I saw Horyou share a link to Speechless with Carly Fleischmann. This is a Nonverbal Autism Video Interview carried out via typed words on a tablet.  The text is read out electronically. The interview is warm and convivial.
It stands out because it does not use a fast talking or energetic host. The interviewer does not talk, in the conventional sense. They could easily have inter-titles rather than synthesised voice. It is because they show the challenge of this interview that it is interesting. It shows that charismatic fast talkers are not the only people with an opportunity to interview artists. It shows that given the right circumstances anyone can interview artists and that desire and interest are required but that solutions can be found for other challenges. It opens up the world to a diversity of people. Imagine video interviews in sign language for example. There is no reason for a specialist channel not to take on this challenge, to fill this niche.
Three things make this possible: Video production costs have gone down so it is easy to find the budget to record such an interview, technology makes communication for nonverbal people much simpler and finally Youtube makes content distribution to an audience easy. This video has three and a half million views.
I will find more videos like this. I believe that they play an important role in modern society where we believe that everyone should be treated equally, to have equal opportunities. It is too easy to idealise the charismatic radio presenter who has a way with words and forget that charisma can be found in people’s intellect. You see it through the laughter in the interview, you see it in the way the interviewee is so relaxed. It’s a shame that there is just one interview. Imagine it as a weekly show.
They love to say “Don’t fear AI”. They all say “AI is meant to help people with their work”, “AI is meant to be a personal assistant” and more. It’s not AI we fear. It is stakeholders, governing boards and accountants. They are the people we fear. Throw in Inhuman resources for good measure. We “fear” AI because they, all the groups mentioned above, want to use AI as an excuse to fire human beings because computers are theoretically, and only theoretically, cheaper.
AI Isn’t Cheap
It turns out that AI requires a lot of computing power, and computing power requires buildings, passive cooling, solar panels and more. It also requires network resources and a trainer, to teach the AI to do what it’s meant to do. I listened to a podcast about an AI Dungeons and Dragons that requires enormous amounts of computing power. AI Dungeons and Dragons requires a lot more than a top spec personal computer. It requires an array of computers. Is that progress?
Learning Prompt Engineering
When I was experimenting with building apps with AI I saw the limitations of AI. AI is great, but learning the art of “prompt engineering” is key. What is prompt engineering? It’s the art of learning to give instructions to an AI system so that it gives you the results you desire, at the quality you desire. It’s about iterating through prompts, until you get the AI to do precisely what you want.
Keeping Things Simple
A huge effort is being made to get AI to respond to humans as if it was intelligent, but that intelligence, to some degree is an illusion, because it has to learn from millions of documents, over a period of time, and people continually have to give it feedback, to improve it.
Reinforcement Learning
This is an interesting video about how AI learns.
And Finally
As a media asset manager you learn to organise information so that it is easy to find. To a large degree that’s what AI does. It gathers a huge amount of data, and then, over time, we teach it to give us the results we expect when we ask one question or another.
What this means is that we can spend billions on teaching AI to give us useful information, or we could spend time on writing more useful documentation, where the answers we seek are easier to find. We don’t need AI to replace humans. We need humans to organise information more intuitively. There’s a reason you come across Google Fu as a term.
As I invest time in learning Hugo I sometimes find myself asking chatGPT questions, when I get stuck, because I can’t find the documentation I want. Sometimes I get useful answers, but at other times it is unproductive.
The Real Value of AI
For me the real value of AI is not in helping us ask questions and get answers, it is in automating tasks that require humans a lot of time. Transcription is a useful feature of AI because it can automatically transcribe text, and then a human can double check that it is correct. AI can then automatically translate the transcription, and a human can go over the translation, and tweak it, and those tweaks can be fed back into the AI.
With Media Asset Management AI is useful too. DV video tapes were 63 minutes long, and 63 minutes takes a long time for a human to watch, keyframe, keyword and more. AI could do the same thing within minutes, and then a human can qualify the result and tweak it where needed.
