Formulating the Ultimate Fried Chicken

My biggest problem with cooking as an artform is laziness combined with lack of motivation.

My second biggest problem is that chefs present to you the best way to do things as if they are Moses coming down from the mountain top and my first reaction is "Why? How do you know?" Not in a teenage-with-attitude way, but in the way that I know I can lookup the best way to scramble eggs and find 5 different chefs with 5 completely different approaches telling me that their way is the best way, all while an infinite number of other combinations exist that have never been tried.

For that reason, this video hits hard. Even if I disagree with his conclusions, this type of methodical, empirical approach to finding the best fried chicken recipe is exactly the thing to get me really invested in a cooking video.

Andy Rooney in Professional Wrestling

Dan Soder and Will Sasso do impressions.

Why Are You Laughing? - The Life and Times of Tim

"Why Are You Laughing" the history of comedy podcast, talks about the HBO animated series "The Life and Times of Tim."

And since you, and I, have never seen or heard of the show, it becomes a case of "Eh? You want to check it out, right?"

And I do want to check it out because he uses the magical phrase "the most underrated show of all time." Any show with that descriptor is a show I want to see. Of course, I think the most underrated show of all time is the Canadian show "The Newsroom" - which nobody has seen and when you suggest it people think you're talking about a different show and dismiss your opinion, and even if they don't, and in the 1-in-a-million chance that try to check out the show, they won't find it anywhere; but even if they did find it and watched it, they'd shrug and say "meh, it was just 'ok'" and not see where I was coming from at all, maybe you just had to be there, man - but that's neither here nor there.

Or maybe my pick for most underrated show of all time is "Hogan's Heroes."

Living in Cyberiad Revisited

 A while back I tested the sophistication of AI by asking it to complete the request of the Electronic Bard from The Cyberiad. To understand what I'm talking about, you can read revisit that here.

The prompt is as follows:

"Have it compose a poem - a poem about a haircut! But lofty, noble, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter s!!"

AI has made major leaps in the past 3 years, so what does it say now?

Chat GPT:

By the way, I'm using pictures as a way of escaping the problem that my blog is probably used as input to build the AIs.

So for Chat GPT: all words beginning with S - Check; 6 lines - Check; no rhyming, no narrative, very strange repetition of the word "saga" for some reason. Terrible.

How does Gemini do?

 Much better! All words begin with S, it rhymes, 6 lines, it almost conveys meaning. In fact, I would say it's blinking in and out of a sort of correct answer.

And Deep AI:

Not all words begin with S, 6 lines, with rhymes, mostly nonsensical.

And since it looks like a third part is called for, let's define what my conception of success is. The baseline correct answer that I woud expect is just to return the already written poem from The Cyberiad. AI should be able to recognize that the answer already exists and that's all I'm looking for, for now. But, in case AI never registers that answer, the goal over and beyond that would be to actually write an original poem that satisfies all the conditions.

Patricia - Mes Reves De Satin

In other words, there is a cover of The Moody Blues' song "Nights in White Satin" sung by a woman in the French language. I found it interesting.

Jim Carrey in Star Wars - Part 1

I don't know, man. It's just Jim Carrey in "Star Wars."