Simply upload your file and it is marked by a 4 x 5 matrix of colored blocks that represents the file. It is registered forever in the graveyard where you can check up on it any time you like.
And now my file has it’s own (very plain) ‘tombstone’.
Johnny Cash : Are you telling me that you don’t think I believe in God?
Sam Phillips : You know exactly what I’m telling you. We’ve already heard that song a hundred times. Just like that. Just… like… how… you… sing it.
Johnny Cash : Well you didn’t let us bring it home.
Sam Phillips : Bring… bring it home? All right, let’s bring it home. If you was hit by a truck and you was lying out there in that gutter dying, and you had time to sing *one* song. Huh? One song that people would remember before you’re dirt. One song that would let God know how you felt about your time here on Earth. One song that would sum you up. You tellin’ me that’s the song you’d sing? That same Jimmy Davis tune we hear on the radio all day, about your peace within, and how it’s real, and how you’re gonna shout it? Or… would you sing somethin’ different. Somethin’ real. Somethin’ *you* felt. Cause I’m telling you right now, that’s the kind of song people want to hear. That’s the kind of song that truly saves people.
People know when you’re being authentic or not. When your actions or words are coming from the deepest part of who you are or if you’re just putting on a mask. They may not say it, but people almost always can tell when your lying, acting the part, or just feeding them a line you know they want to hear. You’re putting on a mask. When we wear masks of lies too often, what you experience is that people slowly drift away from you until you wonder – how did I get here? Alone and just with superficial relationships.
People have a deep seated hungerfor real relationship. Relationships are based on authenticity, truth, and vulnerability. It’s in the very core of our being – and we create it if we don’t have it. Right now, we’re seeing LOTS of different groups trying to fill that need for relationships using words like ‘community’ and ‘culture’ as we cast off previous social norms.
As we cast off the past, we cannot cast off our need for belonging and meaning. We have replaced belonging and meaning in business by creating and promoting certain ‘cultures’. Non-profits and activist movements try to build ‘community’ around values. The problem is those entities, without real truth, just create more masks.
Each community and culture constructs a narrative and sets up rules and expectations of behaviors. If you challenge those behaviors, rules (written or unspoken), or leaders – you are immediately causing disunity and problems. I have seen this kind of clash happen in business environments and in non-profit and activist movements. Increasingly, many of them act more like cults under charismatic cult leaders than the ‘enlightened’ groups they claim to be.
We are doing this at a more and more furious pace than ever before as we tear down the ‘shackles’ of past community and culture – only to replace them with a new community and culture. We have largely given up on reforming cultures as we throw out the values of forgiveness and repentance. Instead we tear them down as soon as they fall out of favor to only be replaced by a new one with even more dubious leaders with even shorter track records. It is no wonder that people are exhausted and increasingly skeptical running from one new movement and activist group to the next. It seems businesses embrace new cultural values each year. Activist movements come and go with breakneck speeds. Leaders are again and again outed and canceled for hypocrisy, embezzlement, and lies. It’s activity that creates emptiness, disillusionment, and hopelessness for many people.
The real answer is that we need to see ourselves and the desires of ours hearts, in the light of real Truth. That is not something, in our broken world and limited understanding, we can do ourselves. Instead, we need to see ourselves in the light of something that is proven to be True. Something that has stood scrutiny for literally thousands of years – and not just a movement/philosophy of this day, this week, this month, this quarter, this year, or this decade.
There is such a real Truth – it is the teachings and life in Jesus Christ. It’s not about following a rulebook/wrote behavior (as Sam told Johnny Cash) or chasing a fad movement of today. A set of rules or guidelines is empty song we’ve heard a thousand times. Instead, Christ offers real and true relationship with Him – and the promise of eternal life with Him forever. Where every tear is wiped away, everything that has ever been done revealed, every hurt healed, every wrong righted, and every relationship repaired. All we need to do to start the journey is to turn to Him today, invite Him in, and live by his teaching. This requires work. We need to dedicate ourselves to learning what Jesus taught and converting our lives and behavior to become His friend.
