So... I wondered what AI had to say about the MacGregor....

[OverEasy]

Hi All,

WHILE I WOULD ENJOY BEING A LUDDITE IN RETIREMENT I CAN’T
I must have missed that gene or it was taken up by the other half ……

Long ago in a place that now seems far away I used to love writing data analysis and reduction programs …l not just for technical stuff but for other stuff as well. We didn’t dare call it ‘Artificial Intelligence’ as we’d have laughed anyone with that hubris. It did the same thing though in gathering and collating massive amounts of data and information then using it to build a relevant synopsis … Back then we didn’t expect to be spoon fed the answers though so the sentence structures were limited… but we were using IBM 360 and PCs so naturally we were code space conscious.

Then and now these types of programs are really based upon a series of IF /THEN statements that iterate … the big problem was to avoid getting stuck in DO loops Today the program space is on literal farms of servers and data banks. So it’s really only a matter of scale, not actual intelligence by any measure. Only a moron back in the day would take the “opinion” of a string of coding at face value… the same applies today and in the future. The larger memory stacks and processing space just allows for a smoother delivery…

What the proponents of AI are counting on are lazy people not wanting to actually think for themselves. To believe the false hype that it’s actually intelligent. This is the tactic that is as old as time where individuals try to claim they are the only ones who have all the answers so the populace doesn’t have to think at all… just drink the Koolaid regardless of the flavor or funny bitter aftertaste…

Now that’s just one side of the coin… I can appreciate the mountains of data that exist and the need to develope the means and techniques to filter and sort that data. To narrow down the volume to relevance pertaining a particular need…. Sort of like dealing with large population spreadsheets … one can appreciate the ability to get relevant information to a subject area… but it’s not “intelligence “ and never will be other than as a euphemism or marketing phrase misappropriated by marketeers who generally wouldn’t know which end of a glass to drink from as far as technology goes for the most part.

It seems that for a lot of people in the general populace they don’t like the ambiguity that is part of life. They want someone else to make their decisions …. They want to be given the answers to questions or situations that they should put the effort in to actually understand for themselves… but that sounds like actual mental effort instead of mindlessness of YouTube, computer games or the general banality of social media opinion swamps….That way, instead of having to reconcile the consequences of decisions they make they can blame something…anything… but themselves when it goes awry.

It’s funny to me how dogmatic some folks can be just because someone or something told them that something was ‘true’ even though rudimentary logical investigation factual proves otherwise.

Faster processors of larger data banks does not actual intelligence make.
Pat answers that align with prexisting underlying bias does not make actual truth or validity.
Following the ‘leader’ without one’s own independent valid investigation from multiple independent sources and approaches is foolishness regardless of the subject matter. Just ask the Jim Jones followers… oh wait, you can’t… they’re no longer here to ask…… oh well….. to each their own I suppose …up until someone starts to say that theirs is the only true way and all dissent is to be eliminated… like HAL tried in 2001… what could possibly go wrong…go wrong…go wrong…go wrrooonnnngggggg….. Daisy Daisy give me your answer true. I’m half crazy all for the love of……

Best Regards,
Over Easy

[WinSome]

So recently my ‘boater buddy Bob’ asked AI to generate a poem with the following info and a pic. Bob says”Just uploaded your photo and that you were a sailor on your Macgregor
Asked for a funny poem. Didn't even mention your sandals or hat. Chathbt just analyzed your photo.”
Here’s what AI produced:

Tom the Sailor & His MacGregor Boat

Old Tom the sailor, a curious chap,
Wore socks with his sandals and sailed with a map.
His MacGregor vessel, both proud and petite,
Had sails full of wind and a galley with meat.
He'd cruise every weekend with biscuits a n d beer,
Yelling "Aye!" to the seagulls, though they couldn't hear.
With his compass off course and his charts upside down,
He once sailed in circles right back to his town.
His anchor? A rock tied with bungee cord tight.
His flag? Just boxers he hoisted at night.
He'd holler at dolphins, mistaking them spies,
And race passing tugboats with fire in his eyes.
One stormy Tuesday, with thunder and hail,
He shouted, "Don't worry, I'll outrun this gale!"
The wind took his hat and his sandwich as well,
But Tom simply laughed, "What a marvelous swell!"
So here's to brave Tom, and his boat with a squeak,
Who's sailed every lake at least thrice in a week.
Though his keel's a bit crooked and his tales stretch the truth,
He's the pirate of picnics, and a sailor of youth.

