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Showing posts from April 1, 2018

Elliott Brack

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I went to Elliot Brack's funeral yesterday. He was a friend. And he was quite a character. He was one of the first people I met outside of work when I moved to Georgia. He was sort of a variation of the main character of Tom Wolfe's "A Man In Full". I used to say that Elliott and I had a 50-50 relationship. He told me what to do and I did it. His 50% was telling me. My 50% was doing it. He was a fixture at my church and involved me in all sorts of things. Including organization of our "Civic Breakfast" where we invited leaders from the community for information and opinions of the community. It goes on and on. There were 260 people attending his funeral. He will be missed. https://www.crowellbrothers.com/obituaries/Elliott-Earl-Brack?obId=48440319
We can do better than meeting spec http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2018/04/we-can-do-better-than-meeting-spec.html Well, that's over. Google AI now sounds indistinguishable from a human. And it'll only get more nuanced and more flexible. It can read aloud better than you can. Which means that anything that's ever been written can be perfectly read to you. Which means that anything a computer figures out or computes can be delivered to you with audio quality that meets spec. That's what AI keeps doing... things we said were impossible. Most of us shrugged when computers could drill holes or assemble machines with more accuracy and speed than a person can. And we avoided the topic when we discovered that computers could read x-rays with great skill as well. But now, it ought to make you shudder to discover that something as basic as speech is now better than the typical human's. Any speed, fully customized, in clear tones with great pronunciation...
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It looks like this may be my next partial ownership plane, a Piper Arrow 2. It is categorized as a complex aircraft and it what I need to get my commercial licence which is still the goal. That will bring our fleet to 4 planes. We had an aviation BBQ Saturday. It is always fun to meet pilots around the area. It is amazing how people are interconnected. We had a nice Easter. We went to church and had a nice Easter Breakfast at church afterwards. We took a bike ride and hike and cooked out. The weather is great. I have travel plans for for Nashville, Budapest and Germany. We also have some possible very cool vacation destinations figured out.