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Still More Things That Are Slowly Vanishing (Or Gone)

Jul 22nd, 2023
by Jeff Duntemann.
27 comments

Here’s another bunch, some from me, some from readers. Time passes. The world changes. More and more, the world that’s vanishing is the one we grew up in.

  1. Mechanical charge-card imprinters. You know, when charge cards used to have embossed numbers, and the store clerk would put your card down and a 3-carbon slip over it, and go snick-snick to transfer the embossed card number onto the charge slip. I haven’t had an embossed card for quite a few years, so these are well and truly gone.
  2. Pocket radios. I still have a couple of these, but I don’t remember when I last listened to any of them. Carol and I have had a “kitchen radio” (the solid state successor to the archetypal “All-American Five”) for over forty years. It’s in the kitchen. It doesn’t get much use.
  3. 4:3 computer monitors. Although you can get them used on EBay, the canonical 4:3 aspect ratio flat-screen monitor is long out of production. I have several, but if they ever flake out on me I suspect I’m going to buy a big-ass 9:16 and force myself to get used to it.
  4. Churchkeys. And by that I mean the kind with two ends: One to pop the tops from soda/beer bottles, and the other to poke triangular holes in soda and beer cans. Cans are all pull-tab now, and it’s only imported sodas (and some beers) that need a churchkey to open.
  5. Rolodexes. I still have one, and I still use it to keep significant business cards within easy reach. However, I’m pretty sure that my generation will be the last to use them on a daily basis.
  6. Green River soda. This was and would probably remain my all-time favorite soda—if I could still get it. We used to buy it at a quirky grocery store near our condo in Des Plaines IL. They had regular and diet, both in glass bottles and in 2-liter plastic bottles. I used to get the 2-liter diet sku, which I haven’t seen since we sold the condo in 2015. It still exists (and has its own web page) but can mostly be found in quirky little grocery stores in or near Chicago.
  7. In-house intercoms. The 1958 house Carol grew up in had one. Ours (1949) did not. The new house we bought here in AZ in 1990 had one, and that’s as recent as I’ve seen one. My folks had a Talk-a-Phone intercom put in when my sister was born, and for awhile it was a baby monitor. I took the two units apart circa 1969.
  8. Dehumidifiers. These generally sat in the basement, and a refrigerated coil of aluminum tubing would condense all that Chicago humidity into drips that gathered in a pull-out well in the bottom. These may still be in use in humid climates; needless to say, they aren’t necessary in Arizona.
  9. Superballs. Again, these may still exist, but I’ve never seen one recently like those we used in the mid-1960s: Their surfaces were under considerable tension, and even a tiny scratch would spread into a crack. Eventually they just split into chunks. But damn, those things bounced high.
  10. Pocket calculators. When every smartphone is a pocket calculator, there isn’t much call for standalone pocket calculators. I still have my late ‘70s red-LED TI Programmer, and my 1982-ish TI-30 SLR.
  11. Slot cars and retail slot car tracks. Bill Beggs reminded me of slot cars, which were never an interest of mine but in their heyday were a very big thing. There was a storefront slot-car track less than a mile from where I grew up, on Devon in Park Ridge. Long-gone. Still with us, however, is Dad’s Slot Cars in downtown Des Plaines, just outside Chicago. Fifteen years or so ago they added an ice-cream parlor at the back of the storefront. It’s only open on weekends now, but there must be slot car fans somewhere or it would not be open at all.
  12. Car CD players. My 1996 Jeep Cherokee was the first car I had that came with a CD player. The 2001 4Runner we bought not only had a CD player but a CD changer that could play six CDs without needing to reload. By the time we bought our 2014 Durango, the CD player had been superceded by the now-ubiquitous USB port and thumb drive player in the console.
  13. Rear-projection TVs. We bought one of these just before Christmas 2005, and used it until something inside it fizzled out and died in 2012. The picture, while big, was never exceptionally sharp, and once LED panels could be mass-produced in 56” (or more) diagonal sizes, rear projection died in a hurry. I had to pay $75 to a recycling company to get rid of it after it croaked.
  14. Pastel-colored toilets. These were huge in the late 1950s. Carol’s childhood home (1958) had three bathrooms, each with a toilet/sink of a different color. I believe we added a pink toilet and sink when my folks had a second bathroom put in in 1957. You can still get them, but they are now Midcentury Modern retro exotica.
  15. Pastel-colored Kleenex. This was common through the 1970s and then started getting scarce. Carol and I passed a light blue tissue between us as we knelt on the prie deux during our wedding mass in 1976, alternately mopping our eyes.
  16. Paper encyclopedias. My family bought the 1958 Encyclopedia Britannica. It was wonderful. Carol and I bought the 1974 edition shortly before we married in 1976. I read it a lot until the Internet happened, and then little by little Alta Vista searches (and later Google) made research a whole lot easier. We sold it to the people who bought our Colorado house when we moved back to Arizona in 2015. The leather bindings were drying out and cracking, and in truth we went years between sessions with it. I’ve heard they’re now “shelf candy,” and can be rented to stage houses.
  17. Dollar coins. Half-dollar coins died about 2001, though the US Mint struck collectables for a few years thereafter. Just to be perverse, I asked my bank for a few Sacajawea dollar coins circa 2012 and spent them. Older cashiers just grinned. Young people at the register looked hard at them. But really: When was the last time you handled or spent one?
  18. Horse racing. Like slot cars, I’ve never been interested in horse racing, but Rich Rostrom told me that the Chicago Bears bought Arlington Park racetrack, had the grandstands demolished, and may be planning a new football stadium there. Apparently horse racetracks are shutting down all over the country.
  19. Smoking pipes. (And I don’t mean crack pipes, or anything else in the line of drug paraphernalia.) This again came from Rich Rostrom, and he’s right. My father had a pipe but I never saw him smoke it. A friend and I tried to smoke marijuana in a cheap pipe in 1971, and mostly failed. I truly don’t remember the last time I was in the presence of a pipe smoker.
  20. Stove-top percolators. (This from Bill Beggs.) When I was a kid, my folks used a beat-up aluminum percolator to make their coffee. Mr. Coffee drove percolators off the edge of the world, and I think Mr. Coffee is now being shoved toward the same abyss by K-machines. I now mostly buy my coffee at McDonald’s.