They got lots of things correct!!

Now! Back in my earlier career working days ( in agriculture) AI was artificial insemination. It occurs -still does - in lots of species. Cattle , hogs, chickens , turkeys, etc. Sorta begs the questions about outputs and inputs and how all that happens. Just in case you need some lively group discussion topics. Eh! AI indeed.

[OverEasy]

So does that mean that Grok and ChatGPT are really just ‘AI’ing with everyone?..

[Russ]

we were using IBM 360 and PCs so naturally we were code space conscious.

I learned to code in college on an IBM 360/370 with punch cards. If we were late on a project, a trick was to soak a card in water and dry it out, and put it in the deck. When the card reader hit it would shred and jam the machine. This bought a day or so until a tech could clean/repair the card reader.

Memory and resources were a concern as was writing efficient code that would run fast.
NOW, it seems with C# and .NET framework a simple "Hello World" program can consume hundreds of megabytes. Hard to imagine back when we had a few had just 64 Kilobytes of RAM.

I still can't wrap my head around AI. It's both cool and scary at the same time. Sure, I enjoy the home automation with the Alexa app "Alexa, Turn on the Living Room Lights", but when I see a POEM that actually rhymes and makes sense, it's a bit unnerving. The ease with which AI can generate videos of actual people is mind-boggling.

This story of AI threatening to blackmail the engineer to expose an affair if he were to shut down the AI computer. It crosses into the creepy category.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpqeng9d20go

[OverEasy]

Hi Russ!

Yes those were the days!
Fortran IV, Pascal, COBOL…LOTUS…. Processor and chip manual…..designing one’s own A to D and D to A sensors
A bold new frontier……

When they went to block coding and didn’t document coding is when I moved on to bigger and better things.
By avocation I’m an R&D and product development applied engineer. It was a multidisciplinary type of career but I chose to focus on the aviation, aerospace and high technology fields.

The shelf for my 4444 chip manuals stuff was less than a third of a shelf of the bookcase
The shelf for my 8088 chip manuals stuff was a full shelf of the bookcase
The shelf for my 286 chip manuals stuff was two shelves of the bookcase
The shelf for my 386 chip manuals stuff was five shelves of the bookcase
The shelf for my 486 chip manuals stuff was a new wider and taller 8 shelves bookcase
When the no longer offered paper manuals and instead provided only a shoebox stack of 3.5 floppy discs I wasn’t so interested anymore…
I couldn’t afford the library space! It’s the simple things in life…..

It’s still 1s and 0s but the actual underlying stuff today really isn’t much different now as then….

The thing that’s concerning is the actual dumbing down of society …. Being more interested in being a self elected ‘fan’ of some ‘team’ that couldn’t care less except to make profits off of them… Being more interested in being a ‘fan’ of some ‘star’ that pseudo ‘speaks’ to them …. Being more interested in playing some BS game that pseudo destroys pseudo things rather than creating things of real value and real constructive creativity…. Being so self unaware that thinking because they asked a string of code (that they had nothing to do with creating) to ‘generate’ a picture of penguins flying in space that they might has personally created something instead of picking up a brush and actually learning how to physically paint a picture of their own… Being more interested in following the crowd following some self proclaimed pseudo ‘genius’ or pseudo ‘leader’ without regard to actual facts or than using even a modicum of common sense. Those are concerning.

When one actually pays attention one learns. When one merely observes without developing the actually underlying understanding of how things actually work, interact, fail…. That individual is little more than a dairy cow grazing awaiting milking time… there are a lot of them out there. That’s concerning to me.

Those that would ‘believe’ that AI is actually intelligent is concerning.

