Notes

I've been following the controversy surrounding the horror novel Shy Girl  in horrified awe. I don't have any problem in principle with writing with AI. I care about how good  the material actually is and not whether it was written in the old-fashioned way or prompted. I think that there is a lot of anti-AI prejudice out there that will not even consider anything that was created with AI. To take a random example from Goodreads, " There's no value for me to art that a human didn't create. " In other words, no form of prompt engineering or editing outputted AI counts as creation. The term "AI slop" was coined because of work that was (1) created with AI and (2) of inferior quality. As such, humans are every bit as capable of producing slop as AI is. And a low-effort AI prompt is almost guaranteed to produce slop. Nevertheless, some people use the word "slop" to tag anything that was created with AI, which is where I draw the line. Just as on...

I think the Java version verification plugin has pretty laughable compatibility issues. I was prompted to update my Java runtime tonight. It meant that I was prompted to test that I have the current version of Java installed. The Java installer is meant to determine this with a plugin on a web page. I would launch a browser to open on that web page by pressing the prompted button in the installer. What followed was a comedy of errors. For some unknown reason, the Java installer launched Firefox, despite the fact that it is not my default browser. Firefox made sure to tell me this and prompted me to choose to make it my default browser. Instead, I prompted its dialog box to piss off. There was also a notice on the bottom of the Firefox application to prompt me to tidy up its display a bit. This was because it noted that I had not used Firefox in a long time. I did clean up the display, if only to get rid of the banner at the bottom of the browser. Meanwhile, in the middle of the brow...

Saw a very stimulating episode of Black Mirror today, “White Bear”. A woman with amnesia is chased by hunters throughout the episode. At the end, it’s revealed that she is really a murderess, and the hunting games are punishment for her crime. A big part of what makes her punishment immoral is that she is unaware of who she is. Merely telling her who she is at the end of the episode is not enough. Because she has no memory of who she is, she cannot confirm or deny anything they are telling her. So they could be telling her a complete fabrication for all that she knows. What it comes down to is that we punish people because they have a “guilty mind”. The law recognises this in the form of the legal principle of mens rea. But they have erased this woman’s memory of who she is and what she did. They seem clearly, in so doing, to have erased her intention of harm as well, so how can they not have erased her guilty mind along with it? To be culpable for a crime you must have a guilt...

My interest in rational conlangs has been revived. The specific catalyst is that I am trying to translate a book that I absolutely love, The Book of Matan, into one. One reason for this choice of book is that its English is very simple and readable. It does not use a vocabulary that is too obscure. But it carries an emotional, poetic beauty that reminds of me of the King James Bible. If any language should translate well into a rational conlang, I would hope it was of this kind. Another reason is that it is a logical extension of my interest in the book. It is a catalyst for me to read the book more than I otherwise would be inclined to do. It is like when, as a teenager, I would try translating The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy into a conlang. I had already read and loved the book. Translating it became an exercise in looking at it from a fresh perspective. The best conlang to me was Rick Morneau’s concept of a machine translation interlingua. To me it captured what I most ...

==ALERT: CONTAINS SPOILERS== Watched "Lethe" last night and was blown away by the character development in the episode. Sarek had seemed like such a good bloke when we had seen him in earlier episodes. But this episode reminds us once again that he is a difficult person. It makes us realise how Spock had so many problems with him growing up. Here he was doing the same thing to Michael, piling all these impossible expectations on her and making her feel inferior for not measuring up. Like most Vulcans, he suppresses his own emotions. But also, like a proud person, he suppresses his own failings. He clearly has a sense of shame about what happened with the Vulcan Expeditionary Fleet, and he chose his own pride over revealing the truth of what happened to his daughter. That was why he let her live with the shame of thinking that she had not met his expectations. And after the mind meld, still suppressing what shames him, he pretends not to remember it. I also liked the sc...

I’m definitely enjoying Star Trek: Discovery so far. The production values of course are fabulous, and the performances are fine. Having already seen Sonequa Martin-Green in The Walking Dead I knew she would be awesome, and she so is. I’m reminded of something a guy said to me at Sutekh , at the University of Sydney. This was in the days when The Next Generation was still airing. He said that TNG was not good, because the way that they solved problems on the show was a Deus ex machina each week. I asked him how many of the episodes he’d seen and he said, all of them. I said that that was strange, because the show had already been running for two years by then. I asked why he would have seen all the episodes if he did not think it was a good show and he said, “Because it’s Star Trek !” I knew what he meant. It was easy to find fault with just about any episode you could think of, but you just kept on watching it because of this experience that you got from it. The Star Trek Exp...