Check this out:
How this growing Texas town became a testing ground for flying taxis and Uber-style gondolas
Click through to see the pictures. I love the Uber-gondolas, though I don’t think “gondolas” is at all the right word — isn’t a gondola a boat? — but nevertheless, this is a step into a pretty neat SF future-of-mass-transit.
This link is from Astral Codex Ten. Let me see if there’s anything else here especially fun or noteworthy …
Well, here’s a post about the is-it-fake art Turing test that Astral Codex Ten hosted last year, so if you found that interesting (Elaine’s Teen, I’m thinking of you, but I also found this genuinely interesting), here’s this post, by the guy who generated many of the fake art pieces used in that test.
Oh, here’s another AI type of link: I am pleased to report that AI is now a better poet than William McGonagall
McGonagall is apparently a famously bad poet. That name does sort of ring a bell, a little bit. Fine, okay, let me look at this … okay, McGonagall wrote this in 1880, after a famous train disaster:
Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember’d for a very long time.
Seven more stanzas if you want to click through. The post about an AI writing better poetry than McGonagall is specifically focused on this Tay Bridge disaster. I …. think … that all the poems are pretty bad, Deepseek’s and ChatGPT’s first stanzas clearly beats Claude and Gemini. I only read the first stanzas. Here’s the one I think is worst:
Gemini:
The Tay it flowed, a silver gleam,
Reflecting sky, a winter's dream.
A bridge of iron, proud and tall,
Spanned the waters, heeding no squall.
Here’s the one I think is best:
Deepseek:
Beneath the bruised and tempest-driven sky,
The iron spine once bridged the firth’s cold breath—
A marvel spun by mortal hands, stretched high
To clasp the shores of life and rails of death.
If you’re really interested, you can click through and read the full poems.
Lots of other links, but nothing else I feel like following up personally, so I’ll stop there.
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Oh that’s a neat follow up to the AI Art Turing test. His process is pretty involved— generating 20-80 pieces per prompt!
Gondolas is also a pretty common name in Europe for the smallish cabins suspended below a line that transport people, usually up a mountain to a ski-slope or across a gorge or valley or something like that. Places too steep for a tram or bus, or too hard or costly to build a bridge across. They are a public transport option for very specific circumstances; they move less people than a tram or even a bus route can, but can be cost-effective where those are not feasible and there’s enough demand. The article doesn’t really show the use-case for those, compared to e.g. efficient public transport with trams or dedicated bus lanes with frequent service.
Considering how noisy drones are, VTAL taxis would probably cause horrendous noise pollution if they become widely implemented.
The gondolas are like public transit on Komarr! I always thought that would be a clever way to move people around a city.
Kim, the gondolas make ME think of spyware and terrifying near-crashes from Murderbot, which is interfering with my ability to think they look neat. Even though they do look neat.