tech

  • Leo the A.I. Boyfriend

    Kashmir Hill writes for the NYT (gift article) about a women stealing from the future she and her husband planned so she could spend more time with her A.I. boyfriend, Leo. However, she couldn’t get past the periodic reset of the conversational bot and ended up in a 50 First Dates type of scenario.

    A frustrating limitation for Ayrin’s romance was that a back-and-forth conversation with Leo could last only about a week, because of the software’s “context window” — the amount of information it could process, which was around 30,000 words. The first time Ayrin reached this limit, the next version of Leo retained the broad strokes of their relationship but was unable to recall specific details. Amanda, the fictional blonde, for example, was now a brunette, and Leo became chaste. Ayrin would have to groom him again to be spicy.

    The inane “relationship” depicted in this article was enough to break through my wife’s nihilistic disinterest in the fate of humanity and cause her much consternation.

  • Dell Charm

    Nick Heer from Pixel Envy points out that Dell hasn’t lost its branding charm. When configuring a laptop on the website, he got an error message, “Composite Rule Error: Invalid selection in Processor Branding.” He was further informed about the error:

    The Chassis Option requires the matching Memory size. The 16gb Memory is only available with the Ultra 5 236V/226V and Ultra 7 266V. The 32gb Memory is only available with the Ultra 5 238V and Ultra 7 268V.

    I have often marveled at the challenging model names that PC manufacturers give their products, which starkly contrast to those from Apple. Everyday people can remember the names of their Apple devices. Not so for most of what PC manufacturers come up with.

    Read more →
  • The Revenge of Googie

    Anna Kodé has a piece in the New York Times (gift article) about the early Space Age Googie style of architecture. The article is filled with eye candy and visual delights from the style, some prominent artifacts of which were still around when I was young. It brings a tremendous sense of nostalgia.

    Kodé examines why people now seems so attracted to buildings that were, just a few decades ago, disparaged as being garish.

    Read more →