Let's try and get 1,000,000 replies to this post

I was just at a wine tasting. I'm not much of a wine guy, but I tried a lot of different stuff, and to my surprise I was not only confirmed that Château Neuf du Pape is my favourite wine, but the guys I was with who have a lot more knowledge than me agreed it was the best wine they had tasted.
 
When I started working in that wine restaurant in Paris my first darling was Châteauneuf du Pape as well!

There was a rolling wine list, meaning we were ordering few quantities, all bio, and so every two weeks there were new wines or better recurring wines on the list. The wine list was a box with many big cards inside, each card was describing one wine, when the wine was available so was the card, etc.
To keep up with my super competitive colleagues I had to read, feel, listen and taste sometimes 40 wines a week and as I was surrounded myself with talented people I became a popular seller in no time.

Very soon my taste started to shift towards more elegant tones and almost always to wines consisting of single-grape variety (cépage) as Bourgogne wines usually are. If it’s red is Pinot Noir, if white is Chardonnay. All the difference in your palet, nose and eye are: sun, terre (domaine) and producer. Châteauneuf du Pape has as many as 13 grape varieties (!) so the difference in the taste is also due to the different cépages present and their ratio in the mix.
Not to say it's not a killer Appellation I just liked Northern French wines as Bourgogne and Alsace more, which happened to be mono-cépage ones.
 
We need to talk about AI.

It's really no fun anymore when people post lazy AI generated joke pics and expect a reaction. Nor is it fun when people make AI generated audio files which are supposed to sound like Maiden if they were a 60's rock n' roll band. These things are funny when people actually make an effort for a joke to hit the mark, or actually try to imagine what a song would sound like in a different genre and then take the time and effort to arrange and record that. Sure, people have always produced loads of crap, but at least it's worth the minimum amount of respect and attention when somebody goes out there and puts a part of themselves into whatever project they are doing.

Just writing a prompt and expecting (and getting!) applause for it is just a kick in the nuts for anyone who wants to be creative and who appreciates creativity.
 
I had a very quick and rocky first impression of AI. At first I was intrigued by how it could be used as a tool to help with creativity, then I was worried about it destroying us all, now I feel like it's kinda shit technology that has been adapted by lazy people looking for cheap thrills. At the end of the day, I think interesting people will continue to be interesting and lazy/opportunistic people will continue to chase after the next shiny thing and run it into the ground until it's no longer interesting.

There have been some interesting uses of AI though. How Peter Jackson has used it to restore old audio and video of the Beatles is pretty amazing. That technology is just starting to become commercially available and I am pretty excited about the opportunities that are going to come from being able to cleanly and easily extract instruments from old recordings. For people in the music/audio field at least, I definitely see a path where AI can help me take care of weird technical problems so I can focus more on the creative side of things.
 
____no5 said:
It seems there’s a whole mythology around board games, whereas I know the absolute classics, like chess, “solitaire” solo and the doors.

The doors (πόρτες), not to be confused with the musical group is pretty much what we call backgammon elsewhere.
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Here we call it tabla, (surprise surprise :bigsmile:).
Do you play plakoto and fevga too and if yes, would you mind if I pm you about some details in the rules? Thanks anyway. :hello:
 
Magnus said:
Do you play plakoto and fevga too and if yes, would you mind if I pm you about some details in the rules? Thanks anyway. :hello:
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Sure Plakoto & Fevga as well, yes please feel free to pm also if you’d like we could play on line!

PS:
For a few years when younger I used to like Plakoto more than the Doors (blasphemy) but later I saw the light!
It’s quite often that people will play all three in turns thought in more official tournaments Fevgra can be omitted.
Generally Doors > Plakoto > Fevga, if it’s to play one game that would be the Doors.
 
____no5 said:
Are you in UK now? I'll be in London next Tuesday -Thursday if you still there let's try for a beer. :cheers:
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That would be great but I'm in Sofia, alas.
Sorry for the misunderstanding: when I posted the "happy birthday Terry Wapram!" post it was no longer Nov 29th here in Sofia but it still was in the UK, last minute or not.
Oh, and enjoy London!
 
Mosh said:
I had a very quick and rocky first impression of AI. At first I was intrigued by how it could be used as a tool to help with creativity, then I was worried about it destroying us all, now I feel like it's kinda shit technology that has been adapted by lazy people looking for cheap thrills. At the end of the day, I think interesting people will continue to be interesting and lazy/opportunistic people will continue to chase after the next shiny thing and run it into the ground until it's no longer interesting.

There have been some interesting uses of AI though. How Peter Jackson has used it to restore old audio and video of the Beatles is pretty amazing. That technology is just starting to become commercially available and I am pretty excited about the opportunities that are going to come from being able to cleanly and easily extract instruments from old recordings. For people in the music/audio field at least, I definitely see a path where AI can help me take care of weird technical problems so I can focus more on the creative side of things.
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To get back to this, one thing I found myself doing lately is using ChatGPT if I'm actually trying to find certain fact or don't know how to formulate a search prompt (the latter idea courtesy of @Night Prowler). The latter proved to be quite helpful, while the former is a mixed bag. However, I found there sometimes is no alternative anymore. The other day, I was looking for some very basic facts on paper and card formats that I couldn't find on Wikipedia. I've been using DuckDuckGo as my search engine for about 15 years now, but in recent months it's become completely useless for queries such as this. All search results were links to online and local print shops. I know that Google has been going that way for years now, and that's one of the reasons I don't use it as a search engine, but I was shocked that DuckDuckGo has descended the same way now. I did a few other random searches and found my impression more or less confirmed.
 
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