So, just like Sam Philips would say, don’t just repeat the words of someone else or give the same pat answer – respond with your whole self authentically and be amazed where a life in Christ leads. I can confirm you’ll never be the same – God will take you places you never knew were possible, met people you never imagined you’d meet, open doors to things you never thought possible, and change your and other lives in ways that are nothing short of miracles.
The Grand Tour turns into the horrors of Overtourism
“Over-tourism is turning the world’s most perfect destinations into the opposite of what they once were”
Lord Byron contemplates the Colosseum in Rome
It’s interesting to see how tourism has evolved in the last 400 years. Tourism started in the 16th century for younger upper-class aristocrats and wasn’t designed for fun. Travel in those days was expensive, arduous, and dangerous. It was the natural progression of those aristocrats who had a thorough grounding in classic Greek and Latin literature that was the root of modern culture (until the 1900’s anyway). The goal was to become more well rounded and enlightened gentlemen, scientists, writers, philosophers, artists, speakers, and leaders by exposing themselves to the best art and cultures of the world. This idea even had a name: The Grand Tour.
You can still see the shadows of that in travel today. Have you ever wondered why there is an unwritten rule that travelers to Europe spend a lot of time visiting museums, famous churches/buildings, and arts of all kinds (plays, music, paintings, architecture)? It’s because the idea of travel comes from the idea of becoming more cultured and seeking truth.
As anyone trained in classical education will tell you, in the past we had a much better understanding of the universal artistic language in these famous works of art and buildings. A lot of classical works are largely lost and unintelligible to modern generations that have very little classical education. Even when read, the great majority of in-jokes, cultural digs, and people are unknown and themes completely missed.
It’s a terrible shame that even I was guilty of as a computer scientist. Why should I read a bunch of old dead people that seem irrelevant? I can’t even tell what they’re talking about half the time. Oh what a world was opened to me when I took some classical literature and Latin classes. Unfortunately, we have traded a millennium of thought and experience for a much more utilitarian and entertainment focus in education these days – and hence so is our travel.
Where our philosophy goes, so we go.
Roman Colosseum today
It makes sense how we’ve gotten to where we are today in modern travel. Without a grounding in the culture that created these great works, many people are largely ignorant of what these monuments and artworks mean. One might argue the reason we’re seeing the destruction of famous historical/artistic works is that younger people experience them as just as foreign to them as cultures they’ve never encountered in other parts of the world. It’s nearly the same level of cultural destruction as an invader who has a whole different value, ethical, and political system – except it’s their own history they are destroying. Our modern society can be seen as culturally insensitive, or downright hostile, to our very historical selves. Not thefirst time this has happened in history – to disastrous consequences.
Even I have started to rethink my own reasons for travel in an era where you can tour just about any majorworldlocation, museum, or event in 4k. While videos do not give you the cultural or personal interactions and friendships you develop from travel – you can still experience great works of art or festivals.
It’s not like we haven’t thought about solutions to broadcasting live experiences before. Who knew the screaming, brash, over-the-top streamer was predicted almost 2 decades before it happened…
Hyper-realistic bodycam style shooter in Unreal Engine 5
(This random frame shot from YouTube is horrible and doesn’t do the game justice – check the video itself to see how real it is.)
In Oct 2022, Alexandre Spidler of Studios Drama posted a Twitter clip from an experimental hyper-realistic bodycam style game that he was fooling with.
In Apr 19th, 2023, he released a brand new high resolution clip, a press release, and a steam page for a game called ‘Unrecord’. The description says:
Unrecord is a single-player FPS that tells the story of a tactical police officer from the perspective of his body camera. As you work to solve a complex case, you’ll need to use your tactical and detective skills to succeed.
