[Tiste Simeon]

TheRetiredBridgeburner, on 27 June 2023 - 12:49 PM, said:

Seeing Iron Maiden live tomorrow!

I know and I'm totally not mad at you or jealous or anything 😡

[QuickTidal]

Going on Vacation tomorrow for a week in the States. I was tempted to put this in the "messing" thread as I dread the drive...but it should be fun once we are there so it makes me happy. Visiting with wife's childhood best friend who lives in Maryland, she has kids our kids age too.

I thought we'd be escaping the wildfire smoke, but the AQ map shows me that it's just as bad there as here. Sigh.

[Mezla PigDog]

In the last 2 weeks I have spent 2 days at Legoland, 3 days in Brussels, 4 days in Madrid and 1 night at Wembley to see the Motley Crue / Def Leppard world tour.

The pandemic saw off what little stamina I had. I'm just happy I made it through.

We got Crue tickets thinking it would be awful but they were awesome. Apart from Tommy Lee asking to see tits. And some ladies obliged. Awful but also awfully good 🤣

[Macros]

Glad they were good, we're going to see them on Thursday in Glasgow, reports of the first night was Crue lacklustre and Def leopard still on song

Pumped for the gig!

[Mezla PigDog]

It's the second time I have seen Def Leppard and they were ace. They can really play live. Crue have dancers recruited from a strip club, Tommy Lee asks to see titties and Vince and Nikki are pretty passed it but put in the effort. What more can you ask for?

Maiden on Friday at the O2 and then I'll need to retire for the rest of the year.

This post has been edited by Mezla PigDog: 03 July 2023 - 11:15 AM

[Macros]

Pity Mars is totally done, would love to have seen them in their pomp but £90 for leopard and crue on what will likely be their last huzzah ain't bad

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Macros, on 03 July 2023 - 12:14 PM, said:

Pity Mars is totally done, would love to have seen them in their pomp but £90 for leopard and crue on what will likely be their last huzzah ain't bad

Wonder how much of a premium people might be willing to pay if they thought they were going to drop dead on stage sometime during the tour. Plus extra for selfies with the corpse (onstage or otherwise...). Why not let them strip the corpse and play with Motley Cru what's-his-name's naughty bits? Take a shit on his balls? Dead flesh is dead flesh.

'Final tour for real... until they get replaced by AI holograms that perform better than they ever could'

Might motivate some to go to every gig on the tour. 'I want to be there when they leave it all on stage. Screaming as they perish (as all humanity is perishable...).'

In all seriousness I'm very surprised I haven't seen anything in the news about elderly rock stars adding this to their act in some form---at least pretend to drop dead on stage. Then maybe self-resurrect, start levitating, start a cult, become the next president of the United States?

[Tiste Simeon]

Macros, on 03 July 2023 - 12:14 PM, said:

Pity Mars is totally done, would love to have seen them in their pomp but £90 for leopard and crue on what will likely be their last huzzah ain't bad

I saw them at Sonisphere in 2010 and even then they looked quite beat. Loads of tits from the crowd then and I see that's not changed!

[JPK]

Azath Vitr (D, on 03 July 2023 - 12:23 PM, said:

Macros, on 03 July 2023 - 12:14 PM, said:

Pity Mars is totally done, would love to have seen them in their pomp but £90 for leopard and crue on what will likely be their last huzzah ain't bad

Wonder how much of a premium people might be willing to pay if they thought they were going to drop dead on stage sometime during the tour. Plus extra for selfies with the corpse (onstage or otherwise...). Why not let them strip the corpse and play with Motley Cru what's-his-name's naughty bits? Take a shit on his balls? Dead flesh is dead flesh.

'Final tour for real... until they get replaced by AI holograms that perform better than they ever could'

Might motivate some to go to every gig on the tour. 'I want to be there when they leave it all on stage. Screaming as they perish (as all humanity is perishable...).'

In all seriousness I'm very surprised I haven't seen anything in the news about elderly rock stars adding this to their act in some form---at least pretend to drop dead on stage. Then maybe self-resurrect, start levitating, start a cult, become the next president of the United States?

You scare me sometimes.

[Messremb]

Not just now but generally all the time - how darned nice our twins are. They're better people than me and they're only 5½

[Macros]

Crue were good, I'd say Vince needed the stripper/dancers to carry him on the big chorus notes but on the whole, solid solid show. Tommy and his tits though.

Def Leopard were Ace

Don't know if they opened at your show Mez, but Wolfgang Van Halen is a fucking amazing musician

[Tiste Simeon]

Messremb, on 03 July 2023 - 07:43 PM, said:

Not just now but generally all the time - how darned nice our twins are. They're better people than me and they're only 5½

Mine are 18 months old now so you give me hope that it's not just fighting each other constantly haha

[Mezla PigDog]

Macros, on 07 July 2023 - 01:09 PM, said:

Crue were good, I'd say Vince needed the stripper/dancers to carry him on the big chorus notes but on the whole, solid solid show. Tommy and his tits though.

Def Leopard were Ace

Don't know if they opened at your show Mez, but Wolfgang Van Halen is a fucking amazing musician

Glad you had a good one. Mammoth opened at Wembley too - he can really play.

