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The ABQ
Correspondent Last Two Issues March 2025 HAVE A
SEAT Back in
what must have been 1976, I received a proposal for an article in Personal
Computing Magazine, of which I was Editor. (In those quaint old days of
print, the protocol for offering a piece to a publication was to send a
letter outlining it to see if the editor would be interested.) Yes, the idea
was appealing, and I replied that I’d soon be in the author’s home territory
and could meet with him. He invited
me to his home in South San Francisco, which was one of those houses not
common outside California whose front is at street level, and whose back is
supported on stilts over a chasm. He gave me a tour, pointing out a
storage area stacked high with folded corrugated cardboard objects. They were
kits of model airplane gliders, cleverly die-cut so the purchaser could
pop out the pieces and assemble the aircraft following instructions printed
on them. When a customer ordered a glider, my host could just slap a
label on the sturdy folded object, and mail it off. Impressive. I was
offered a comfortable chair, handed a draft of the proposed article, and
asked what sort of music I liked. He played a number of
instruments, and planned to practice on a recorder while I read. I said I
liked Bach, and he indeed played Bach while I read. I said we’d
publish the piece. We chatted interestingly about the
computer biz before I left. It was an unusual experience. He was more
than talented (he
invented computer languages, was an artist, initiated the design of the Apple
MacIntosh, had much to do with the Mozilla Firefox browser, which I use
routinely, etc…); he was also outspoken and
influential, His work is present in daily life these fifty years later. He
was also highly quotable. e.g: “Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if
you tied them the usual way. This happens to us all the time with computers and
nobody thinks of complaining.” Partly
because of his influence, our computers now work much of the time. Unlike
most of the techie creators of personal computers, who thought that computer
users cared how the infernal things work, Raskin
promoted the idea that computers were appliances that customers used for
doing something they wanted done. Good on him. I saw Jef
last at the West Coast Computer Faire in 1977, where Faire proprietor Jim Warren
roller-skated around the floor of the San Francisco Civic Auditorium,
visiting his exhibitors. That show was notable for the introduction of the
Apple II, which became an icon of its era. As we looked around the busy
hall, Jef commented, “This is either the end of something or the beginning of
something.” I think it was both. Jef Raskin
died in 2005 at only 61. Too bad. He
was really interesting and had more to do. GETTING
THERE Forty-some
years ago,
pre-artificial neural nets and LLMs, I published a couple of things speculating
on the potential for turning “personal robots” into companions who would
be helpful and comforting to old folks like me, now. I had expected such
critters to be among us long ago, but it takes a while for fundamentally
different ideas to come into general use. Robot companions seem to be
creeping up on us at last. A
WIRED article
reports interestingly on experience with an “AI travel companion” in
Tokyo. The author found it…um… companionable and helpful as well as error-prone. (Who of us is not error-prone?) She seems
to have been glad of its company and utility. A Quartz article, 2025
could be the year AI Grows Up deals with less “personal” AI agents performing
functions in business, and the probable need to set agents watching agents
to be sure that they don’t do anything harmfully silly. “Who watches the
watchers?” is a classic issue, just in new context. That’s what auditing
firms are about. We haven’t found a way to predict comprehensively what “emerging technology” will be able to do what we’ll be either glad of or sorry about, just too many unknown variables. Wikipedia says that “
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NELS
MUSES Item: While
looking at references to Jef Raskin, I found this quote from him: "An unlimited-length file name is a file. The
content of a file is its own best name." Remarkably,
while explaining to ignorant me in 1968 what a computer is and does, Woody
Bledsoe used this key phrase: “The information is the address; the address is the
information.” With
the rise of LLMs these many years later, what they were saying is becoming
crystal clear. Item:
It has
apparently occurred to Saudi Arabia that, while they have had immense…really IMMENSE revenue from oil for quite some time now,
that resource is not unlimited. Maybe they should use some of that money to
create other resources. One of the things they’ve come up with is The Line, a city 1600 feet
tall, 656 feet wide, and 105 miles long. They’ve already started to build
it…and there’s a remote chance that the mad scheme can be carried through. Holy
Smoke! It’s in
a special area of the country, called NEOM, formally dedicated to
doing new stuff. The general population of Saudi Arabia is not especially
noted for embracing new stuff, and one can imagine a certain reluctance to
accept social changes that must inevitably accompany a project on this scale,
but the country’s management does not shrink from enforcing its dictates.