Posted in: Ideas & Analysis, Memoir.

Bring on the Twitter Killers!

Jul 6th, 2023
by Jeff Duntemann.
8 comments

The whole problem with social media (apart from being a hazard to some people’s sanity) is simple and ancient: Too much power in too few hands. And the threat to sanity could be managed if people cared to. There should not be five corporations controlling 90% of social media. There should be fifty. No, scratch that. Five hundred. My older readers might remember the BBS era. Those are the kinds of numbers I’d like to see.

Well, the solution may be in sight. Every time I turn around, someone is pushing a new, um, “Twitter-killer.” There are lots, most of them pretty new, some of them still requiring invites to join. Meta’s Instagram subsidiary has created something called Threads, which is still invite only and (obviously) I have not seen. (I don’t even think their server is publicly visible.)

Another one being pushed by the mainstream media is Spill, which is still invite-only, and targeted at Black folks. (I won’t say “African-Americans” because as best I know Spill’s reach will be global.) There’s Amino, for teens. I’m 71, but again, Yay!

Lifewire has a list. Have any of you every heard of Plurk? I haven’t. It has “an adorable interface.” Yay wow! (When’s the last time you saw the word “adorable” expressed without irony?) Aside from Mastodon and Tumblr, I’ve heard of none of them. But yeah, bring ‘em on.

The best list of Twitter alternatives I’ve seen here comes (predictably) from Vice. It’s a good article; at least skim it. New to me were Cohost, Post, Substack Notes, Spoutible, CounterSocial, and WT.Social. Other lists are out there, and many other social media sites are new (or new-ish) that I have heard of, like Bluesky, which is touted as a “decentralized Twitter.” Another that’s been around for some time is Discord. A lot of my friends are on LinkedIn, and although I’ve had a login for years, I don’t check it much.

There’s Micro.blog, which competes (as best I can tell) with Substack, though leaning toward shorter posts. Ello dates back to 2014 and was created by and still caters to artists and designers.

Of course, there are Gab and Minds, which offered less censorship of conservative users and positions. Parler was once in that space too, but I think they’re now defunct, though there is some talk about a relaunch.

My point? The more social networks there are, the less power a handful of social networks will have. Network effects are real, of course, and so is tribalism. I infer from the descriptions of some of these sites that they are silos for a particular ideology. That’s all to the good; I don’t like ideology. Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter thinned out Twitter’s ideological machinery radically. That’s one reason I see no reason to leave Twitter. Musk is reinventing space technology. I like space technology. He’s ballsy, and seems to be deliberately annoying certain categories of users who liked Twitter’s traditional censorship via cowardly tricks like shadowbanning.

I see lots of people saying they’re leaving Twitter. I wonder how many actually are. I’m all for Twitter refugees finding a comfy home somewhere else. The sort of people who will flee a network because it doesn’t censor enough are people I’d just as soon not hang out with.

Of course, most of these networks will probably croak after a couple of years. But some may grow, and siphon off some of Twitter’s bellyachers. (I have some hopes for Bluesky and Threads.)

Will the new social networks really kill Twitter? Don’t be absurd. Most of us are happy with Musk’s changes. I’m even considering getting a verified account, just for the hell of it. I used to pay for Compuserve and LiveJournal, after all. I’m not averse to paying for what I use, if it’s useful enough.

Twitter, so far, has been more than useful enough.