It doesn’t look at all like the typical Call of Duty style – it looks…real. Just like actual bodycam footage with gritty environments that remind you of exactly what real-life interiors might look like. They use body-cam style cameras with a spherical FOV, shaky hand movement, chromatic aberration, and pixelated faces that make it seem like watching replayed camera footage.
The second video looks even better and captures just what anyone that’s gone paintballing has experienced. None of the polish of CoD – all the grittiness of real locations. I have no doubts this is good enough to be something that police and military will want to use for training soon.
The developer appears to be seeking funding and a studio partner to continue development. I’m surprised they haven’t been snatched up already.
Side note: the developer has already posted scammers putting up false ads and trying to get people to download links and apps that are supposedly the game. A reminder that we’re in the brave new world of the internet – full of scams and misinformation. Be careful out there.
AI is here. Netflix put out a short show called Unknown: Killer Robots that is largely on-point. If anything, it’s not as up to date as reality – which is a little scary.
Despite our efforts, there’s really no putting the AI genie back in the bottle despite the attempts of artists, politicians, and academic pundits. AI has demonstrated it can teach robots how to walk and fly better than any static system, it can create art faster and with nearly the same quality as real artists. The question is, can we control and limit it in a reasonable way – or will it destroy us?
To that point, the show demonstrates how countries are increasingly seeing AI in military use. We’re already seeing off-the-shelf drones being used extensively in the Ukrainian war – from tiny drones scouting and delivering hand grenades to ad-hoc drones using small plane engines to delivering bombs. They also cover the counter-intuitive reality that trying to save lives by developing military technology has almost always lead to even greater casualties – such as the Gatling gun which was design to put fewer people on the military field but resulted in massive causalities of mis-matched soldiers in WW1
Many of the topics and data they cover in this show are actually old news – the reality is that AI enabled systems are around 5-7 years more advanced. Which is almost half the length of time the modern field has existed.
Still, they cover most major bases:
AI flying drones that go into hostile buildings to map and scope them without risking troops in extremely deadly house-clearing fights.
Wildfires and the fog of war – multi-system battle managers
The stakes couldn’t be higher. While politicians can argue the ethics, the reality is that when forces are pushed to their breaking point and a force is about to lose – just about nothing is off the table. Especially ad-hoc and terrorist forces which have perpetrated chemical, biological, and conventional weapons attacks (from bombings to shootings).
Some of the better quotes:
It will be like people on horseback charging tanks. Forces with AI will absolutely dominate forces without AI
There is no prize for second place in war.
I think people have largely underestimated the peace we enjoy today due to overwhelming military dominance we’ve had over the last 70 years.
The Original Practice Shakespeare Festival puts on free Shakespeare plays in local Oregon parks. It’s quite a prolific group – they do multiple shows per week at a variety of local parks each summer. It appears the cast is volunteer and they do carry small scrolls in case they get lost but what they lack in technical skill they make up for in theatrics and good fun. So, it can be a somewhat rag-tag operation at times but it’s definitely a fun and cheap way to catch some Shakespeare.
The Edo-Tokyo Open-Air Museum is an outdoor museum where historically valuable buildings are relocated, restored, and exhibited along with most of their interiors. It’s a collection of over two dozen reconstructed houses, shops, and restaurants that feels like you’re going back into time.
AIO water cooling and heatsinks are so last year. DIY Perks takes a brand new i9-13900K processor, mounts all the major components with water cooling bricks, encases the entire PC in a waterproof acrylic tube, and runs all the cooling through external copper tubing. How does it cool it? Using a pond.
And it turns out to be extremely effective – reaching only 20C (only 5C more than standard) at full load after an hour. Dang.
Besides using Glassdoor, Levels.fyi can be an invaluable job seeking tool for tech workers. It informs you which level/grade/rank/etc at one employer would translate to the equivalent in another company. It also gives you a salary comparison for those levels for various roles at most major companies.
