Author Archives: skierpage

About skierpage

As you might guess, my site is mine. My Schema.org info is at .

AI: Google AI clueless about Google’s Android, chapter 2 of N

Posted on 2026-09-27 by skierpage

Portola music festival is on 🪩 👯 🎊. If you’re interested in what the yoof of today are listening to, there’s a “Portola Party People” playlist, https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DX5LFAujdafjI . But of course that playlist assumes you have Spotify, because the other … Continue reading →

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art: does lived experience put substance X into an artwork?

Posted on 2026-07-22 by skierpage

People hate that AI art is “disembodied and decontextualized, detached from lived experience” (@Terminus52 in a Substack comment thread). It feels like cheating that a clanker can mindlessly crank out an artwork that “ought to” come from a tortured artist’s … Continue reading →

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AI art: there oughtta be a law!

Posted on 2026-07-22 by skierpage

Stability AI trained its image generator on the LAION-5B data set of 5 billion (!!!) image-text pairs. If you download this data set, you don’t get the images, you get metadata about each image including its URL, plus the nearby … Continue reading →

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music: actually I really do know

Posted on 2026-07-09 by skierpage

“Ride Line the Wind” is the hit Christopher Cross song with the incomparable Michael McDonald killing it on “background” vocals, but I think this album track is even better. It took years to track it down because I assumed it … Continue reading →

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DIY disaster part 42: screws, badly

Posted on 2026-07-07 by skierpage

Buy two fancy bronze ceramic-coated star drive truss head lag screws, and screw them in to repair the fence board. How hard can it be? DIY Disaster caption contest

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art: Tracey Emin – woman power, woman pain

Posted on 2026-07-07 by skierpage

I found Tracey Emin’s “A Second Life” exhibition at Tate Modern irritating at first because you have to read paragraphs of her handwriting. But the payoffs are huge. “My Future” ends with “That’s the last Dead Thing to Leave my … Continue reading →

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AI: Google AI clueless about Google’s Android

Posted on 2026-06-12 by skierpage

Google Gemini AI’s stupidity regarding its own capabilities and behavior on Android is infuriating. Someone texted me a screenshot of a dinner reservation. So I long-press the Android home button to enter AI mode, and ask it to add the … Continue reading →

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art: home is Incomplete Open Cubes 5/9

Posted on 2026-05-12 by skierpage

Sol LeWitt programmatically/accidentally made the most simple, refined, and beautiful home evar, Can you spot it in this housing development? I saw this exhibition at SFMOMA around 2024, a sublime quiet experience. The artwork is the name: starting with three … Continue reading →

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music: Charlie Puth deadens his talent

Posted on 2026-04-22 by skierpage

I didn’t pay much attention to Charlie Puth; his fans giving him way too much credit for having perfect pitch and producing his own songs turned me off. But he delivered a smart excellent rendition of the U.S. national anthem … Continue reading →

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skiing: missing the bigger picture

Posted on 2026-04-05 by skierpage

actual story: the 41-year-old wins big! Lindsey Vonn will be remembered for attempting a comeback at 41, completely rupturing her ACL in a downhill race crash nine days before the Winter Olympics, competing in the Olympic downhill anyway, and then really … Continue reading →

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