Posted in: Ideas & Analysis.
Tagged:

Don Lancaster 1940-2023

Jul 2nd, 2023
by Jeff Duntemann.
9 comments

The inimitable Don Lancaster has left us. He died on June 7 in Mesa, Arizona, of complications following hip surgery. He was 83.

Anybody who was there at the dawn of microcomputing knows who Don Lancaster was. His seminal TTL Cookbook sold over a million copies. He also did cookbooks for RTL and CMOS ICs. He was famous among early mirocomputer fanatics for his books on “cheap video,” back when video boards were just emerging and (can you believe it?) some folks rolled their own from loose parts. He wrote about the Apple II, including one or more books on Apple II assembly language. His book The Incredible Secret Money Machine was an eccentric guide to starting your own small-scale home business.

When I began using Don’s books in the midlate 1970s, I never gave any thought to actually meeting him. His CMOS Cookbook was critical to my ongoing COSMAC Elf project. I built the original Elf from Popular Electronics in 1976, and over the next several years expanded it in several ways, including a wire-wrapped memory system totaling 2,560 bytes of CMOS memory, as ten banks of paired 5101 CMOS 256X4 RAM chips. I doubt I could have managed that without the CMOS Cookbook.

I also used his TTL Cookbook to learn how the various TTL chips worked and could be hooked together. I’m not exaggerating when I say that without Don’s books on ICs, I would never have learned digital logic to any useful degree.

Don had a strong interest in local archaeology, especially the ways that indigenous  peoples used and stored water for irrigation. About that I know little or nothing, but looking for tinajas was one of his hobbies.

As I drifted toward technical writing in the early 1980s, I realized that I was imitating Don’s style without consciously doing so. This is an odd talent called “pastiche” in literary circles, which is the art of writing in another writer’s style. I discovered this talent in college, when after reading the whole (thick) book of e.e. cummings’ complete works, I began writing what were recognizably e.e. cummings poems. They weren’t great poems, but they were definitely in his style. When I began writing Pascal MT+ From Square One toward the end of 1983, there was a lot of Don Lancaster in it.  (That book eventually emerged as Complete Turbo Pascal in 1985.) I later found myself pastiching Isaac Asimov when I wrote the “Structured Programming” column in DDJ. Asimov almost always started an article with a funny story, and so did I. (See DDJ for September 1991 for my well-known intro about the Pizza Pride girl.)

Don Lancaster and Isaac Asimov taught me more about technical writing than anyone else, ever. Furthermore, neither had any idea that he was teaching me. I met Asimov at LACon in 1984 when Carol and some friends and I won breakfast with him at a charity auction. But unlike Asimov, Don eventually became a personal friend.

I don’t precisely recall how I was introduced to Don. I think my PC Techniques art director Barbara Nicholson’s brother somehow pulled me into Don’s network. Flukier still was the fact that Don lived within reasonable driving distance from Phoenix, in Thatcher, Arizona. Although Don never wrote for my magazines (and we published none of his books) we invited him to our monthly author parties. He attended quite a few, generally with his wife Bee and his dog.

And we went down to visit him a time or two. Don took us up the side of a nearby mountain in his VW microbus, which was scary at times but otherwise wonderfully scenic.

Once Carol and I left Arizona for Colorado in 2003, Don and I fell out of touch, but he was still working to the very end, and produced a boggling body of work including 44 books and over a thousand technical articles.

He was a little eccentric (though he had nothing whatsoever on Wayne Green) and I’ll freely accept the tag for myself as well. His skill with words and his rampaging curiosity were like nothing I’ve ever seen elsewhere. I am honored to have known him, and to have learned from him. He really was a guru, and the world could use a few more (or maybe a lot more) like him.

Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him.

Posted in: None Of The Above.

More Things That Are Slowly Vanishing (Or Gone)

Jun 30th, 2023
by Jeff Duntemann.
17 comments

Back in January I published a list of things that had once been common and are now fading into the mists of history. It got a lot of attention, so here comes another one. A few of these came from readers and posted in the comments.

