willedoo

I think with the debate on AI we're just tinkering at the edges. It won't keep developing at the current pace; the pace of advancement will snowball quite rapidly. I'm sure we'll be having a very different conversation about it in two years time, and most of that conversation will be about the downside of it.

A Wooden Indian, not the cigar type.

A beautiful old KB Inter

One example of job losses will be in the modelling industry. There will still be a need for physical catwalk models but almost all of the print and media advertising will go to AI generated models. That's a spin off from the graphics getting to the point where AI models can just about pass off as the real thing. A lot of photographers and modelling agencies will have to find something else to do. It's happening already; most of the online clothing retailers are using AI generated models now. It's not something that's going to happen one day; it's happening now and things will really accelerate, like a snowball effect. I can see the point of it though. If you were running a retail business or you were an advertising agency doing advertising work for companies, why would you employ a modelling agency when you can do it all with a few mouse clicks. No photographers, no studios, no booking venues and sets for model shoots. Unfortunately also no jobs for those people.

It's hard to keep up with banks these days. I've been with Suncorp since back in the days when it was Metway Bank, then Suncorp Metway, then Suncorp, so more than 35 years all up. They sold the banking arm to ANZ a couple of years ago and sometime over the next few months Suncorp Bank will vanish and I'll be an ANZ customer. There will be nothing to miss about Suncorp as they have zero loyalty to their customers. They shifted the credit cards off to NAB a long time ago, closed down almost all of their physical branches, sacked a heap of people and outsourced to 4,500 workers in third world countries to take their place. The only loans they offer now are business and housing loans, no more personal loans offered, so they've become a bank in name only. I've got this new thing going now where I want to try to deal with companies that employ Australians, but I don't know if there's any banks left like that.

I can remember watching the Canadian football grand final on the telly when I was in Alberta in 1985. There was a bit over four minutes left on the clock and the game finished about 35 or 40 minutes later. A lot of stops and big pow-wows. One thing I noticed during the MCG match was the coaches with a speaker/microphone headset covering their mouths with the playbook when they were calling a new play through to whoever it goes to. I'd never thought about it before, but maybe the teams employ lip readers to get a heads-up on what the opposite team is about to do.

In 2005 my brother and I took our dad on a road trip to see the war memorial in Canberra. On the way down we stayed a night in Cowra to have a look at the old POW camp as my dad was in a training battalion there at the time when it happened. In town there was a small museum and they had a hologram show depicting our POW's overseas. The point I'm getting at is that I wonder whether holograms will be replaced by AI created video or whether they will co-exist with it.

There's been big graphics advances just in the last few months when it comes to image to animated video. Not so long ago people's faces were obviously AI, in looks and facial expressions. With some of the better ones now it's almost spooky how realistic they are becoming. All those little things that define a person's personality are now being captured, especially the eyes and the smaller subtle facial movements.

On the positive side of AI, the advances in graphics are leaping ahead. It won't be too long before we can watch movies that don't look like a video game. It will soon get to the stage where the realism will surpass that.

All the talk in the news lately about artificial superintelligence and the urgent need to regulate it reminds me of a virus that's already escaped the laboratory. I get the feeling that the genie will be well and truly out of the bottle before the world's lawmakers can do anything about it.

Big day at the MCG, only three short of capacity with a crowd of 100,021.

I see where a bloke from Anthropic rates it a 10% chance AI will cause human extinction by 2030. That's it, I'm definitely not buying a new car, the old one should see me out.

That's right, the SanFrancisco 49ers flew in eight days ago and the LA Rams this morning. Polar opposite way of doing things.

Big day at the MCG tomorrow for NFL fans. First ever regular season game played in Australia. Rams vs 49ers, live on channel 7, kick off 10.35 AEST. They have to fly back to the US and play next week without a bye.

I've got two magnetos on the place, neither attached to bikes. One lives on an out of comission David Brown tractor, and the other one I'm not 100% sure, I think it's off an R-670 Continental.

I guess they have some type of spoof software that makes the calling number look like a local number.

I did some Googling and learnt a handy trick for potential scam calls. In the search bar, you type the number in and at the top of results is a website called reverseaustralia.com. It has a forum like format where people post their experiences of receiving a call from that number. I've got to the stage where I don't answer calls from numbers not in my contact list. I figure if they're genuine, they'll leave a message in messagebank and I can ring them back. Unusually, the call today did leave a message. When I dialed 101 to retrieve the message it was an AI generated female American accent voice pretending to be from the Red Energy who I recently switched to as a power retailer. One of the commnts on the reverse call lookup website said the same thing except they said they were from AGL.

Marty, that's a big ride, a bit longer than the one we did from the Sunny Coast to Cairns. I think from memory, Brisbane to Melbourne is about the same as Brisbane to Cairns. We did that trip up in about three days as well. Slept the first night in some concrete pipes at a road construction job, second night in Townsville at a mate's place and when we got to Cairns we got talking to a bloke and his wife who both had Harleys and they invited us to camp at their place. I think it was in Rockhampton from memory, a bloke approached us in the street to have a look at the Guzzi and he invited us around to his place to check out his bikes. He had Black Shadow and Rapide Vincents and a Norton single, a long time ago so I can't remember if it was a Manx or International. Talk about envy, I would have chewed my arm off for that Black Shadow.

I haven't filled up for a couple of weeks, it was $2.50 then. The highest I paid earlier in the year was $3.50.

The two longest trips I ever went on were both two up with a mate on his Guzzi, sharing the riding. One was from Melbourne to Adelaide and back, around 1,500 klm, and the other was from the Sunshine Coast to Cairns and back, around 3,200 klm. There's a ton of bikes I could name that would make those trips a horror story two up, but the Guzzi was a great tourer with a nice long comfortable seat and quite low from top of seat height to the ground. I could imagine it as the sort of trip where a BMW would be good as well.

My last ride wasn't very exciting at all. It was on a battered old postie bike down the driveway to pick up the mail from the letterbox. Uneventful trip down but broke down halfway back up and that's where it stayed for a few years. Haven't had a road registered bike for quite a few years now. Still remember my first ride (175cc BSA Bantam) and some of the more exciting ones. Some memories I cherish, some involving hospitals I'd rather forget.

I was once told by a bloke at CIG when it went by that name, that the rental was to cover cost of handling. That's obviously BS, as a farmer who uses one bottle every two years pays the same rental on that one bottle as a business who uses a bottle per week. In one case the bottle is handled once in two years, in the other case it's handled 104 times in two years for the same rental fee. It was good back in the days before they bar coded the bottles but I always knew they would code them one day and stop people dodging the rental..

Another factor is that you know BOC as a long term trusted supplier who will always be supplying the product. Bunnings goes through a few fads, so you couldn't be confident they would still stock the product in a couple of years time.

Not really a random thought, but for want of a better place to post - there's often a catch with things. I use D size oxy/ acetylene bottles which I rent from BOC (formerly CIG) at a rental cost of $187 p.a. for the two bottles. Someone suggested getting them from Bunnings as they don't charge yearly rental. The catch is they hold a deposit of $200 per bottle, so you have to give Bunnings over $600 to walk out the door with 2 D size bottles, that's including the gas refill cost. After having the bottles for two years you would break even compared to renting them from BOC and be ahead after that. It's no cheap solution.

There's some interesting stuff in that short documentary, but quite a few strange things as well. When the narrator was talking about the quarries in the Qld. channel country mining stone on an industrial scale and traded across the continent, they showed this photo with no explanation of what Tehran and Dubai had to do with it.