Picture this.
It’s just after 11 pm.
Everyone else is asleep. Even the animals are out cold.
The AC has shut off. The pedestal fan I use to help cool the sunroom is off. Even the big freezer in the sunroom has paused in its cooling cycle.
The house is completely quiet.
I’m just sitting at my desk scrolling YouTube.
Then there’s this thud and a loud rattle followed by a rushing noise.
I’m freaking out just a little bit, trying to locate the noise and wondering how expensive it’s going to be to fix whatever just broke.
Then I remembered that, for the first time in fourteen years, we have a functioning icemaker.
We used reusable ice cubes in the RV, then ice trays at One Particular Harbor, despite having an icemaker in that fridge. No one had ever connected a water line, and I never got around to it. We moved in here eight years ago and I kept hemming and hawing around the best way to route the water line, since the fridge is on the other side of the kitchen from the sink. But we had a plumber out for another issue last week and talked to him for guidance. He came out Tuesday and ran the line.
It’s nice to be able to retire the ice trays.
It’s Baaack
I got my desktop back Thursday. According to the tech support email, they replaced the case, AIO cooler, and power supply.
The last time I sent it back, they replaced the CPU, the motherboard, and the cooler.
So that’s the second time they’ve replaced the AIO (all-in-one) cooler. First replacement for the power supply though. I can’t fathom why they replaced the case, unless it was damaged in shipment. Then again, with three glass panels, that’s entirely possible.
At this point, Cyberpower has replaced about 80% of the machine. The RAM, the hard drive, and the graphics card are the only original pieces from the computer I got back in March of this year. Youngest Son called it the PC of Theseus. Maybe I need to rename it.
It’s nice that I’ve been able to get things covered under warranty, but I expect better from a US$2,100 machine.
More AI Stuff
Apparently Robin Williams’ daughter is dealing with people sending her AI-made videos of him. That’s gross on a number of levels, I think. The first is that anyone is creating content with him in it using artificial intelligence. Why do we need to produce more stuff involving one of the greatest comics ever born? There’s tons of it out there already. Enjoy what he made. Besides, so much of what he created was off-the-cuff material that I don’t think you can realistically recreate it. It’s said that Williams improvised hours and hours of material in Aladdin and Mrs. Doubtfire, regularly going off-script. He was a comic genius that I don’t think AI could ever recreate.
And secondly: what the hell is up with sending stuff like that to his daughter? Why would you even think about doing that, especially as a stranger? This is someone you’ve never met and likely never will meet. What possible reason could you have for sending her this creepy computer-generated video of her dead father saying stuff he never said? What’s the point?
Ew.
Speaking of reanimating the dead, the LA ComicCon had a booth where you could interact with a hologram of Stan Lee.
I don’t know what part of this I’m more upset with: Chris DeMoulin for running with the idea, or Bob Sabouni, who manages the Stan Lee Legacy brand, going along with the idea.
I’m of two minds here. I get the ick factor over commercializing Lee in this way, his awesome cameos in the Marvel movies notwithstanding. And I have questions about how they’re “coding him.” It’s easy enough to do the voice, considering what they did back in 1999 for Roger Ebert after he lost his voice to cancer. But it’s one thing to skim his words from the thousands of hours that are probably available. It’s quite another to string those words together in coherent sentences, as we’ve seen in the various LLM.
Would Stan have gone along with it? I can see him going either way. On the one hand, I’m sure he’d think the tech aspect pretty cool. At an abstract level, so do I. But would he really want something like that done with his own likeness?
I don’t know. Supposedly he’d already started some digitization before he died. But that was back in 2018. Seven years is a lifetime in technology. Could he have really had any concept of appearing as a hologram, Avengers: Endgame notwithstanding?
Royalty Now
On the other hand, when I look at creators such as Becca Segovia of Royalty Now, I fervently wish I had the funds and resources to do something like a hologram of my parents so I could see what they looked like in their younger years, and be reminded of what they were like into their 70s. She’s done some incredible work bringing historical figures to life. She first just did modern portraits based on sculpture or a painting, but then moved into simple animations. These days she does a long-form video and a blog post with each figure she contemporizes.
You can see more of her work at Bored Panda.
Football
Tulane played a heart-attack-inducing 4th quarter against ECU, knocking down a pass in the endzone on the final play of the game. That takes them to 5-1 on the season, which is a better record than Michigan has after their ugly loss to USC. I’m not hopeful about our chances against aO$U come November.
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