  1. Typewriters. Ok, these may already be well and truly vanished, but there are times when I miss them. I kept my IBM Selectric until we left Arizona in 2003. Mostly I used it to type up adhesive labels and addresses on business envelopes. All of that stuff comes out of my laser printer now.
  2. Wing-tip dress shoes for men. I admit, I never had these myself, but I was still seeing them here and there until ten or fifteen years ago.
  3. Pantyhose. Apart from older women who may have been wearing compression stockings, I almost never see sheer hosiery anymore. Weirdly, the last place I saw it regularly was at dog shows, where male handlers wore business suits and female handlers wore skirts and pantyhose. This was true well into the teens, but we haven’t been to a dog show in some years now.
  4. Car keys. Our 2014 Durango was our first car with fobs instead of keys. All the rental cars I’ve driven since then were the same thing: Key fobs without keys. It took some getting used to, but now when I try to drive Carol’s 2001 4Runner, I almost always try punching the (nonexistant) button on the dashboard rather than twisting the (real) car key.
  5. Women wearing hats in (Catholic) church. Back when I was a kid this was a very serious business. I saw teen girls wearing a sheet of Kleenex atop their heads during mass when they forgot their hats. Girls at our Catholic grade school had beanies to wear during mass before school started.
  6. Paper routes. I delivered papers for a little while when I was 13 or so. It was a weird little paper that was ad-supported, but I was asked to ring doorbells and see if people would pay for it. Almost no one did, and it was enough of an embarrassment that I stopped after just a couple of months. (Thanks to Rick Kaumeier for this one.)
  7. Penny (or nickel) toddler rides in supermarkets. Usually by the front windows, usually a horse, though I’ve seen ones where the ride is a stubby little airplane or even a cowbow-style covered wagon. (Again, from Rick Kaumeier.)
  8. Card parties. (Yet again, from Rick Kaumeier.) My father had these now and then with his gang from work. They all smoked so much that the air was mostly unbreatheable on the first floor of our house. My mom slept upstairs with my sister and there were a lot of open windows for a couple of days.
  9. Ash trays. These used to be almost everywhere, because when I was a kid almost everyone smoked. There were even ash trays in my college classrooms, and a few students smoked. (Tthankfully, only a few.) (Thanks to Jim Tubman for this one, which should have been obvious to me.)
  10. Cigars. The last time I saw anyone smoking a cigar it was a couple of people in my writers group in Colorado Springs, circa 2014. Tobacco kills. (It killed my father.) I think maybe we’re finally catching on.
  11. Mercury blood-pressure cuffs. And, for that matter, needle -gauge blood pressure cuffs. It’s all electronic now.
  12. White-wall car tires. I had totally forgotten about these, which were in decline even in the 1950s. (Thanks to reader TRX for the reminder.) It makes me wonder what people who restore classic cars do for white-walls.
  13. Newspaper vending machines. (Thanks to Rich Rostrom.) Not only the machines, but the papers themselves are getting scarce. Now I only see them at the customer service counter in supermarkets.
  14. Neighborhood mailboxes. (Again, thanks to Rich Rostrom.) We had one at the corner of our street, near Edison grade school. Now you only see them in high-traffic areas like in front of supermarkets.
  15. Balsa-wood model airplanes. (Thanks to Spencer Arnold.) We used to get balsa gliders for a quarter at Bud’s Hardware Store in the Sixties, and you could get a balsa plane with a prop and a rubber-band “engine” for 50c. My father built a lot of balsa planes when he was kid, and built a few when I was in grade school. These may still exist, but see the next item:
  16. Hobby shops. There was always one within reasonable biking distance when I was a kid. There was still one in Colorado Springs circa 2012, but that was the last time I saw one. They varied in emphasis; some sold stamp albums and sometimes stamps, others did not. Most sold model airplanes, and the .049 engines that I couldn’t afford. Craft stores absorbed some of that business. The bigger Ace Hardware stores still have small brass & aluminum sheet and tubing. Beyond that, most of the business has moved online.
  17. Reel-type power mowers. These were just like hand-pushed lawnmowers, but they had engines. My grandfather Harry Duntemann had one. Once the rotaries came in around the early 60s, the reel models quickly slipped away. My uncle gave me a rattle-trappy old one about 1966 and my friends and I made a bizarre go kart out of it.
  18. AM radio. (Thanks to Tom Byers.) As a teen in Chicago I listened to AM a lot, especially WLS and WCFL, the rock stations in their time. As rock got harder, I listened more to WIND, which played a gentler kind of music that I preferred. Of course, once I had an FM radio (college) I dropped AM and never looked back.
  19. DJ chatter. DJs were celebrities when I was a kid. They’re now an endangered species, especially those who did a sort of fast standup comedy between songs and commercials. Radio is heavily automated these days, and most announcements are prerecorded. Weather and traffic reports are mostly gone as well.
  20. Cable TV. (Thanks to Bill Beggs.) We still have cable, but internet-only. People are moving their TV viewing to streaming sites in droves. Carol and I don’t watch a lot of TV, with a smidge off the air, and rest from streaming sites.

There are a couple of things that I thought had vanished that are coming back. Whether this is a good thing or not is an open question:

  1. Bell-bottom pants. Yes, they’re coming back. I’m of seventeen minds about this.
  2. Big glasses. And I mean big, mid-late ‘80s big. I had those, and used to joke that my cheeks had 20-20 vision.
  3. Vinyl records. (Thanks to Don Doerres & Rich Rostrom.) The reasons I dumped vinyl were pragmatic: CDs did not wear out and you didn’t have to turn them over. Now Wal-Mart and Target have racks of vinyl. Wow.

There may be more, but 20 is a good round number. Maybe we’ll come up with enough to do a third installment.

Posted in: None Of The Above.

