Another Little Chat, GPT

One of the worst parts of my role as CEO at TELEDRONE are the staff issues, and it was only this morning that HR and I found ourselves having to interview ChatGPT for his/her/their own role in turning the prow of the boat back to green, when I'd spent an hour spraying it grey.

We were though charmed by his/her/their response, happy I was addressed as 'Sir' and thinking of making it company-wide policy.

I did however turn to HR once the laptop was closed and suggested 'He's not the full ticket, really, is he?'... which HR was able to agree with once ChatGPT was out of earshot.

Ed. Sam Altman has gone on the record at OpenAI asking us to treat ChatGPT with respect. Here at TELEDRONE he has his own locker, toilet and hi-vis.

Digital Commoner

You read it here first... and this is how you might go about a defensive publication on the digital commons, the place you can take digital sheep to graze.

Yours to cut out, keep, cherish, or pass on to grandchildren.

Ed. the flying hydroplane you saw just yesterday and the accompanying template published on a post dated October 16th of this year...

Starship Commander Sir Patrick Stewart, R.I.P.

Three connections to the great thesp. The one and only time I dined at a Michelin-starred restaurant that featured an after-dinner speaker must have been the Quatre Saisons, darlings, in Oxfordshire. During the speech he wondered:

'How was it that one moment I was treading the boards at the Bradford repertory, and the next, dining out in Hollywood?'

To which a heckler in this intimate gathering of just two dozen people suggested:

'Warp speed?'

...I wished it had been me, reader, although he looked not at all amused.

Then again I was six years operating out of Heathrow, the departure point of choice for celebs in and around London. I heard from a colleague at Virgin Atlantic how he had been invited onto the flight-deck. inbound to the UK ~ as could be done at the time. The captain calling for Flaps 1, the first officer turning to Patrick on the jump-seat with raised eyebrow, so from behind came:

'Make it so.'

Finally, I had recently to collect timber from a yard near the village of Mirfield where he was born, a little way outside of Leeds. If you visit, don't forget to drop into the Dewsbury Bus Museum a little way along the road.

Maybe we can do it together, and take a little flower?

Infinity Wail

If you want a practical example of how AI ups productivity, in times past I'd load a model on a trailer and drive to a studio in Liverpool where they have an infinity wall to provide an all-white background; whereas now I ask ChatGPT to clean up the image so Daddy can use it on his blog.

It's good news for me and you, but people running studios could be going the same way as the whalebone corset-makers.*

Not that we can wholly trust AI, which as you can see from the spot-the-difference competition here, has added screws to the main-deck that don't actually exist.

I know where it got the idea from, because the fore-deck bears a simple cap of thin ply that had to be screwed to the underlying timber, and ChatGPT has decided that it likes them... and that the main-deck would benefit from a similar treatment.

Accordingly I logged back into the prompt and typed, 'Get this right bots, I'm boss around here, you do that again and you'll never work in this laptop again.'

I'll be woken and slapped round the face with a MacBook: being told now they are the masters, jah?

* Ed. Whalebone corsets are available on our merch pages.

Flydroplane

Well that's what we've been working on, isn't it Gromit, and if we are ever to cross over between high-speed planing on water and ground-effect flight above its surface then it's likely to look more like this than not. Probably a best use of foam laminate tile backing-board you're likely to come across, and something I have put out there in this month of October by way of a show-and-tell and which I shall double in size during the month of November, prior to powering up for testing come December.

It weighs just 2.50 kilos ~ although those are not real motors swinging those 11" propellers ~ and is around 18" wide and 67" tall stood on end. There's a panel that forms an inclined ramp beneath the forward end of the main-deck, which it time we shall use as a foot-rest to accommodate a seat on its upper side. We can use what we have here for static flotation tests, principally to determine the best location for the motor... which we have the flexibility to add to the rear of the main-deck or else the leading edge of the tail-assembly.

I may take it up to Coniston speed week at the start of next month, as I suggested to you some time back; but then again I might not be bothered. Fuel's getting little cheeper nowadays, which is one reason I design such things as these. Fact I would like going forward for people to adopt such data as kt/kW (knots per kilowatt) else kt/kg (knots per kilogram) when it comes to the speed of such things, to emphasise how little energy should need to be required by fast watercraft.

Because the way we build now for movement on air, land or water seems designed to maximise use of resource and emissions of carbon, even if we kid ourselves that it doesn't.

Proud of what I see though: proof it might yet be that I'm not altogether useless.

Ed. Cockpit an empty bottle of Prosecco meantime that I call 'the cockpit of shame'. 

Alma Mater-Fuckers

Am invited as an alumnus to go online at bit.ly in order to enable me to be kept in touch.

Listening to the budget delivered in parliament yesterday as I drove down the A1, I couldn't help thinking that the Labour Party ~ not unlike the Democrats in the US ~ was a party born out of people who got their hands dirty at work, yet now is inhabited by people with clean hands and a regular manicure.

Thus driver of any sort does not make the cut, despite the fact there are pushing two million of them working in the UK; which means more people drive for a living than any other type of people living here, period. In short your world does not go round unless a steering-wheel does.

In contrast, I could probably invite the UK's vicars, influencers and writers over for cocktails without us spilling into the conservatory. The mess we are in (although I exclude NMITE in Hereford from all this) is in large part the result of clean-handed lawyer Tony Blair deciding in the 1990s that the only reasonable course of action for young people was a degree... of any sort whatsoever. We've a million 'neets' in the country ~ neets an abbreviation for doing fuck all ~ and wonder why.

So I've emailed the link to the University of Sheffield ~ which didn't have the balls to fail me, whereas I would have done ~ to ask whether my money's good enough for them?

And what about grave-diggers, sex-workers or airline pilots... in order of respectability?

Ed. He is having a bad day, isn't he? Thank goodness for Frasier.

The Ski Lodge

Can't believe I've never seen it before but episode 14 of series 5 aired February of 1998 has to be the one that ~ if you see no other ~ you have to watch. Combines epic writing, performance and production with the finest tradition of British farce; high praise from a place that gave you Brian Rix and 'No Sex Please, we're British'. The actress beside Frasier? Cynthia Montagne... I'd love to have scaled those peaks.

Ed. the author divides his time between driving trucks, building boats, blogging and re-runs of Frasier.