AI should also be used for proofreading, rather than writing. AI can be taught all grammatical rules, and ensure that what is written makes sense. It could even be trained to recognise where people reading from a teleprompter would stumble, and other suggestions to make the text flow.
Conclusion
In a rational world AI is just a tool that people can use to streamline their workflow, catch errors, speed up tasks like transcription and more. The drawback is that it gives an excuse for accountants, governing boards, stockholders and others an excuse to say “cut out the humans, let AI do the work.” Plenty of tech companies have done just that. It’s not that people fear AI, but that people don’t trust those in charge of budgets not to make immoral and irrational decisions, by firing the humans, that generate value in the first place.
Last night I finished converting all my audiobooks to a DRM free format. In the process I learned that the m4b format renders much faster than mp3. I spent weeks trying to convert AAX files to mp3 and then by accident I agreed to convert files to m4b and it took the time it took for me to walk on my daily walk to be done.
Migrated to Audiobookshelf
Now that all the files have been converted to mp3 and m4b I have uploaded them to Audiobookshelf. Some files failed to import. The rest imported with ease. The advantage that I now have is that I can browse through my audiobook collection faster than if I use either Audible’s phone app and their website. The other advantage is that my files are self-hosted locally so unless my hard drives fail I have my own copy, as I would if I had bought physical books.
Fiddly
When you’re listening to Audiobooks on a laptop the website works well. When you’re listening on an iOS device the epxerience is slightly more complicated. You need to navigate to the website in a browser, find the book, and then start listening. If you use it for podcasts then it plays one podcast and then you need to select the next. On a computer podcasts play one after another.
Create Users
Audiobookshelf allows you to create users. You can have one that has admin privilieges that is used just to add podcasts and create libraries etc and a second one to use as a user. By seperating the two there is less chance of making a mistake.
You can create multiple libraries for multiple users, so in theory you can create a library per person, for them to upload their own books. You cannot restrict library A to user A, library B to user B etc. You can control whether people can upload, download and more. You can give people access to listen, via the site, but restrict who can download to keep.
And Finally
OpenAudible and Audiobookshelf give us a way to keep the content that we spent money buying for our own personal use. If Amazon or Audible go bankrupt then we do not end up with nothing, after spending 100+ usd per year for content. I like both OpenAudible and Audiobookshelf
the search engine was the king, now it’s social networking.
People had their own home page, now it’s grown to their own website. The blog was grown and grown, replacing webrings
to be developed
For several years the search engine was king. This was the place where everyone went to find content because all the information was so disorganised. Recently though this has changed. The way people use the world wide web has evolved. Whereas people in the past would create just one webpage with a little content people are now creating entire websites.
These websites are not websites in the sense that they were back in the late nineties, rather they are profiles. It used to be that you’d create a static HTML page that would need to be updated manually through the hot metal code. With CGI-bin and later technologies, the nature of the homepage has changed.
Remember Geocities? It’s been replaced by myspace. Remember the discussion about web portals and yahoo and google were trying to corner the market to get the highest audience. That has changed. Look at Digg, Facebook, Bebo, twitter,Jaiku and Pownce. All of these websites are about one thing. Community. They are only interesting as long as your friends are members; no friends means no way of using it. I was a member of myspace for months before anyone I knew joined and by the time had joined I re-created a profile having forgotten the other profile.
It’s the same with Facebook. I joined it a few months before anyone from my environment started using it but recently everyone has started using Facebook to communicate. Not just this, they’re also uploading their lives to the web. So am I. There are two issues that are interesting to look at. For anyone wanting to do a dissertation why not look at the changing nature of privacy with the rise of the social networking website. When I was studying for my HND privacy was key and release forms were essential. Now it’s as though everyone is a publisher and the nature of privacy has changed. It goes along the lines of “Don’t upload anything too compromising or embarrassing”. Your network of friends can see everything. Friends from your high school days can see all your university friends and vice versa.
This promotes the expansion of social circles. Whereas in the past networks of friends were mutually exclusive due to location they are joined online. Take some videos of when you’re at a party in Switzerland and those in England can see it, and so can their friends if you so choose. It’s a shame you can’t select for only one network to see videos rather than others, for example, only London friends can see the London videos and Switzerland friends can see those. It would make uploading certain videos possible.
