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Gratuite du Credit (In French)

I wrote this review of Gratuite du Credit back in 2007 or so, whilst living in New Zealand, for an website that has since disappeared, “bookine.org” The topic came up recently with a friend, and the host was kind enough to fish it for me :) Adolescent gauchisant, par la suite jeune adulte AAA, non pas Ancien Alcoolique Anonyme (ceux qui ont de la bouteille LOL), quoique, mais Abstentionniste Anarcho-Apolitique, par le hasard des rencontres je me suis lié dernièrement d’amitié avec un membre des “instances” dirigeantes du parti Libertarianz.

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Creative May

Diapason creative - May 2023 The generative and creative AI explosion is here to stay. The prompt to image hype of mid 2022, driven by the likes of Midjourney, was not just a hype after all. It was a first step in a bullet-train race which reached the conversational AI station in late 2022. Now the train has split into a set of gigantic pinball multiballs, causing havoc across all industries.

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Welcome to the machine

Welcome to the machine. “Knock - Knock” “Who’s there?” “Me, a human” “Welcome human. What’s your prompt? Think carefully - the few words you say will determine your fate”. I stumbled the other day on promptperfect, a SaaS website that offers to optimize one’s prompt, taking into account the specifics of the various models that could be used. This works, allegedly, for chat-like LLMs, as well as for prompt to image applications.

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Creative 23Q1

Diapason creative - 2023 Q1 Newsletter Diapason’s resonances this past quarter After a sold-out concert at Redfern’s iconic 107 venue, Lili Alaska and her band (yours truly included) were lucky to be the first to try out the newly equipped recording studio at the Bondi Pavilion. The same location we opened up with Lindy back in September. Great feel playing with a brand new set of Zildjian cymbals (little known trivia: Zildjian is one of the oldest operating companies in the world).

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Socratic Bot

This is a follow-up from my earlier post. This is really entertaining. It is also depressingly addictive. Self-indulging as well: what a luxury it is to be able to engage in a polite, seemingly rationale discussion with s̶o̶m̶e̶o̶n̶e̶ ̶w̶h̶o̶ something that can reply almost instantly to each point, yet can wait with an infinite patience for my responses. It also is a great support for fictional Socratic dialogues(*) - a very effective medium to convey philosophical ideas by guiding a student to reach the conclusion through their own reasoning.

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Chatbot consulting

Earlier this year, Diapason participated in the organisation of the CreativeAI_Sydney symposium. At this time, public attention on generative AI was growing exponentially, and focused very much on Dall-E2, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion (in the order they entered the spotlight), i.e. ‘prompt to image applications’. Most of our discussions gravitated around the this fundamental question: “Can AI be an artist (and therefore be a threat to existing artists) - or is AI only a tool that artists can use”.

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Medical Devices Regulations 101

Regulations are a complex topic. According to Feynman, the best way to master a complex topic is to: (1) study it (2) explain it simply (3) fill any gap. Here’s my 2cts at step 2, which I wrote for a collaborative project. Feedback welcome for step 3. National or multinational (EU) regulations impose various requirements for the commercialization of medical devices within (or from) their jurisdictions, that consist in - roughly:

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Creative September

Diapason creative - September Newsletter Diapason’s resonances this past month Wind of Change I rarely listen to multipart podcast series. I tend to binge rather than schedule, so this would be too competing with my workload. I stumbled though last month on Wind of Change from Patrick Radden Keefe. The song that gives it name to the podcast has been part of my teenage years - and this is when (teen+early adulthood) we forge our deepest sensory memories and tastes in music, as is known and used by music-based therapy for Alzeihmer patients.

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Balance

A Quality Management System is often represented as a pyramid. Which is a relevant analogy. It has some “depth”, it is not a flat structure, and it matches well the hierarchical nature of many human thinking processes, of organisational structures, and of many information system paradigms (e.g. folders/subfolders). Consultants and other experts who use this analogy typically describe from 3 to 6 levels. All these options are valid. A QMS does not have - by essence - 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 levels.

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Customer-No-Service

After some spam issues already with my first email SAAS (Namecheap) for diapason.consulting, I had moved my email services to my Google Workspace subscription, which I had upgraded to the second tier, including a supposedly professional level email server services. Several weeks of frustration later, after having setup SPF, DKIM, DMARC, with my emails still ending up widely in spams, I contacted google workspace support. The support chatbot questions, over a couple of minutes, led me to this point with a human support person.

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