Regarding the blackmailing program…
Back in the day I would add subroutines that gave back commentary statements when there was an input error or an out of bound’s interrogatory was entered. I also interfaced these with a user ID login and an archiving count function. So when ‘George’ entered the wrong input it would provide a statement that was personalized along the lines of:
“Hi George. This is the seventh time that you have entered inappropriate data. Have you had your coffee yet?” (If it was before noon)
“Hi George. That was an interesting entry… Wrong, but interesting. How about you try again?” (If the entry was beyond bounds)
“Hi George. Naw..That’s not gonna work…Given it’s Thursday afternoon how about we focus on this rather than trying to rush out for Happy Hour at the Cedar Pub? ((If it was late Thursday afternoon… the Cedar Pub was our local)

Now initially this was funny within our group but over the ensuing years people changed and new people arrived.
The program kept chugging along merrily adding new names and counters and personalized responses.
Until a new manager of limited technical capabilities (?) came along after I’d moved on to other responsibilities who seemed to actually think that the program was ‘intelligent’ because it not only addressed him but his name but because it kept track of his entry error rate, the day of the week and the time of day! I got to witness this first hand one day when I was visiting to pick up a friend to go to the Cedar Pub one Thursday afternoon about 10 minutes to five pm…. It was hilarious to watch him actually talk to the microphone stuck to the side of the monitor…

Later I snuck back and added this new manager’s birthday, his wife’s birthday and his wedding anniversary with a count down function and personal commentary reminders just for him. I can only imagine how he reacted…

As far as computer generated rhyming poetry it’s an aspect that can be (and has) broken down mathematically to follow grammatical rules and patterns as well as phonetical characteristics. Same with sentence and topical paragraph construction which can be based on rules and patterns. It is still basically an ‘IF / THEN” logic structure… 1s and 0s… not actual intelligence… except for the promotional hucksters and those gullible enough to ‘believe’.

Along the same lines I have no doubt that some ‘AI’ coding twit added a bit of fun on a lark while they were merrily typing new code and added a trigger logic sequence to personalize a ‘blackmail’ message response.

It’s the simple things in life…..

Best Regards,
Over Easy

[Russ]

I'm wondering if you wrote some of those IBM manuals.
When I worked for Merrill Lynch we had a program that would take an hour to calculate a proposal. The 8087 co-processor took it down to 15 seconds. So..... they pony upped to have all the old PC/XT (heavy) computers shipped back and upgraded with that chip. We did this Fed-Ex overnight both directions. I can't imagine what it cost to upgrade all those PCs. Now days, it's cheaper to just replace with new.

Certainly coding has changed. I've been known to insert Easter Eggs into code. Never to the scale you did. That must have been fun to watch reactions. Typically computer users (especially back then) were a bit intimidated by the machines. The fun you must have had.

Modern languages (like PHP) are quite different from machine level code. It's hard for me sometimes to wrap my head around the fact that the instructions are being carried out on the host machine, not the client. Old code thinking is hard to change.

Back in the day some clever programmer created tiny little programs to "translate" text files.
The 2 that were fun were "Jive.com" and "Vallygirl.com"
You would feed it some official text file (like some technical jargon manual) and out would come the "jive" translation. For its time, that was pretty impressive AI simulation although nobody called it that.

Folks have since created online versions of that. I put your post through the jive website.

OVEREASY:
Yes those were the days!
Fortran IV, Pascal, COBOL…LOTUS…. Processor and chip manual…..designing one’s own A to D and D to A sensors
A bold new frontier……
When they went to block coding and didn’t document coding is when I moved on to bigger and better things.
By avocation I’m an R&D

JIVE:
Yes dose wuz da damn days. Right On!Fo'tran IV, Pascal, COBOL…LOTUS…. Processo' and chip manual…..designin' one’s own A t'D and D t'A senso'sA bold new frontier……When dey went t'block codin' and didn’t document codin' be when ah' moved on t'big-assga' and betta' wahtahmelluns.By avocashun I’m an R&D

[dlandersson]

Ok, off topic?

I'm wondering if you wrote some of those IBM manuals.

