Showing Off The Power Of WordPress In 2024

Yes, it’s a video made by/for WordPress-the-company, so it’s biased. No, the video does not succeed in recreating the NYT frontpage in all its detail and finesses.

But, and this is a big but: it does succeed in showing the awesome power of WordPress as a tool for creating and maintaining a website! Just have a look at the video in their blog post of March 14, 2024: “Re-Creating The New York Times’ Website in Under 30 Minutes Using WordPress.com“

No wonder so many sites all over the world are powered by WordPress (including this site ;-)).

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Nobody Is Perfect, Neither Are Companies – Not Even Apple

As you may have discovered while reading this blog, I have owned and own a lot of Apple hardware. Why? Because I appreciate design, the attention to detail, and the way Apple tries to make their products and the users of those products work together a seamlessly as possible. But even so, Apple has made mistakes on each of these.

Does that make me a “fan”, blinded to all alternatives? Of course not. After all, Apple is just a company; their strategy centers around “business”, not integrity or being perfect.

Apple is far from perfect, and that is very clear in the way the App Store works. I once contemplated building apps for the iPhone, but have to pay 30% of my income to Apple was a no-go for me (I already pay taxes, thank you).

Not allowing other app stores to exist in order to better protect the users is another example of “business over integrity”. Russell Ivanovic said it well:

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AI Madness!

Just to be sure I looked up the meaning of the word “gaslighting”: “to manipulate (someone) using psychological methods into questioning their own sanity or powers of reasoning“. That definition makes the verb a lot stronger than what I had in mind ;-)

Anyway, here’s what I wanted you to look at: “Marta Peirano: Gaslighting AI” (at the conference (Un)real Data – Real Effects last February). This journalist is not the best storyteller, but the talk is worth listening to! She gives a series of examples of how AI can get derailed, including getting Grok to call Elon Musk “the Oprah of censorship”…

Screenshot of Marta Peirano talking (video is also available on Youtube)

The ease with which some of the LLM’s can be gaslighted confirms my disdain for the “I” in “AI”…

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Sad News: Dave Myers RIP (2)

Following up on my post about the passing away of Dave Myers: I saw one of the episodes of their last series “The Hairy Bikers Go West“. It was somewhat harrowing to see Dave Myers so frail and somewhat shaky. No wonder that Sy “Kingie” King seemed to be worrying about Dave the whole time, and you could read that worry and fear in his eyes… Somehow that had more impact on me than the recipes they worked on.

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An Oscar For Ukraine

The documentary “20 Days In Mariupol” is probably heartbraking, and the political context in the world may have contributed to its win of the 2023 “Documentary Feature Film” category at the 96th Academy Awards in Hollywood.

I’m just wondering: how long will it be before a russian propaganda film about the war in Ukraine wins a prize in Moscow?

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Sad News: Dave Myers RIP

On Wednesday February 28, “Dave Myers, one half of TV cooking duo The Hairy Bikers, has died at the age of 66, two years after revealing he had been diagnosed with cancer.“

Dave Myers (left) and Sy King, as photographed by the BBC on the set of their latest series, “The Hairy Bikers Go West”

As a motorcyclist, I was surprised to see “bikers” cooking on TV many years ago. But from the first episode I saw it was clear: this were not your average TV cooks. They were just two good friends, having a great time together on their bike as well as in the kitchen. Sad to see him go at such a young age…

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Darkest, Wettest, Gloomiest February Since Long

The belgian Royal Meteorological Institute calls February 2024 a “very warm, wet and gloomy month”. Specifically: no temperatures below zero Celcius, more than twice as much rain than normal in 23 rainy days, and only 30 hours of sunshine (compare that to the almost 73-hour average of the past 30 years). Combine that with somewhat stronger than usual wind from the SSW, and it’s hard not to link a part of what happened with the rising water temperature in the Atlantic Ocean.

Adapted from a photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Considering all those numbers, it’s almost a miracle that our solar panels managed to generate 59% of what we expected in terms of solar energy production! Nevertheless, even with a “good” performance of our panels in January, that makes it the darkest Winter of our solar array…

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