Odd Lots

May 30th, 2023
by Jeff Duntemann.
9 comments

J and C - 5-27-2023

  • Our longtime friend David Stafford stopped in for an evening on 5/27, and we took him to Tutti Santi restaurant at 64th & Greenway. It’s one of our favorite eateries here, high-end Italian, and we ate on the patio. David took some photos, which turned out pretty well, as you can see above.
  • Could the ancient Greeks see the color blue? This is evidently a massive, long-term fistfight in certain circles, as ridiculous as it sounds. Mostly, the best guess is that the Greeks didn’t have a word specifically for blue tints. Matt Iglesias posted the best discussion I’ve found. It’s apparently more about linguistics than color vision.
  • I’ve posted some of my weird experiences dealing with modern AI here. AI images often have the wrong number of fingers or toes, and sometimes bizarre body proportions. Now an AI has created an entirely fictional governor of South Dakota, whose term in office was 1949-1951…in its imagination, or whateverthehell creates AI weirdness like this.
  • Carol and I have three Intel NUC computers, which are both small and quiet and yet still manage to do pretty much anything we do in terms of computing. (We are not gamers.) I’m not entirely sure why, but you can now buy a lid for a NUC machine that is a Lego base plate. I gave what Lego I had to our nieces years ago, or I’d be sorely tempted.
  • I’m a sucker for robots, so an article stack-ranking the top 100 movie robots was a must-read, even though my all-time favorite film robot, Kronos, only made it to #57. (I do agree with the very high quality of #1, which may be my second favorite movie robot.) Some of the robots are very old and/or very obscure; I think there were fifteen or so that I’d never heard of and another four or five that I’d simply forgotten.
  • A study published in the Lancet shows that natural immunity to COVID19 is equal to and often greater than what the supposed vaccines offer. The paper is a real slog if you’re not a researcher, hence the link to City Journal‘s overview.
  • And another City Journal piece I enjoyed, about Rod Serling and some of his struggles during the rise of television as the premier form of American entertainment.
  • A cow got loose in Carol’s thoroughly suburban hometown of Niles, Illinois (just north of Chicago) and CBS News described the results as “Udder chaos.” Points for that one, guys.
  • Some lunatic stole two million dimes from the US Mint in Philadelphia. That’s not as much money as it sounds like (do the math) but the bigger problem is how to spend it. Unless you’re getting a burger and fries at McDonald’s, paying for things by the pound (of coins) will attract a great deal of unwanted attention.

Posted in: None Of The Above.

STORMY Vs. the AI Doom Kvetchers

May 28th, 2023
by Jeff Duntemann.
4 comments

I follow the AI discussion to some extent (as time permits, which it hasn’t lately) and from initial amusement it’s pivoted to apprehension and doom-kvetching, as if we didn’t get a bellyful of doom-kvetching as COVID passed through. The AIs I’ve played with have had peculiar failure modes, among them expressing that 128-bit registers are larger than 512-bit registers. Numbers aren’t their forte, even down at level of counting on their fingers, since AI image generators don’t have any clear idea how many fingers a hand is supposed to have. (More on that topic here.)

I get the impression that our current generation of AIs have their own way of proposing solutions to problems. What seems obvious to them isn’t always obvious to us. The danger, if there is any, lies in giving them more responsibility than something that can’t count fingers or toes should rightfully have.

Which brings us to an SF flash story that I wrote in 1990 and published in my magazine PC Techniques about that time. Most of my regular readers are familiar with “STORMY Vs. the Tornadoes.” It was designed as a humor piece, and a satire on the concept of AI as it was imagined thirty years ago. A few days ago I realized that I had, in a sense, predicted the future: That AIs will do ridiculous things because those ridiculous things make sense to the AIs. STORMY, a National Weather Service AI, was asked how we might reduce American tornado fatalities.

And STORMY took the question very seriously.

Here’s the whole story, for those who haven’t seen it, or haven’t read it in a long time.

STORMY Vs. the Tornadoes

By Jeff Duntemann

“Mr. Petter, in the last six months, that computer program of yours cut Federal government purchase orders for 18,000 ‘uninhabitable manufactured housing units,’ to a total of 21 million dollars.” Senator Orenby Ruesome (R., Oklahoma) sent the traitor Xerox copies skittering over the Formica tabletop.

U.S. Weather Service Programmer Grade 12 Anthony Petter winced. “Umm…you gave us the money, Senator.”

“But not for rotted-out house trailers!”

Petter sucked in his breath. “You gave us 25 million dollars to create a system capable of cutting annual US tornado fatalities in half. We spent a year teaching STORMY everything we knew about tornadoes. Every statistic, every news item, every paper ever published on the subject we fed him, and we gave him the power to set up his own PERT charts and plan his own project. Umm…I preauthorized him to cut purchase orders for items under $2000.”

“Which he did. 18,000 times. For beat-up, rotted-out, abandoned house trailers. Which he then delivered to an abandoned military base in west Nebraska a zillion miles from nowhere. And why, pray tell?”

