thanks for reading!

June 20, 2023
MThomas

I’m sorry that I haven’t been posting much lately. Work has just become completely overwhelming, and the rainy season (here in Japan) hasn’t helped.

But I do read your comments and I appreciate them, and all your “likes,” too!

Just realized it’s been MONTHS since I posted the next installment of Bringer of Light.

Yikes.

Time to wrap up the first book and get to the climax already!

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