This should be scary as well as fascinating to watch in coming decades. Item: A report about a lady collecting slime moulds on her Tasmanian property
reminds us that these are extraordinarily interesting living…er…things with
capabilities that still puzzle us. For example, they can work their way
through a maze to find food. This interesting short article from Discover,
admiring their talents, is a bit rude about them. They deserve better. _______________________________________________
ITEM FROM THE PAST This item from March 1996 just seems appropriate for the start of this forty-first year COMFORT IN
CLASSIFICATION You’ll notice on the Correspo
Home Page that we finally have a real
ISSN...an “International Standard Serial Number”...assigned by the National
Serials Data Program of the U.S. Library of Congress to the Online Edition of
the ABQ Correspondent. What
does it mean? Well..unh...
um...who knows?. The printed
edition of the ABQ Correspondent has sported an ISSN for some years. In the
case of printed publications, serial
numbers are potentially helpful to librarians who hope to arrange all
documents in orderly fashion, so that scholars can find them again in the
future. It’s less clear that an ISSN assigned to this online edition of the
Correspo has value for anybody. Where the heck will anybody look to find the
material? I forgot to save the first
few files of this, and even the ones now preserved are just WordPerfect
files copied to fragile floppy disks.
A scarier idea is that the material is stored in a great Monitoring Computer
in the Sky by agencies of governments unspecified, whose work is aided by the
ISSN. That’s goofy, but who knows? The ISSN gives a certain cachet to the publication, and one’s
ego is bolstered by the notion that some scholar in
future years may be interested in these paragraphs, improbable as it may
seem. The Online Correspo seems
more “official” now, with a definable place in the world. It was challenging to move the Correspo
online after ten years of publication...two sides of an 8½” x 11” sheet of canary yellow paper…printed out, copied at Kinko’s or some such shop, folded inside another sheet of paper with somebody’s address on it, stamped, and mailed. (A first class stamp must have been about fifteen cents at the time…more like fifty cents now… couldn’t afford it.) Without practical constraint on the length of the online copy, we arrived at trying to limit pieces to 400-500 words, but sometimes wander
embarrassingly beyond that. Should we automatically show reader responses? Goodness, no. How about frequency? Well, the print edition had been every-other- month but monthly was practical online and not a nuisance to readers…and so on and so on. Lots changed . …and it has been a sort of meaningless comfort all these years to have an International Standard Serial Number to make the Correspo seem real. Onward. February 2025 HUM A
FEW BARS… What with
all the recent stir about “drones” flitting about over New Jersey and
other spots of interest, one recalls a minor story from what must have
been late 1963. I was working as a none-too-competent Production Coordinator
for a TV commercial production studio, FilmFair, in
Hollywood, and we had a batch of commercials to produce, promoting Mattel’s Chatty Cathy
doll. Chatty Cathy was not equipped
with as-yet-unknown solid-state technology, but with an honest-to-goodness
teeny-weeny record player. If you wound up the spring and released it,
Cathy would say one of several randomly selected short phrases. The thing
worked...not as well as the smartphone now in my pocket, but it won the
hearts of many little girls. One panel on each of the storyboards for the
television spots said something like “Just pull the cord on the back of
Cathy’s neck, and she’ll speak to you.” …except that “cord” was spelled
“chord.” suggesting that the storyboards had been laid out by a musician.
One of my tasks in preparing for the shoot was to find, somewhere in LA, a
highly reflective wall, so that we could photograph an actor walking next to
it along with his/her reflection. The official comment was “We can always
do it at the airport, but that has become trite; we want something fresh.”
Well, I must have looked at a hundred promising walls all over town, shooting
pix of many with a great big old Polaroid camera that was also a wonder of
technology in those days, and I couldn’t find anything suitable. Time
was running out, and on a cold, rainy, nasty afternoon, I called the
spot’s producer at the Carson/Roberts agency with the news. He sighed,
and said he’d pick me up, and we’d run down to admire walls
at the airport. He turned out to be a pleasant young guy about my age,
named Bob Emenneger, a musician as well as a filmmaker. Aha! We both hated the airport on
inspecting it…and I can’t remember what we did about a reflective wall. BUT
the connection with recent events is this; creative Mr. Emenegger went on to be a director/producer/composer.
He also authored a
book UFOs: Past, Present, and Future, which he turned into a 1974 documentary film that has become a classic reference
in the UFO/UAP/UAS world in the years since. The story is more intriguing than
many. I think we have an ancient Chatty Cathy or two somewhere around the house. We don’t have any UFO memorabilia. Shhhhh, JUST
KEEP IT BETWEEN US Back in the ‘70 I published a piece or two
suggesting that robots could become warm companions and helpers to old
folks like me now. I was insanely optimistic about the time schedule,
assuming that these critters would be among us by the ‘90s, but fortunately,
nobody took me seriously. They are just now beginning to look really practical as LLM technology booms. One of the
inhibitions, apart from concern about the uncanny valley, is the
amount of energy and storage required by these systems. You have to know a lot to be useful to others, to anticipate
needs and understand the limitations of the party you’re trying to assist. Dogs seem to be equipped by Nature with
companionability, and many can learn a lot, often more than we realize. Dogs
learn a different class of skills from those we expect in our robotic
companions. For example, they can’t read aloud the contents printed on
the label of a can of soup. (Does it really contain that much sodium?)