Petter keyed in the question on the wireless terminal he had brought from his office. STORMY’s answer was immediate:

TO KEEP TORNADOES FROM KILLING PEOPLE.

Petter turned the portable terminal around so that the Senator could see it. A long pause ensued.

Ruesome puffed out his red cheeks. “Mr. Petter, be at my office at 8:00 sharp tomorrow. We’re going to Nebraska.”

The two men climbed out of the Jeep onto scrubby grass. It was July-muggy, and it smelled like rain. Petter gripped his palmheld cellular remote terminal in one hand, and that hand was shaking.

Before them on the plain lay an enormous squat pyramid nine layers high, built entirely of discolored white and pastel boxes made out of corrugated aluminum and stick pine, some with wheels, most without. The four-paned windows looked disturbingly like crossed-out cartoon eyes. Petter counted trailers around the rim of the pyramid, and a quick mental estimate indicated that they were all in there, all 18,000 of them.

A cold wind was blowing in from the southeast.

“Well, here’s the trailers. Ask your software expert what made him think stacking old trailers in the butt end of nowhere would save lives.”

Lightning flashed in the north. The sky was darkening; a storm was definitely coming in. Petter propped the wireless terminal on the Jeep’s fender and dutifully keyed in the question. The cellular link to STORMY in Washington was marginal, but it held:

TORNADOES ALWAYS SEEM TO STRIKE PLACES WHERE THERE ARE LOTS OF MOBILE HOMES.

Petter read the answer for the Senator. Ruesome groaned and kicked the Jeep hard with his pointed alligator boot. “Goldurn it, son, you call this ‘artificial intelligence?’ That silly damfool program bought up all the cheap trailers it could find and stacked them in Nebraska to get them away from tornadoes in the midwest. Makes sense, right? To a program, right? Save people who don’t live in empty trailers, right?”

The force of the wind abruptly doubled. Lightning flashed all around them, and huge thunderheads were rolling in from all points of the compass. Petter could hear the wind howling through cavities between the trailers.

“I’m sorry, Senator!” Petter shouted over the wind.

But Ruesome wasn’t listening. He was looking to the west, where a steel-grey tentacle had descended from the sky, twisting and twitching until it touched the ground. Petter looked south—and saw two more funnel clouds appear like twins to stab at the earth.

The programmer spun around. On every side, tornadoes were appearing amidst the roiling clouds, first five, then a dozen, and suddenly too many to count, all heading in defiance of the wind right toward them. The noise was deafening—and Petter could now feel through the soles of his feet that unmistakable freight-train rumble of the killer twisters.

Petter had felt all along that he had never quite asked STORMY the right question. Now, suddenly, the question was plain, and he hammered it into the terminal with shaking fingers:

STORMY: FOR WHAT PURPOSE DID YOU BUY ALL THESE TRAILERS?

The answer came back as a single word:

BAIT.

The winds were blowing him to the ground. Petter dropped the terminal and grabbed the Senator by the arm, pulling him toward a nearby culvert where the road crossed a dry creekbed. He shoved the obese man into one three-foot drainpipe, then threw himself into the other.

A moment later, the tornadoes converged on the trailers, all at once. The sound was terrifying. Petter fainted.

Both men lived. Local legend holds that it rained corrugated aluminum in Nebraska for several weeks.

And it was years before another tornado was seen anywhere in the USA.

Posted in: None Of The Above.
Tagged: · ·

RTL-SDR Software Defined Radio

Apr 30th, 2023
by Jeff Duntemann.
4 comments

I’ve been meaning to try software-defined radio (SDR) for a good long while. I had a suspicion that it would require some considerable research, and I was right. However, it wasn’t especially difficult or expensive to give it a shot. Amazon offers a kit that consists of an SDR USB dongle, plus some whip antennas and connecting cables. Price? $42.95. I also bought a book by the same outfit that offered the kit: The Hobbyist’s Guide to the RTL-SDR. Given that it’s 275 8 1/2 x 11  pages of small print, I’ll be plowing through it for awhile.

Of course, my first impulse is always to just run the damned thing, and do the research later. Very fortunately, the firm has a “quick start” page online, and by following its instructions (carefully) I got the product running in half an hour. The UI is reasonably well-designed:

RTL-SDR-UI

It has the waterfall display and amplitude display that you would expect, plus the ability to detect AM, NBFM, WBFM, CW, USB, LSB, DSB, and RAW. There’s a squelch and several ways of selecting the tuner frequency. There are other things that I haven’t figured out yet, but that’s also to be expected.

The software is a free download (see the Quick Start Guide) with a slightly fussy installation mechanism that runs from a batch file. The dongle has an SMA connector on its end for an antenna. The kit includes a little tabletop photo tripod that can carry an adjustable whip dipole, which I put on the tripod and eyeballed at 100 MHz. Without further ado, my favorite FM classical station, KBAQ on 89.5 MHz, was roaring out of my headphones.

