A bright sunny start to the day, but clouds blew over mid morning. without covering the sky. When I went to be last night, I realised it was an hour later than I thought it was. I hadn't noticed when I sat down to relax with the first episode of the new crimmie with the strange title 'Flowers over the inferno'. The rhythm of the day was broken after lunch by losing an hour on line and on the phone trying to modify my travel insurance. No wonder I didn't sleep as long as I intended. I reckon that since Christmas I've had to spend a total of six hours using online direct message chat bots to make enquiries, each of which could have been answered directly by a living person in fraction of the time.
I read an article this morning about the phenomenal growth in the application of AI for every conceivable purpose, driven by investment entrepreneurs. Promoters admit it's far from perfect, sometimes falling short of real world accuracy when it comes to complex scheduling with many variable elements. Chat bots often fail to answer a question because they've not yet learned from use, or been taught to recognise how many ways a question can be asked. The response to this criticism is to say that humans have to learn how to ask questions in a particular way. We have to adapt to AI, rather than AI succeeding in adapting to the real world.
Already spelling and grammar checking programs highlight what it thinks are user errors, in an effort to push writers into a style not their own. It can be useful on times but irritating as well when there are words of phrases it doesn't recognise. Blogger wants me to change 'on times' to 'at times'. I write as I speak and think, why should I change?
We went to St John's for the Lent lunch with a dozen others and sat at table with Andrew and enjoyed an interesting conversation with him about his work as a mental health counsellor at UHW. He starts training for ordination at St Padarn's in the autumn, taking with him a rich experience of lay ministry. I wonder how this will impact on his future priestly role?
After we'd eaten I went shopping for an assortment of groceries - plant milks, fruit and rye bread. It was a heavy load and I was grateful for the rucksack to carry it home on my back rather than in two shopping bags. I slept for over an hour and woke up refreshed before walking in the park. I caught sight of a buzzard riding the thermals a hundred and fifty feet above the trees near the stables, and got a couple of photos at the limit of the range of the Olympus telephoto lens, so not terribly sharp when magnified. One of them, after editing revealed its plumage pattern and colour confirming it was our local raptor. I watched it glide down into the tree cover the other side of the allotments. I think there may be a nest somewhere over there.
After supper I devoted some time to exploring an excellent website of British bird songs and bird calls, in an effort to identify a distinctive loud call which I've been hearing daily at several locations around the two parks for the past couple of months. To my surprise, I discovered that what I'm hearing is a green woodpecker. I've heard them hammering several times of late. It's good to know what kind of woodpecker it is. There's one in Thompson's Park too. We're so lucky to have such a variety of wildlife here at the heart of the city.
Then another episode of 'Flowers in the inferno'. As the story unfolds it seems to be about a mysterious man in disguise avenging children abused by their parents in a remote alpine village, as several incidents of casual if not deliberate violence towards children are portrayed, somewhat shockingly to my mind. How this fits together remains to be seen. The female commissario (chief inspector) in the story is as grumpy with her colleagues as Rocco Schiavone in another Italian crimmie set in the Alps!
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