OVEREASY:
Yes those were the days!
Fortran IV, Pascal, COBOL…LOTUS…. Processor and chip manual…..designing one’s own A to D and D to A sensors
A bold new frontier……
When they went to block coding and didn’t document coding is when I moved on to bigger and better things.
By avocation I’m an R&D

JIVE:
Yes dose wuz da damn days. Right On!Fo'tran IV, Pascal, COBOL…LOTUS…. Processo' and chip manual…..designin' one’s own A t'D and D t'A senso'sA bold new frontier……When dey went t'block codin' and didn’t document codin' be when ah' moved on t'big-assga' and betta' wahtahmelluns.By avocashun I’m an R&D

[kmclemore]

I'm wondering if you wrote some of those IBM manuals.

Well, I did. I contributed to quite a few IBM “Red Books”… internal technical manuals that were occasionally offered to customers. They were some of the best documents on IT technology in the business.

I was also fortunate to have been on the ThinkPad development team, as a customer experience engineer - trying out the prototypes on customers, getting feedback, and creating new features. Great fun, and very successful.

Later on, I was on the team that developed the first bedside terminal, and after that I was unfortunately also on the OS/2 (Warp) development team… sigh. Both were total failures because of a lack of understanding the customer needs and emotions.

(And admittedly, yeah, way off topic.)

[Be Free]

I had no idea there were so many former programmers on this board.

I'm a former application and later systems programmer on IBM mainframes. Kevin, I'm sure I've read at least one of your Red Books and OS/2 should have been the standard for desktop machines. It was head and shoulders above anything else on the market!

[Russ]

OS/2 Warp was a fine OS, however IBM didn't know how to market it.

Thinkpad? Did you suggest the little red eraser pointer?

[kmclemore]

OS/2 Warp was a fine OS, however IBM didn't know how to market it.

Thinkpad? Did you suggest the little red eraser pointer?

Yep, and they let the unscrupulous Gates of MS in on the system and got their lunch eaten. It was an outstanding OS, and was used for decades after it was discontinued, in cash-dispensing bank-card machines… and to date there’s no virus that ever broke it.

As to “Mr. Happy” **… i.e. the Trackpoint… no, that one came out of the IBM labs. The first ThinkPad actually had a roller-ball pointer system built into the lower right corner of the display. The Trackpoint was added shortly thereafter. We licensed the device to quite a few other companies, but we never licensed or sold the drivers… they had to write their own… so ours always worked better.

** (on our development team, that pointer was nicknamed in reference to a particular part of female anatomy.)

[Russ]

Yep, and they let the unscrupulous Gates of MS in on the system and got their lunch eaten. It was an outstanding OS, and was used for decades after it was discontinued, in cash-dispensing bank-card machines… and to date there’s no virus that ever broke it.

As to “Mr. Happy” **… i.e. the Trackpoint… no, that one came out of the IBM labs. The first ThinkPad actually had a roller-ball pointer system built into the lower right corner of the display. The Trackpoint was added shortly thereafter. We licensed the device to quite a few other companies, but we never licensed or sold the drivers… they had to write their own… so ours always worked better.

** (on our development team, that pointer was nicknamed in reference to a particular part of female anatomy.)

Interesting that OS/2 was used for ATMs.
Didn't stop anti-virus makers from marketing to OS/2 users. Heck, I even run anti-virus on my Mac for some reason.

Mr. Happy?** Gotta love the engineers. Of course users simply called it the eraser pointer. It is surprisingly durable as I assumed constant use would wear it down. I often found it easier to use than a track pad. I still hate track pads.

** From Wikipedia: A pointing stick (or trackpoint, also referred to generically as a nub, nipple or clitmouse) is a small analog stick used as a pointing device typically mounted centrally in a computer keyboard.

[kmclemore]

Mr. Happy?** Gotta love the engineers.

Yep, and all the OS/2 code units were codenamed after stuff from Star Trek. Warp was obvious - it referred to OS/2 3.0, but OS/2 Communications Manager was called “Ferengi”, OS/2 3.1 was “Borg”, and other components were called “Klingon”, etc.

OK, so it was a long time ago, and ya kinda had to be there.