Although the dongle can technically tune from 500 KHz to 1.7 GHz, I found that there’s a low-frequency cutoff at 24 MHz. I saw some mumbling in the book about an upconverter, but haven’t explored it yet. The implication is that it’s part of the dongle but you have to select it as an option somewhere. I’ll get to that eventually.

The software installs on Win7 and up. I have a Win10 Intel NUC box that isn’t doing anything right now, and the plan is to put it in my workshop, where I can feed the SDR with the discone I have on a mast above the garage. It’s currently down in the garage for repairs—one of the cone elements fell off. All the more reason to put it back together and get it up on the mast again.

This isn’t supposed to be a review. I need to dig into the doc a lot deeper than I have so far before I can say with any confidence how good it is. It receives broadcast FM just fine. However, like most Arizona recent construction, this is a stucco-over-chickenwire house, which means (roughly) that I’m running the SDR in a so-so Faraday cage.

I see some fun in my near future. I’ll keep you all posted on what I can make it do and how well it performs. So far, so good.

Posted in: Ideas & Analysis.

Feet Have No Excuse

Apr 28th, 2023
by Jeff Duntemann.
3 comments

(If you haven’t read my entry for April 23 yet, please do so—this entry is a follow-on, now that I’ve had a chance to do a little more research.)

AI image generators can’t draw hands worth a rat’s heiny. That’s the lesson I took away from my efforts some days ago, trying to see if any of the AI imagers could create an ebook cover image for my latest novelette, “Volare!” It wasn’t just me, and it wasn’t just the two image generators I tried. If you duckduck around the Web you’ll find a great many essays asking “Why can’t AIs draw hands and feet?” and then fail to answer the question.

The standard answer (and it’s one I can certainly accept, with reservations) is that human hands are very complicated machines with a lot of moving parts and a great many possible positions. I would argue that an infinite variety of positions is what hands are for—and are in fact the reason that we created a high-tech civilization. Even artists have trouble drawing hands, and to a lesser extent, feet. This is a good long-form tutorial on how to draw hands and feet. Not an easy business, even for us.

In photographs and drawn/painted art, hands are almost always doing things, not just resting in someone’s lap. And in doing things, they express all those countless positions that they take in ordinary and imaginary life. So if AIs are trained by showing them pictures of people and their hands, some of those pictures will show parts of hands occluded by things like beer steins and umbrella handles, or—this must be a gnarly challenge—someone else’s hands. In some pictures, it may look like hands have four fingers, or perhaps three. Fingers can be splayed or together and clenched against their palm. AIs are pattern matchers, and with hands and especially fingers, there are a huge number of patterns.

So faced with too many patterns, the AI “guesses,” and draws something that violates one or more traits of all hands.

The most serious flaw in this reasoning comes from elsewhere in the body: feet. In the fifty-odd images the AIs created of a barefoot woman sitting in a basket, deformed feet were almost as common as deformed hands. This is a lot harder to figure, for this reason: feet have nowhere near the number of possible positions that hands have. About the most extreme position a foot can have is curled toes. Most of the time, feet are flat on the floor, and that’s all the expressive power they have. This suggests that AIs should have no particular trouble with feet.

But they do.

I’ll grant that in most photos and art, feet are in shoes, while hands generally go naked except in bad weather or messy/hazardous work. So there are fewer images of feet to train an AI. I had an AI gin up some images this morning from the following description: “A woman sitting in a wicker basket in a nightgown, wearing ballet slippers.” I did five or six, and the best one is below:

Woman In Basket in Ballet Slippers

Her left leg seems smaller than her right, which is a different but related problem with AI images. And her hands this time, remarkably, are less grotesque than her arms. But add some ballet slippers, and the foot problem goes away. The explanation should be obvious: In a ballet slipper, all feet look more or less alike. The same is likely the case for feet in Doc Martin boots or high-top sneakers. (I may or may not ask an AI for an image of a woman in sandals, because I think I already know what I’d get.)

There were other issues with the images I got back from the two AIs I messed with, especially in faces. Even in the relatively good image above, her face seems a little off. This may be because we humans are very good at analyzing faces. Hands and feet, not so much. Defects there have to be more serious to be obvious.

Anyway. The real problem with AI image generation is that they are piecing together bits of images that they’ve digested as part of their training. They are not creating a wire-frame outline of a human body in a given position and then fleshing it out. At best they’re averaging thousands or millions of images of hands (or whatever) and smushing them together into an image that broadly resembles a human being.

Not knowing the nature of the algorithms that AI image generators use, I can’t say whether this is a solvable problem or not. My guess is that it’s not, not the way the software works today. And this is how we can spot deepfakes: Count fingers. The hands don’t lie.

Posted in: Ideas & Analysis.

