Netflix showed last night that while its content delivery networks (CDNs) continue to work well delivering static content, I believe their edge infrastructure in regional internet exchange points (IXPs) were completely unprepared for a live presentation that millions of people were watching.
Netflix can start by adding more infrastructure in the 511 Building in downtown Minneapolis, because most people in this area that I talked to had to keep hitting refresh or go back 10 minutes in order to view a potato 240p stream of the fights.
However, if you used a VPN to modify your perceived location to a different area of the world, streaming worked a lot better with no buffering…HD even!
What is the most puzzling to me is how a company, that wouldn’t exist now without its technology infrastructure, and which has a net income of $2+ billion a quarter, and nearly a year in lead time before the fight, couldn’t possibly prepare better for this event. Things aren’t all well at Netflix.
Don’t trust those polls!
Political polls continually forget to acknowledge the reality that there are a large group of people that will respond to these polls in the exact opposite way of how they intend to vote, purely out of sarcasm.
What a Milestone!
Happy 100th Birthday, May Bottke!
(May was my Kindergarten Teacher at Lincoln Elementary School in 1983-1984, and I was the popcorn man in the Kindergarten circus!)
It was so great to have a few minutes to talk with this special lady. And yes, she still remembers my birthday!
They didn’t kick me out for doing this…
Me touching the Apollo 13 Command Module…the machine that held together after a nearby service module explosion, and after being in a deep freeze in space, to get astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Haise, and Jack Swaggert home in April of 1970. Picture from July 2017 @ The Cosmosphere, Hutchinson, Kansas.
Watch the new Apollo 13 documentary on Netflix!
Nice cloud rotation
Nice cloud rotation nearly right overhead tonight as a line of thunderstorms moved through!
It must have been an associated downburst that caused a LOT of mature tree damage in North Alexander park, and over by the King Mill Dam. Power was out in the northern part of Faribault for about 4 hours.
A look into the future of AI generated media and deepfakes
This seems like a good time to remind everybody about the Electronics Technician Association (International)’s Audio/Video Forensics Analyst certification program that we worked hard on several years ago.
Since 5 years ago, AI has become much bigger, and “deepfakes” are an even bigger issue now. Check out the sample video I shared below for a little shock value! Second guess what you see and hear. It may not be real!
Check out what is covered in the certification here: https://etai.org/comps/AVFA_comps.pdf
Now, more than ever, it’s very important to use logic instead of emotion, facts instead of opinions, and multiple sources instead of a single news channel, when forming your own opinion about anything. Realize the importance of skilled experts in the future to assist with the detection of these threats.
(Video created by The Dor Brothers)
On an AI rant again…
I think I’ve figured out why it upsets me so much when people use generative AI to compose material to create nearly 100 percent of a letter or other writing project, and then not source it as AI generated.
I see this time and time again in my personal and professional life.
It’s not necessarily the fact that AI derives its output from people’s original copyrighted works without the owner’s permission. Although the courts are deliberating on that question now.
It’s not the fact that AI can be used positively, and that it can help us think outside the box when we can’t find the exact words to portray how we feel.
It’s certainly not the fact that properly used AI is being used right now to crunch huge datasets and clinical data to help find cures for diseases that have plagued us for decades.
What upsets me is the ego of some of its users!
Let me explain. Most of us can tell when a piece of writing is outside of the style or ability of its author. Most of us can tell when a paragraph or two sounds suspiciously like another boilerplate AI generated piece that we’ve read before. It’s incredibly easy to run a piece of writing through several AI detectors to confirm our beliefs. Yet, the “author” of the piece believes they can fool everyone with the lack of writing effort on their part, and that their “brilliant” effort will fly right over the heads of their uneducated and oblivious reading audience.
I’m here to tell them… No. It most definitely does not.
And it damages their credibility. The readers understand they weren’t worth more than a one or two sentence prompt to a generative AI robot. A 15 or 20 second effort at most.
When used as a thank you, it’s not heartfelt. The original act leading to the thank you was one of kindness, and the resulting thank you is one of dismissiveness.
Let’s not let generative AI do what can be done best and more intimately as true conversation and correspondence between friends, colleagues, and acquaintances.
*Story image generated by DALL-E 3, “Copilot” Bing AI from Microsoft 
July 2024 Grand Road Trip out West
A 5,419 mile grand adventure of the west in 14 days, including the states of Minnesota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, Nebraska, and Iowa.
4 days of tenting, including stops for Bear Country USA, the rodeo in Cody, Wyoming, Glacier National Park, Gifford-Pinchot National Forest, the Pacific Ocean, US-101 (scenic coastal road) and US-50 (the loneliest road in America), Monument Valley and the Valley of the Gods, and Cheyenne Frontier Days.
Day 1: Faribault, MN to Custer, SD
Day 2: Custer, SD to Cody, WY
Day 3: Cody, WY to Shelby, MT
Day 4: Shelby, MT to Coram, MT
Day 5: Coram, MT to Coeur d’Alene, ID
Day 6: Coeur d’Alene, ID to Astoria, OR
Day 7: Astoria, OR to Newport, OR
Day 8: Newport, OR to Klamath, CA
Day 9: Klamath, CA to Reno, NV
Day 10: Reno, NV to Milford, UT
Day 11: Milford, UT to Monument Valley, AZ
Day 12: Monument Valley, AZ to Cheyenne, WY
Day 13: Cheyenne, WY to Council Bluffs, IA
Day 14: Council Bluffs, IA to Faribault, MN
Enormous words of inspiration, from a former great president.
Taken from “Apollo 11”, 2019.