What the column has you do is disable Gemini access in Mail, but it is still on for search.

I did all that ages ago and re-confirmed, it’s still all disabled…

But Gemini persists:

I had to call THREE hospitals to get a CT scan in a reasonable amount of time. First one said “April” and I was like “No.”

2nd one said 2/18 which is better, but still 29 days out and I don’t want to sit and ruminate on the diagnosis that long.

3rd one? 1 week. 1/27! I think that’s about as good as I can get.

Tales From the Loop got adapted for Amazon Prime and Electric State was adapted for Netflix. I enjoyed Electric State, but other than the name, look, and feel, it didn’t really adapt the book.

Haven’t seen Tales From the Loop yet.

Sunset at Zero Point likely couldn’t get made in the current political environment due to it being a sweet gay romance book. Think sci-fi version of “Moonlight.”

Speaking of Sweden… I just blew through all the Simon Stålenhag books. Good reads with gorgeous art!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Stålenhag

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Tales-From-the-Loop/Simon-Stalenhag/9781982150693

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Things-From-the-Flood/Simon-Stalenhag/9781982150716

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Electric-State/Simon-Stalenhag/9781501181412

https://www.simonstalenhag.se/labyrinth.html

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Sunset-at-Zero-Point/Simon-Stalenhag/9781668096413

(published outside the US as “Swedish Machines”)

https://www.simonstalenhag.se/

I’ll take it! 😉

Working on it!

According to this, the US imports $421B worth of goods from Canada every year.

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/imports/canada

30% of it various oil related products.

One of my favorite artists has his gear list on his website:

https://smither.com/etc/gear-bag/

"Pickup
Who knows what they put in those things?

DI
Who cares?"

LOL.

It’s part of the creative process, but it’s also it’s own rabbit hole. 😉 I do like having 42 simulated amps and 56 simulated effects pedals on tap without spending 10s of thousands of dollars, but fiddling with them is it’s own deal aside from playing and is, apparently, never ending. LOL.

But OTOH, if I want to try my hand at a specific song, I can get there without having to research every last bit of tech that went into it.

You’re right though, locking in “my own sound” is still do-able. The manual selection is all still there.

There is an AI angle that COULD work it’s just unfortunate that nobody is using AI in this way.

Instead of replacing creatives the way it does now, it could be used as a tool to inform creatives.

For example, not linking the product because they aren’t paying me to shill for them, but there is a brand of AI enhanced guitar amplifier. You use the prompt in the app to tell it what sound you’re looking for and it will do all the amp and pedal settings to make that happen.

“jazz guitar tone with a touch of reverb” or even specific bands and songs.

You STILL have to be able to play the guitar, it’s not going to do that for you, but it will save you hours of knob twiddling and pedal swapping to get the sound (or an approximation of the sound) you’re looking for.

Applying this to other creative fields, a novelist could use it to generate character names, or an artist could use it to come up with a color palette. I don’t think either of those would be objectionable because the creative still controls what happens after the fact.

It’s when the slop starts writing, painting, or playing for you that it becomes a problem and that’s where we are now.

The question I put to management is “What do you want me to use AI for?”

I can’t get a consistent answer. Lots of stuff unrelated to my job duties. “Well, it’s so easy to make Facebook ads!” - “You know that’s not a thing I do, right?”

I’ve said this for years… There was no “gaming crash”, people just started playing games on the C-64.