Did I just meet a neural network??

Someone by the name of Darren Alexander-Beckett followed my blog today so I popped into his blog to see what he was about. I found a number of posts so I started reading one…and almost fell off my chair. It looked like English and almost made sense, but in a dream-like, mash-up type way.

So I looked at another post, and another, and it finally hit me…I was looking at the writings of an AI/neural network!

I’ve read about these types of programs before but never expected to see one right here on WordPress. I was so astonished I left a comment asking if that was what it was.

Okay, maybe that wasn’t exactly smart, but the outcome was surprising. When I followed the link back so I could grab the URL, the posts were gone. All that remains is this: https://nowpastthefuture.wordpress.com/

The posts that used to be on the ‘NowPastTheFuture blog have disappeared so someone, and I really don’t think it was the AI, caught my comment and within SECONDS did away with the evidence.

Why, oh why didn’t I take a screenshot when I had the chance? -kicking self-

Anyway, if anyone has any ideas as to who or what might have created this blog, and why, I’d love to hear about them in comments. Prank? Experiment? A test of our gullibility? I really don’t have a clue, but I’m still buzzing with excitement.

cheers,
Meeks

Office #Word 2016 really is a piece of…

Shyte.

What follows is a raged induced rant so look away now.

-breathe-

I’ve just wasted an hour trying to fix the Word 2016 dictionary. It started with ‘Mira Than‘.

No, actually, it started with the combination of two big episodes of Innerscape into one very BIG Word 16 document. How big? 375 pages. Apparently, Word still has issues with very big files. That’s the reason I originally migrated my writing to a dedicated writing package [StoryBox]. Unfortunately, to publish a print version of Innerscape, I have to go Word >>PDF>>Createspace.

Anyway, after spending hours wrestling with Word’s section breaks [more on that in another post], I began doing a this-is-absolutely-the-last edit, when I realised that every time I typed in Miira Tahn, Word would ‘correct’ it to ‘Mira Than’ as soon as my attention moved elsewhere.

I tried getting Word to ‘Ignore All’, but it wouldn’t – and no, it wasn’t just variations on the name, like ‘Miira Tahn‘s‘ etc. And then it began throwing up other ‘errors’, all to do with US spelling. So, naturally, I used the nifty option at the bottom of the Spell Check pane to change the dictionary back to UK spelling:

My efforts obviously confused Word because it suddenly switched to the French dictionary. -growls in rage-

The French dictionary finds every word written in English to be incorrect…

I changed the dictionary back to English UK.

Nope…Word now wants to stay in French.

I look up fixes to the problem. I attempt to reset my language preferences. I restart Word…

Now Word wants to use the US dictionary again BUT the page full of French ‘errors’ is still set to the French dictionary. And then Word stopped working.

It’s back now, but I haven’t been game to check my document in case I end up throwing the monitor across the room. There are many basic, useful formatting functions in Word, and it works well for short-ish, business type documents, but the more Microsoft tries to automate the process, the more mangled and unstable it becomes. Especially with big documents.

I hate to think how convoluted the Word code must be because Microsoft almost never delete anything. They just keep adding to it, and adding to it, and adding to it…

Sadly, while this rant did make me feel a little less homicidal, it’s only a temporary distraction from the main event. I have to get this stupid piece of shit to play nice or I may never get my hands on those lovely, shiny books. 😦

Thanks for letting me vent,

Meeks

 

 

Natural language processing – or the future of chatbots

Natural language is what we humans use with each other, and it is not always logical and straightforward. That is why we have had to learn to rephrase our queries so Papa Google knows what we mean.

But most people don’t know how to search effectively because they are still stuck in natural language. Hence the rise of chatbots.

For now, chatbots are stupid, irritating pieces of code that work by leading us through a long, tedious process of questions and answers. If this article is right, however, chatbots of the future will use natural language processing [NLP] to work out what we want, and give it to us with the minimum of fuss and bother [on our part]. Machines getting smarter? Or humans dumbing down?

Meeks

 

Chatbots don’t quite understand us yet. We speak and they process our commands. In a chatbot like Yahoo Weather, you ask about the forecast in Seattle and the bot returns an answer. Natural Language Processing or NLP can read what you say and interpret some meaning. You don’t want to know the current temp in…

via Pat.ai chat technology is a step in the right direction — VentureBeat