Technical content is now at pborenstein.dev
Botch

— So, what did you do before this?
— I was a surgeon.
— No shit?
— No shit.
— How do you go from being a surgeon to doing this?
— How did I fall so low?
— Sorry, I–
— Nah, don’t worry about it. OK. I’ll tell you. So, one day, I’m having l…

Harry Belafonte

His most famous song, of course, is “Day-O”. But for me it’s “Mama Look at Boo Boo”.

It was on a slightly warped LP hiding in my parents’ collection, that I discovered at 12 years old. The line “I wonder why nobody don’t like me, or is it the fact that I’m ugly?” really resonated with me at 12 :)

What AI chat is good for

There’s a song that runs through the last season of Battlestar Galactica. They never actually play the song or even clips of it. Instead, the actors kind of hum snippets of it, and I can’t make it out. Clearly, it’s an important plot point, and I’m supposed to know it.

bsg
What is this?

The fun part of blogging is messing around with the blogging platform. But once you’ve done that, you have to fill it with content.

GPT things

GPT-3 tends to come up with upbeat stories. Three somewhat different stories, but all with the same happy ending.

I gave GPT-3 this prompt, and ran it three times. This is the complete prompt. I did not ask it to do anything. (They are called completions, after all.)

She walked slowly as the dead fall leaves spiralled at her ankles and crunched beneath her feet.

It’s from a short story I wrote when I was 16. I was very proud of it.

The Power Broker

Have you seen the size of this thing? It’s over 1300 pages long. That is more that the first three Harry Potter books put together. Which I also haven’t read.

Vellum

I may have to create a new category for this kind of book: Books I’m Not Sure I Started.

Last Year at Marienbad

The plot is très simple: A man, a woman, and another man. One man is maybe the woman’s husband. The other man is pursuing her, telling her that they met last year at Marienbad.

Finding Oz

L. Frank Baum worried that his first name, Lyman, made him sound untrustworthy and chose instead to use his “more honest sounding” middle name.