back in the early-mid '80s I worked as a tire changer for a chain of tire retailers. We had a mechanic who did all the front-end alignments and brake jobs etc, and he had an apprentice/helper who worked with him. When cars with drum brakes came in, they liked to each take a side and race to see who could get them done faster. I remember timing them once, and they both could remove and replace the shoes and the spring kits in less than 45 seconds.

it seems to me, and I could be wrong, that they don’t accent syllables the same way, if at all. Years ago I had a database teacher in community college who was from India and it took me a couple of classes to tune in to her, but after that it wasn’t hard to follow her at all. I’m often in Zoom meetings with a software engineer who immigrated from Vietnam and he was a bit of a challenge to understand at first, too.

Oh yeah… and my cancer doc is from Sri Lanka. That was doubly fun. His heavy accent pronouncing four-dollar medical terms took some serious getting used to. Listening to him dictate into his little recorder for the transcriptionists at the end of our visits is an added treat I always enjoy…

Sure, AI can whip up fantastical imagery and low-effort dialog — but if audiences call BS, the blowback can be extraordinarily embarrassing.

I see AI generated bullshit on youtube all the time these days. To the point where I can tell by the thumbnail before I even watch it. I’ve gotten in the habit of checking out new-to-me channels in a private window first, before deciding whether I want to subscribe or even keep watching. The instant I detect any AI… either in the voice or the nonsensical writing, I’m outa there. I do e-learning multimedia for a living, and we use a lot of stock images, and those sites are being loaded up with AI generated garbage. It’s getting harder to find stuff that isn’t AI, and using it to generate your own is a total crapshoot as far as results go…

y’know… maybe if I were a 2100 year old Palestinian goat-herder living under Roman rule, I just might believe this shit…

I had a good friend who worked LP for wal-mart back in the '90’s. He loved that shit. He’d burn CD copies of the surveillance videos of his latest escapades fighting with and tackling shoplifters and bring them home for us to see. He was a master of “redirecting” someone running away from him into whatever nearby solid object he had available. I know those big red bollards that keep cars from driving thru the front doors claimed more than a couple of victims at his, um… urging. Entertaining stuff for sure.

My favorite channel would have to be Destination Adventure with Dustin Porter. Why this guy doesn’t have 10,000,000 subscribers is beyond me. Not only does he go to some amazing places, but he’s a really gifted videographer. Everything about them is top-notch, and he does it all by himself. The amount of B-roll stuff he gets must be a tremendous amount of work. He picks great music too…

I used to know a guy named Ed back in the early-mid '80’s who was a professional college student. We were both attending the local junior college. I was about 19 or 20, he was about 30. He was tall, had long straight dark hair and a full, fairly long beard with a fairly prominent hawk nose. One day, his parents finally got tired of him avoiding adulthood and declared they were no longer going to support him and he had to get a job. He showed up to classes with a short hair cut and no beard. We all had to do a double-take. He seriously had no chin, and combined with that big hawk nose, his profile had become so comically different from what it had been that everyone who knew him was noticeably shocked by the transformation. He went from having a long profile with a prominent nose to a little round head with a huge beak sticking out. He went from a moderately imposing figure to a sadly goofy looking character just like that. I watched a couple of different people just kind of blurt out stuff like “eww grow it back!” etc. It was crazy to see how everyone’s perception of him changed overnight…

Coincidentally, I just caught that for the first time this weekend when this song came on the radio while traveling with my wife and daughter. I knew she was Maya’s mom, but I had never noticed her singing her name before hearing it again yesterday…

An LG C1300. I carried that thing for several years. Never had to replace the battery and it would still go 3 days on a charge when I finally switched to an iPhone 3

yeeesh… reminds me of back when I made interactive content in Flash and I’d forget to embed a font in a dynamic textfield.

I’m just offering another perspective, that’s all… Feel free to ignore me like my wife learned to do.

I have… we’re good. 33 years good.

Devils advocate here, because this sounds like my wife and I. She gets really annoyed at me, but she doesn’t understand that I don’t expect her to answer my questions. I just need to let them out of my head so I can concentrate on the rest of the movie. What she could do is either just ignore me, or agree that it’s a valid question and let it go. On some occasions, I may ask a question because I feel I may have missed something that she might have caught, but usually the questions are more rhetorical in nature…