Anyway, the web has become personal. Within the last 6 months or so I’ve seen the web go from being about avatars and nicknames to being about real names and real networks. It’s about bringing the offline world online and vice versa. This is where I believe for there to have been a shift in perception of what the web is for. Almost everyone I know and see regularly is now on Facebook. It’s amusing to see how it’s become mainstream.
It’s as though Facebook has become a portal although not in the 1998 sense of the word. There is a new part of the internet. If you imagine the web to be like drupal then imagine that Yahoo and Geocities are the old gateways to the World Wide Web whilst various social networking websites are a new ad important portal with one major difference. These portals aggregate and distribute your content to your friends around the world. You’re no longer going online for research. You’re going online because you’re socialising. It’s replaced, at least partially, socialising in the real world whilst nonetheless providing a great way of sharing content. Both “user-generated” and “interactive” have become keywords in describing what the web is today.
In summary, whereas two or three years ago the Web was somewhere people came to find information for future use the web has evolved into an interactive user-generated medium. As a result of this, I think the world wide web has added another node to what purposes it serves.
Web 1.0: static and hard to interact anonymously vs web 2.0: highly interactive user-generated content where real names are now used, especially in places like Facebook.
You build up plenty of dust as you plow the fields at the moment. The drought continues, as does the desire for this pandemic to be over. For now, the downward trend continues so we could feel optimistic. I’m still optimistic than in two or three weeks recycling centres will go back to normal. At the moment recycling centres remind me of something else.
Looking at this queue of cars reminds me of something. All the engines are off. All the cars are lined up. Plenty of people are in their cars waiting. If you saw this in Calais you’d expect them either to be waiting for the Eurotunnel train to get back to England or for the ferries to take them.
This is an image of Swiss people waiting to get into a recycling centre. Despite this being the 31st day of the pandemic Swiss peoples’ desire and compulsion remains strong. For many people this is the lazy person’s equivalent of “getting out of the house for a bit”. I go for a one and a half hour walk and they sit in their cars, enjoying the fresh air, the tweets of the birds, and best of all a great view on the Mont Blanc. For the last two days we’ve had a good view.
Today I have spent very little time on Twitter and Facebook because I still can’t stand either of them. I’m thinking of deleting both accounts when this pandemic is over. I spent time modernising my weebsite instead. Pages that haven’t been changed since the late 90s are finally being updated and included within this CMS. The inspiration came as a result of seeing that Google told me in an e-mail that 21 pages were not AMP compatible.
Last night I watched this during and after having dinner last night. I feel the need for watching people hike, and socialising. We’re now on day 31. We’re officially a month in. If we were in a different context then I would have almost completed one Via Alpina route by walking several hundred kilometres.
When I started reading about Thur-Hiking it was in blog form, with pictures, and then books, and occassionaly podcasts and then, during this pandemic, I started watching videos of people’s hiking adventures. It’s a way of seeing nice landscapes and imagining what would be possible in Europe. It’s good to plan for the future, and it’s good to have plans that do not require much or any contact with others. Via Ferrata, climbing and other sports may not start again for a while after the last new transmission of the virus. Hiking, however should be possible.
My project, for the next few days, is to continue shifting all my old website content to this blog. I should learn something new in the process.
The first time I went to St Hilaire du Touvet was for the Coupe D’Icare event which is held every September. It is a mountain film festival and parapente competition. The second time I went was with Glocals friends to climb up the via ferrata. There are two routes up. One is an easier one. The second is a hard one. What makes the second one so hard is that it’s vertical, up a chimney of sorts. What made me uncomfortable was the friable nature of the rock. I thought that if I fell the spikes would not hold. A few weeks later I found out that this is one of the hardest via ferrata, supposedly the hardest via ferrata in France.
The video above is nothing like that. They’re climbing up the beautiful waterfall that the via ferrata goes along. I was attracted by the width of the water fall.
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behaviour or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.