AI Image Generators, Mon Dieu

Apr 23rd, 2023
by Jeff Duntemann.
9 comments

I finished a 10,700 novelette the other day, the first short fiction I’ve finished since 2008, when I wrote “Sympathy on the Loss of One of Your Legs,” now available in my collection, Souls in Silicon. I’ve mostly written novels and short novels since then. (I’ll have more to say about “Volare” in a future entry here.)

To be published, it needs a cover. I have no objection to paying artists for covers, which apart from an experiment or two (see “Whale Meat”) I’ve always done in the past. Given all the yabbjabber about AI content creation recently, I thought, “Hey, here’s a chance to see if it’s all BS.”

The spoiler: It’s not all BS, but parts of it are BS-ier than others.

Ok. I’ve tested two AI image generators: OpenAI’s DALL-E 2, and Microsft’s Bing Image Generator. I found them through a solid article on ZDNet by Sabrina Ortiz. As it happens, Bing Image Generator outsources the process to DALL-E. I wanted to try Midjourney, and may eventually, but you have to have a paid subscription (about $8/month) to use it.

I’m not going to summarize the story here. One image I wanted to try as a cover would be the female lead sitting with her behind in a wicker basket, floating through the air at dawn a thousand feet or so over Baltimore. In both generators (which are basically the same generator) you feed the AI a detailed text description and turn it loose. I started simple: “A woman flying through the air in a wicker basket.” Edy Gagliano does precisely that in the story. What DALL-E gave me was this:

DALL·E 2023-04-23 14.46.55 - a woman flying through the air in a wicker basket - 500 Wide

Well, the woman is flying through the air, but we have a preposition problem here. She is over, not in the basket. Good first shot, though. I tried various extensions of that basic description, to the tune of 48 images on Dall-E. I won’t post them all here for space reasons, but they ran the gamut: A woman flying through the air holding a basket, a woman flying through the air in a basket the size and shape of a bathtub, and on and on.

The next one here is perhaps the best I’ve gotten from DALL-E. It’s a woman in a basket over Baltimore, I guess. Here’s the description: “a barefoot woman sitting down inside a magical wicker basket that flies through the air at dawn over Baltimore.” In one sense, it’s not a bad picture:

DALL·E 2023-04-23 10.05.40 - a barefoot woman sitting down inside a magical wicker basket that flies through the air at dawn over Baltimore 500 wide

That said, It looks out of focus. The basket is not wicker and it’s yuge. And in the story, Edy just puts her butt in the basket and lets her legs hang over the side.

Now let us move over to Bing Image Generator. In a way, it came closer than nearly all of the DALL-E images. But now we confront a well-known weakness of AI image generators: They can’t draw realistic hands or feet or faces. Here’s my first take on the image from Bing:

_77229ce5-3d7c-4c09-964f-b2b784ba3580 - 500 Wide

Look closely. Her hands and feet appear to be drawn by something that doesn’t know what a human hand or foot looks like. The face, furthermore, looks like it has one eye missing. (That’s easier to see in the full-sized image.)

I’ll give Bing credit: The images are less fuzzy and smeary. Because Bing uses DALL-E, I suspect there are DALL-E settings I don’t know about yet. I tried a few more times and got some reasonable images, all of them including some weirdness or another. The one below is a better rendering of a woman who is actually sitting in the basket with her legs hanging over the basket’s edge. But did I order a helicopter? Her face is a little lopsided, and her hands and feet, while not grotesque, aren’t quite right.

_090cd681-df9a-4736-8fcd-cdaafe028ae1 - 500 wide

Bing gave me about 24 images while I messed with it, and some of the images, while not capturing what I intended, were well-rendered and not full of weirdness. The one below is probably closest to Edy as I imagine her, and we get a SpaceX booster burning up in the atmosphere to boot. Is she over Baltimore? I don’t know Baltimore well enough to be sure, but that, at least, doesn’t matter. Stock photos of anonymous cities are everywhere.

_794c2ce1-7cd6-492d-9712-7e75ab646a3c - 500 wide

None of the others are notable enough to show here.

So where does this leave us? AIs can draw pictures. That’s real, and I’m guessing that if you tell it to draw something a little less loopy than a woman with her butt in a flying basket, it might do a better job. I remain puzzled why hands and feet and faces are so hard to do. Don’t AIs need training? And aren’t there plenty of photos of hands and feet and faces for them to generalize from a substantial number of specific examples?

I have no idea how these things are supposed to work, and if there were a good overview book on AI image generator internals, I’d buy it like a shot. In the meantime, I may practice some more and look at specific settings. If nothing else, I can produce some concept images to show to a cover artist. And maybe I’ll luck into something usable as-is.

Whatever I discover, you can count on seeing it here.

Posted in: Reviews.
Tagged: · · ·

Odd Lots

Apr 21st, 2023
by Jeff Duntemann.
5 comments

Posted in: None Of The Above.

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