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Max at 15
On our recent trip back home, Max was jump-testing his new hiking boots at Walmart.
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Songthaew vs Tesla
Related Newsflare from Feb: Tesla ‘bug’ causes car to brake when it sees ‘people standing on back of bus’
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Back Home Again
Nam and I went on a nice trip to pick up Mina in WA and for Nam to see Max after four years of COVID lockdown/US visa processing. The last long leg of our trip saw us dropped this bus stop in between the two sides of Maha Sarakham city at dawn. As it turns out, we aren’t moving back to the states just now. Mina has come back to Thailand; she missed her friends here. I have many tales to tell.
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Bing: Corporate AI Echo Chamber
The AI-enabled version of Bing is useless for search… Imagine using the bare bones search engines of the 90s on all of the useless filler on the web today, navigating by command line to a toddler – that’s the new Bing experience. You can pare down on its idiot responses by tweaking prompts, but it’s a huge step backwards from just Googling something. It’s also noticeably clunkier than using vanilla ChatGPT. I’m not the only one who noticed.
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Nissan Did Something Right
…and it wasn’t even RWD. Behold the 4-hour car ad:
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An SEO copywriter
An SEO copywriter walks into a bar, grill, pub, public house, bartender, drinks, beer, wine, liquor…
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Chicano Subculture in Thailand and Japan
There was a resurgence of interest in “Thai Chicanos” last year, resulting in a few articles and videos across the web. The most entertaining video, however, is the one from almost a decade ago, about the “Cholos of Bangkok,” by Coconuts TV. Also last year, an interesting YouTube video documenting “Japan’s Chicano Culture In LA” was published by Peter Santenello: However, the true counterpart to the “Cholos of Bangkok” is “Inside Japan’s Chicano Subculture” by the NYT: From a language and culture standpoint, all of these are enthralling. I’ve watched them all multiple times and pick up on new details every time.
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It’s Been Twenty Years and One Day…
…since I started this blog! In that first uninspiring post, I think I was referring to NTT cutting off my dual ISDN (64 + 64kbps !!) service or refusing my application for the then cutting-edge FTTH service to my rental home in Sumoto, Japan. I can’t say it seems like only yesterday; it actually feels like a few lifetimes ago. The first few years, blogging was new and exciting! I actually had a blog before this one up at Blogger. If I recall correctly, back then it required making a Blogger account (was it even named that?) and a separate Blogspot account and performing some kind of manual registration/installation. I…
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Blue vs Red Kapom/Gapom Species
No photos here, just a link to a 13 year old post I updated about some local lizard species which are called the same thing in Thai/Isan languages: กะปอม/กิ้งก่า), but ended up being distinct species with different common names: Oriental garden lizard (Calotes versicolor) vs. Calotes mystaceus (the Indo-Chinese forest lizard). For the sake of posterity, I hereby shorten their names to Bob(s) and Dan(s). Bobs are the red ones, Dans are the blue ones (did you know that roughly 75% of people on social media would have used apostrophes to indicate plurality in that sentence?) Update: Uh oh, there are Emmas (green when mating) in Thailand as well: Calotes…
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Is openai.com written by AI?
It certainly looks like it: “We spent 6 months making GPT-4 safer and more aligned. GPT-4 is 82% less likely to respond to requests for disallowed content and 40% more likely to produce factual responses than GPT-3.5 on our internal evaluations.” I asked ChatGPT if it could write the next line and it replied: “These improvements have been made possible through a combination of rigorous testing, enhanced training data, and algorithmic updates that prioritize responsible language generation.” Used as (possibly) my last prompt into NightCafe, it becomes:
