Investing

[oblong]

I did this mix up my two favorite Paul Newman movies. 

[Deleterious]

19 minutes ago, chasfh said:

I have tried in the past to create images of real people shown in various situations and the output has never been any good. Frequently they’ve rendered as cartoons. But that was probably a year or more ago and I was so disappointed by the results that I never tried it again. Obviously it has gotten better at it.

This is a picture of Shirley Temple hitting a home run in a major league game. Meh.

Gemini generates 4 pics.  I think the top is the best.  Not even close to perfect, but not terrible for just one prompt with no editing.

Edited June 9 by Deleterious

[gehringer_2]

12 minutes ago, Deleterious said:

Gemini generates 4 pics.  I think the top is the best.  Not even close to perfect, but not terrible for just one prompt with no editing.

Top's not bad, but what's with the guy coming through wall below the grandstand?  All look better than Chasfh's but for some season she's not in the batter's box in 3 of 4. If you think about it that's a funny error to make because there aren't going to be many training images of guys hitting standing on home plate to extrapolate from. Also curious how the dugout is or isn't there. What made it change its mind?

[Deleterious]

In the spirit of The Color of Money.  The alternate ending where Powell beats Trump.

[Deleterious]

6 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

Top's not bad, but what's with the guy coming through wall below the grandstand?  All look better than Chasfh's but for some season she's not in the batter's box in 3 of 4. If you think about it that's a funny error to make because there aren't going to be many training images of guys hitting standing on home plate to extrapolate from. Also curious how the dugout is or isn't there. What made it change its mind?

I don't pay for ChatGPT so I don't edit these.  Normally you could edit all that stuff out, make the changes you want, etc.  

I like the odd random foul pole behind the dugout.  

EDIT: That was Gemini.  But I don't pay for that either.

Edited June 9 by Deleterious

[gehringer_2]

1 minute ago, Deleterious said:

In the spirit of The Color of Money.  The alternate ending where Powell beats Trump.

with bumper pool sized cues. Actually not sure what Trump is assembling there. Maybe a two piece blow gun to dart Powell as he leaves the scene.

[gehringer_2]

5 minutes ago, Deleterious said:

I like the odd random foul pole behind the dugout.  

LOL - didn't notice the wandering foul pole. But it goes to the main issue with AI, which is how do you verify reliability? With the image it's easy enough to tell it what it got wrong and let it use you as its auditor, but in some kind of complex analysis result where you want to use it exactly because you don't know the right answer from the wrong one, you are in a deeper dilemma.

Edited June 9 by gehringer_2

[oblong]

4 hours ago, Deleterious said:

In the spirit of The Color of Money.  The alternate ending where Powell beats Trump.

I love the JPow. I see what you did. 

[Screwball]

From a different angle on the AI stuff. 

I am working on a history project and need to build a website. There are many "help" type ways you can go. It seems to be very AI intensive, and they try to push it. Give us some details and we build you a website, and it will. I looked at the WIX/Wordpress stuff. Always a button to let AI take over. Mine is simple. It doesn't seem to get that. I spend more time editing the pages. I honestly had a better site with the old 2000 Microsoft Front Page or raw html code. You can also save all Office documents in html format. Used that too. Just playing.

So I got curious. I spun up Grok, just for fun. Entirely different thing than a webpage.

I posted a picture of a mechanical coin changer and asked AI how to use one.

Ten minutes and a bunch of BS answers later that sounded like the same corporate BS I heard for the last 40 years, and it had no idea how to make change. It was entertaining though.

Junk in, junk out, same as it's always been. It won't end well.

 

Edited Tuesday at 01:17 AM by Screwball

[oblong]

Friday night at dinner before the Tiger game, we went with lifelong friends who moved to the SW area of MI, he mentioned one of these coin changers. Were talking about going through his dad's stuff (he died in January), and they found one.

 

[gehringer_2]

14 minutes ago, oblong said:

Friday night at dinner before the Tiger game, we went with lifelong friends who moved to the SW area of MI, he mentioned one of these coin changers. Were talking about going through his dad's stuff (he died in January), and they found one.

 

Before you bought your home delivered newspaper by monthy subscription - you had to pay your paperboy in person every week - so one of those changers was a required working tool for every paperboy. The little hooks on the back are so you can hang it from your belt. IIRC, for a long time the News and Freep were a dime on weekdays and quarter on Sunday, so that was 85 cent for the week, so when you were on your 'collecting' day you had to be able to make change from a dollar at the door for ~60 customers.

Edited Tuesday at 04:00 PM by gehringer_2

[oblong]

Yep.  I was a paperboy in the mid-late 80's for the News.  $1.65 a week.  20 cents Mondo through Saturday, 45 cents on Sunday.  I learned quickly the multiples, $1.65, $3.30, $4.95, $6.60.  

Collecting SUCKED.  I think that's why I never became a football fan.  Everyone is home watching Michigan. I'm out schlepping to make $20 that week.

 

[Tiger337]

15 hours ago, Screwball said:

From a different angle on the AI stuff. 

I am working on a history project and need to build a website. There are many "help" type ways you can go. It seems to be very AI intensive, and they try to push it. Give us some details and we build you a website, and it will. I looked at the WIX/Wordpress stuff. Always a button to let AI take over. Mine is simple. It doesn't seem to get that. I spend more time editing the pages. I honestly had a better site with the old 2000 Microsoft Front Page or raw html code. You can also save all Office documents in html format. Used that too. Just playing.

So I got curious. I spun up Grok, just for fun. Entirely different thing than a webpage.

I posted a picture of a mechanical coin changer and asked AI how to use one.

Ten minutes and a bunch of BS answers later that sounded like the same corporate BS I heard for the last 40 years, and it had no idea how to make change. It was entertaining though.

Junk in, junk out, same as it's always been. It won't end well.

 

AI has a lot of potential and some will use it well.  I have been able to use it in my work a little bit.  Ultimately, you are right though. AI is not going to work by itself and magically makes things better.  No matter how muxch we hear about "machine learning", people still have to design it and manage it and know how to use it.  There will be some good in it, but I fear most of it is going to be garbage in and garbage out and it will be primarily used to serve the needs of of corporate billionaires.    

[Tiger337]

51 minutes ago, oblong said:

Yep.  I was a paperboy in the mid-late 80's for the News.  $1.65 a week.  20 cents Mondo through Saturday, 45 cents on Sunday.  I learned quickly the multiples, $1.65, $3.30, $4.95, $6.60.  

Collecting SUCKED.  I think that's why I never became a football fan.  Everyone is home watching Michigan. I'm out schlepping to make $20 that week.

 

I never had a route, but I did my friends route a couple of times.  I disliked the dogs who were a lot less tame in those days! Fortunately, I never had to collect.  

[Deleterious]

Every 12 year old should experience adults dodging you over their unpaid $1.75 tab.

[CMRivdogs]

I had a couple of cousins that had routes. Way too much work for what they got. They were mostly afternoon routes, so every day after school, collect, fold and deliver papers 7 days a week. Then you had to find a substitute if you were going on vacation, or had a ballgame or whatever.

Where I lived when I was old enough to do something like that there weren't enough homes nearby to make it worth while. But then by the time I was 12 or 13 there were a few lawns to cut (usually $3 per). Come summer my dad hid his own business so I got drug out with him early in the morning to do yard work or something in the garden center.   

[Dan Gilmore]

I did the paper route thing starting when I was eleven, including the collection. A year of that convinced me to switch to the university paper-5 days a week, and all indoors at dorms once I got those “routes”. I could deliver 180 papers in less than half an hour. Plus see the circus of dorm hallways. The Daily Illini is/was a real paper, some issues were 60 pages. 

[oblong]

One week I made.... $1. My friends and I sat around a table counting our collections.  $1.

Seriously, it was like bookies and I'm the guy who has to kick upstairs.  We'd get our papers from some dingy back room in a warehouse building.  Mr. Stubee would have our stacks set up on a table.  Sometimes we had "fillers" which were ads we had to place in each newspaper.  Then on Mondays he'd tell us what we owed.  It was always different even though we had the same customers each week mostly.  "Ok Bobby... this week you owe me $37.25..... waddya mean you're short"  Maybe he was charging us vig.  We're getting juiced by a guy driving a panel  van.  Sounds right.

 

[Screwball]

We used those coin changers in a gas station. We sold gas, smokes, snacks, etc.  Went through our belt and a wad of bills in our shirt pocket. There wasn't a cash register on site. Maybe a calculator inside somewhere. 1973 during the oil embargo we had to ration gas. Shut people off after 1000 gallons a day. They were not HAPPY!!!!!

You got really good with one of them and could make change in no time at all. It became a habit you hardly thought about.

I often thought it would be fun to put up a table in a mall or on a street corner. Have a money/change drawer and a computer. Computer random generates an amount between 0 and 20 bucks, and a countdown timer set to 10 seconds. Make change in under 10 seconds win 10 bucks. If not, cost you 2 bucks. 10 seconds is enough time. I think you would make money.

[Dan Gilmore]

Re what Oblong said-another reason I bailed on the local paper-they had the same sleazy guys who made errors in what was owed, always in their favor. The campus paper was all prepaid-no collections.

[chasfh]

I had a Free Press route starting the day before my 11th birthday and kept it going, no ****, until the summer of my 16th birthday, when I switched to hourly jobs.

It was a Free Press route, early morning gig. The platonic ideal was up at 5am and on the road to deliver within ten or fifteen minutes. Actually, it was more like up around 615am and maybe out in half an hour. Too many days I got home with only a razor thin margin to get showered and dressed to catch the bus to school. Too many of those times my mom had to drive me for missing the bus because I dawdled too much on the route. She was not happy about it.

All seven of us kids had routes. Our house was were Paper Dropoff Central because three of us were paperboys at any given time, and there would be a couple other kids in the neighborhood with routes. So we'd walk out to the front porch and there were the paper bundles. I don't know how my dad arranged that, but we didn't realize how good we had it.

Nowadays, kids don't deliver papers. I'm not even sure they're allowed to anymore. Now it's adults driving cars who deliver papers. We get the Trib and the NYTimes delivered on Saturday and Sunday. Our "paperboy" lives in Des Plaines—I know because the end-of-year tip envelope we get gets mailed there. Des Plaines is half an hour away by car even when the Kennedy is not under construction. And the Kennedy is under heavy construction right now.

I know it's end of year when two things happen, even beyond the envelope: (1) the paper gets delivered all the way to my front door instead of on the walkway near the front fence; and (2) it comes around 7am instead of the usual 830am or 9am. Then, after the first of the year, everything reverts back to "normal". Imagine that.

 

[gehringer_2]

20 minutes ago, Screwball said:

We used those coin changers in a gas station

Yup -  forget that completely. You handed the attendant cash and they made the change at the car. Fill the tank for $4.50 and get change back from a $5. Most often I bought an even $2 or $3 though, made for the quicker getaway. 🤣

 

Edited Tuesday at 07:17 PM by gehringer_2

[gehringer_2]

21 minutes ago, chasfh said:

All seven of us kids had routes

So was there a Schwinn 'Truck Bike' involved? That was always the mark of the serious paper boy pro.

[chasfh]

51 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

So was there a Schwinn 'Truck Bike' involved? That was always the mark of the serious paper boy pro.

I walked my route. Some of my brothers and my sister my have used bikes.

[Screwball]

18 hours ago, gehringer_2 said:

Yup -  forget that completely. You handed the attendant cash and they made the change at the car. Fill the tank for $4.50 and get change back from a $5. Most often I bought an even $2 or $3 though, made for the quicker getaway. 🤣

 

In those days we pumped the gas, washed the windshield, and checked the oil and tire pressure if you requested it. Now we get to do all that ourselves while gas has went from .35 cents to over 3 bucks a gallon. I think there are a few states with laws you can't pump your own gas. Oregon was one in 2018 when I was there.

Friday and Saturday nights were the best. There was a nigh club just out of town from our station. Lots of girls would stop for gas or cigs on the way to the night club, and they were always dolled up.