The robots oughta be able to do that…as well as
taking the can from a shelf, opening it, and warming the contents on a stove
(remembering to turn off the burner afterward). The problem is not just the
size of the necessary robot brain, but the need for the critter’s
discretion. To be useful, the robot must learn continuously…about
everything and everyone it encounters We probably don’t want it to
share with the rest of the world everything it knows that’s important to us
personally. Some folks are working on that, Nvidia, for example. They
are reportedly building a “$3K AI-powered desktop for researchers and students; system
allows users to run many AI models locally instead of relying on cloud
computing.” And
others are developing super-efficient software that may squeeze
an LLM into your smartphone. (Yes, you’ll need lots of energy to run it for more than a few
minutes, but people
are working on that, too.) The part we haven’t
solved yet is making the robot as caring as a dog. We shall see. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- NELS
MUSES Item: Long-ago associate Larry Bellinger (the only guy I knew who was pushed out
of an airplane over Panama by a crazed crew member) commented about 1996 that
he saw a short future for the cellular phone business. Why bother with
cellular, he asked, when direct satellite communication with personal phones
will shortly be feasible? Well, it took a while, but Starlink is
reportedly providing service to currently-on-fire Los Angles as this is
written. This wireless palm-sized robot…it comes in a kit…walks and jumps using a kind of locomotion that is apparently becoming more popular becoming more popular. See this scuttling table. Item: Musical instruments are quickly becoming digitized, and sounding pretty good in the bargain. I can’t play my few chords on a guitar my guitar any more, but have hope for making satisfactory sound with this remarkable device. It may not even be necessary to develop calluses. _______________________________________________
ITEM FROM THE PAST This item from
1993 is recalled by the current to-do about the
use of computer generated images…and
sound…well, almost real people in movies. WOOF Brock has reported from the wilds of Hollywood about the stresses of operating a realistic dog puppet in a production
whose real performing dogs were owned by a trainer who was pathologically
jealous of the puppet. "My dogs can do all the action the script
calls for," he said. The dogs couldn't, but the guy threatened to walk out if the interloping puppet was allowed
to do anything. Without those dogs the production would shut down,
because they couldn't match the animals exactly. Brock was less concerned about that than about having the guy come in
and shoot the puppet with a gun. They got through it by photographing
everything with the real hounds, and smuggling
the puppet shots in at night. Brock did not expect exactly this hazard in
showbiz. He recently puppeteered a wolf in a film called…um…Wolf. He hopes he's not canine
typecast. Reminds me of a session years ago in Hollywood when we were shooting a television commercial
for a Minneapolis bank whose logo featured a small girl standing next to an
immense protective dog. We simulated the logo with a real girl and
a real dog...actually three or four identical Great
Danes. Dogs get bored and moody in a hurry on set, so the trainer typically
maintains a fleet of interchangeable animals, and brings several to the
shooting session. At one point our
director, Hank Ludwin, gestured with a stick while explaining something. The dogs instantly took note. Their ears went down, and they dropped to attack
positions. The trainer and his helper flung themselves on the dogs,
shouting. "Drop the stick, drop the stick!" Hank did, and the dogs
relaxed. The trainer explained. "These dogs just came off Disney's Swiss Family Robinson. They've been
trained to take swords away from pirates." (Swiss Family Robinson
was on television this afternoon, and the sight of the dogs brought it all
back.) By the way, Brock commented that the
director of Wolf was really good, smart in his use of the puppets, appreciative
of what the puppeteers were able to accomplish, and fun to work with.
"His name is Nichols," said Brock. "Mike Nichols?"
I asked. "Yes, have you heard of him?" said my son, the Hollywood
expert. He hadn't. Gad. The resentment
of imitation dogs by the trainer is matched
currently by the resentment of special effects critter
creators who see their business slipping away. When
a director tries a special effects shot
several times, is dissatisfied, and finally says “Never
mind, we’ll CG it,” those words are chilling. While
it was hard to imagine in 1993 that CG would become
as practical as real 3D props, the reality is
upon us in 2025, and lots of people are greatly
upset. One assumes that CG “avatars” can be trained
with AI/LLM techniques so well that they will
simulate real people, living or dead, to become such
capable, cooperative, game, inventive,
interesting performers that their living models will
become less useful and will be paid or otherwise
encouraged to disappear. Not
recommending this. mind you, just pointing out its
practicality. Coincidentally,
last time I visited family in LA (their neighborhood hasn’t yet burned down, though many of
their friends have lost their homes) I
watched Brock’s excellent brother Garth, who
manages a special effects studio, directing
creation of a puppet dog. I paid close attention but
did not spot an angry man with a pack of real
dogs coming in to shoot this puppet. We lost good old Brock to MS in 2015. Doggone it. --------------------------------------------------------------------
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