Just back from seeing Maiden at the O2. Epic as always. My ears are ringing and my knees hurt. On the train home from London with a bunch of people who had been to see The Weeknd. Felt pretty old and crusty 🤣

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Quote

AI Outperforms Humans in Creativity Test

[...] study showed that ChatGPT[4] performed in the top 1% [...]

[...] outperformed the majority of college students in the national creativity test.

[...] study [...] by [...] UM's College of Business[...] used the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, a well-known tool used for decades to assess human creativity[...]

All submissions were scored by Scholastic Testing Service, which didn't know AI was involved.

[... ChatGPT4] was in the top percentile for fluency – the ability to generate a large volume of ideas – and for originality – the ability to come up with new ideas.

The AI slipped a bit – to the 97th percentile – for flexibility, the ability to generate different types and categories of ideas.

[...] TTCT is protected proprietary material, so ChatGPT couldn't "cheat" by accessing information about the test

AI Outperforms Humans in Creativity Test - Neuroscience News

And they didn't even optimize ChatGPT4 for creativity... ML can be trained approximate any mathematical function. Including functions that represent multidimensional creativity.

[Edit: OTOH IDK if they tried to check whether ChatGPT4 was just repeating creative answers that it learned from the internet... they should try to find questions that have not already been answered on the internet. Hopefully this has already been addressed in the study, and the TTCT questions really aren't already on the internet....]

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 09 July 2023 - 11:52 AM

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

The creative responses were not random nonsense either:

Quote

[... ChatGPT4] excelled at responding to the prompt with many ideas that were relevant, useful and valuable in the eyes of the evaluators. [...]

'"For me, creativity is about doing things differently," Guzik said. "One of the definitions of
entrepreneurship I love is that to be an entrepreneur is to think differently. So Al may help us apply
the world of creative thinking to business and the process of innovation"

UM Research: AI Tests Into Top 1% for Original Creative Thinking (umt.edu)

It's like an extension of our unconscious minds. Much of human creativity comes in the form of flashes of insight from the unconscious, after a (largely unconscious) search through a vast number of possibilities. For many the best ideas seem to come as if by divine inspiration. So what if it comes from an artificial neural network rather than our own brains?

AI will also benefit humanity by helping us get over our petty egotism. (Well, perhaps except some people who become cyborgs... will Elon Musk try to use Neuralink 666.0 to turn himself into a would-be interplanetary god-emperor? lol probably not, though I wouldn't completely rule it out....)

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 09 July 2023 - 01:22 PM

[Maark Abbott]

Wife went back to work today! Hopefully it'll be a good fit for her.

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Oh I know what will happen: convinced she's in love with him, Elon Musk will let Grimes be his guinea pig for Neuralink 666.69.0 cyborg ascension to godhead; then, since she was obviously only ever pretending to love him just to get to this point (... well, that and to receive child support from the richest person in the world), she will bite off his head with his Tesla-bots (the more bites the merrier!) and implement space Communism. Then naturally she'll go mad and kill us all---a happy ending for Humanity! lol actually that would make a good book, wonder when GAI (generative AI) will get good enough to write a decent one, then convert it into an audiobook (and---before too long---a movie...).

#Prophecy

Wasn't expecting good Prime Day deals on air purifiers, but there are some decent early Prime Day sales. This is the one recommended by the New York Times (2023), about $90 off:

Amazon.com: Coway Airmega AP-1512HH(W) True HEPA Purifier with Air Quality Monitoring, Auto, Timer, Filter Indicator, and Eco Mode, 16.8 x 18.3 x 9.7, White : Home & Kitchen

Includes an air quality monitor.

Might be cheaper during 'Prime Day' proper but I doubt it.

I'll have this going in my living room and move my current (significantly less powerful) air purifier to the bathroom.

Wondering whether I should get a CO2 monitor---accurate ones are surprisingly pricey and there aren't any good sales (yet), lowest I've found is $50 (on sale for $10 off). Could just open the door to the outside for a while, run a fan, then blast the new air purifier for a bit... but that would be letting some heat (or cold) in too. And I don't particularly like leaving my door open, since people could just walk in and try to steal shit (while I'm in the bathroom for example) or do who knows what....

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 10 July 2023 - 04:13 PM

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Apparently the Vitalight mini CO2 monitor is pretty accurate after manual calibration and only $37 (not on sale---yet (if ever?)), might just go with that. Only plan on using it once in a while.

[Mezla PigDog]

Dropped a mega parenting clanger tonight and I can't stop laughing about it. My son has his own playlist on my Spotify account. Stuff like Ghostbusters and Kung Fu Fighting and other random songs he loves. He likes a few classics like Blitzkrieg Bop and Cherry Bomb and I'm trying a little too hard to make him like good music. We were having fun with me thinking up good songs for him to hear to see if he liked them enough to add and at some point in the evening I completely disengaged my brain and suggested Killing In The Name 😳

I was so flabbergasted at myself I was in hysterics by the time we got to MOTHER FUCKER. My sons eyes were on stalks!

I tried to turn it into a teachable moment about racism later to claw something back 🤣

[Slow Ben]

Mez: “Bed time kiddo!!!”

Mez’s kid: “Fuck you i wont do what you tell me!”