Category: Tech

Waiting for Oliver or Someone Like Him

This post from last September is currently receiving more views than any other. Comments for it continue to be submitted for approval.

Is This Guy For Real?

So, what the heck. I entered a comment on the latest Substack post by the alleged human lifeform who calls himself Oliver Kornetzke.

Last September, on my blog I wondered if you are an AI construct. My site doesn’t get a significant number of views, but that post receives the largest number of them. Why? Because others share my doubts.

The first sentence of your essay here doesn’t sway me from the possibility that I am reading something generated by AI, or at least someone needing help writing and relying upon AI:

[“It’s illegal to sleep in your car but the dealership down the road can leave forty cars idling unsold in a lot for a decade and that’s just “inventory,”]

It is not true that sleeping in your car, in and of itself, is illegal. Car dealers don’t leave cars “idling.” That implies the engines are running. Rather, the cars are sitting idle. No dealer would ever leave a car unsold for a decade.

Based on those nonsensical assertions, I see no point in reading past that opening sentence. So, my question to you is, are you real? If so, where is there some biographical information about you?

If you are inclined to indulge this request, I can provide the link to my post. Or you can simply search for yourself, and look for, “Is This Guy for Real?”

As a former broadcast journalist, I am looking for facts, and seeking to have my doubts confirmed or refuted. Thank you.

https://substack.com/profile/42576373-doug-pratt/note/c-280309485?r=pck51&utm_source=notes-share-action&utm_medium=web

Maybe “Oliver” will have some starshine he can share with us.

Follow-up:

Oliver Blocked Me!

LLM Explains It All?

A company that interests me is Open Evidence. They use AI to collect authoritative medical research and process the information for presentation to physicians.

There’s a study that claims Large Language Models that aren’t medically specific generate results that are superior to Open Evidence. As you would expect, Open Evidence isn’t letting that claim go unchallenged.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rigorous-evaluation-of-medical-ai-is-good-ugcPost-7471713096210751489-x_VW/

In other medical information technology news, there’s a good, old-fashioned ransomware hack over at Amazon’s company, One Medical.

https://cybernews.com/security/amazon-one-medical-data-breach/

Beatles Rotator

I recently played my big sister’s original American copy of the 1966 Beatles album Revolver.* It’s in mono, and I was surprised by how good it sounds, considering the damage it endured. Here’s ‘Good Day Sunshine’.

Monitoring the playback with Audacity, I was impressed with how dynamic the sound is. There’s no compression going on here.

For comparison, here is the official online copy of the song.

Looking at the peaks, some loudness compression was apparently added to the recording. The 2009 mono Beatles set reportedly was transferred from the master tapes with dynamic range left intact, so perhaps this is a YouTube effect.

Okay, so let’s find out. What about ‘Good Day Sunshine’ when played from the Beatles 2009 CD mono box set? No loudness compression is confirmed.

* A 60-year-old record on a 50-year-old turntable, with a 30-year-old cartridge and a relatively new stylus.

The Kitsune Channel

I was a first generation Roku customer. Being the sixth company founded by Anthony Wood, he named it the Japanese word for six.

My second generation Roku player on top of my first generation model

Today, I have two Roku sticks and Amazon’s me-too product, the Fire TV stick. (Fire TV has two technical advantages — there is an optional external Ethernet adapter, and the remote can control home theater receivers.)

With today’s announcement, Roku will no longer be the company it was. What’s the Japanese word for fox?

Roku is being bought out by Fox for $22 billion

https://9to5google.com/2026/06/15/roku-is-being-bought-out-by-fox-for-22-billion/

IMPish Tales

Bob Metcalfe rhapsodizes about working on ARPANET interfaces, the pre-Internet project that Bob Taylor headed.

Metcalfe later worked for Taylor at Xerox PARC, where he was a primary developer of what became Ethernet. Bob provides historical context for “America’s Technology Highway,” Route 128.

A Distorted View

How good am I at detecting audible distortion? I’ll go to Germany to find out.

https://www.klippel.de/listeningtest/

To ensure a valid test, I wore a pair of IEMs with vanishing low measured distortion. (The 7Hz x Crinacle Zero:2) This was the result from my first pass.

You reached an audibility threshold of -39 dB. This value is near the mean value of the audibility threshold of all listeners participated in the test. However, there were some other participants that were more sensitive in detecting those distortions. It is very likely that those participants had more experience in careful listening. Listeners who have repeated the test see that a little bit of training will improve their sensitivity for those distortions and reduce their audibility threshold.

Some listeners went all the way down to -69 dB! Now that I’m familiar with the test, and there are other parameters that can be selected, including music, I’ll give it another try later.