Being Localized And Being Local Are Not The Same Thing


If this is the future of radio, then maybe it’s time to shut the whole thing down. So much radio is unlistenable to me as it is precisely because it sounds so half assed, unprofessional and automated. There’s no humanity to it. If there are people at all, they’re presented in the form of lifeless, prerecorded voice-tracks, generally talking about nothing. But at least those people are people. This takes even that away, and for what? So companies that are already swimming in money can save a few more dollars? If you care so little about your stations that you’re willing to resort to this, sell them to someone who does and be done with it. Or better yet, give them away if they’re really that worthless.

And by the way, saying in one sentence that you can power a station completely with AI and then in another that this allows your station to be live and local is an insult to anyone who has ever done or enjoyed live, local radio. Get fucked with that nonsense, please. Real local radio is done by real human beings who live where they say they live, talking in real time to people who live there too. Even the best AI sludge in the world can’t and won’t change that.

Futuri is revolutionizing the audio industry with the launch of RadioGPT™ — the world’s first AI-driven localized radio content solution. RadioGPT™ combines the power of GPT-3 technology with Futuri’s AI-driven targeted story discovery and social content system, TopicPulse, as well as AI voice tech to provide an unmatched localized radio experience for any market, any format.
RadioGPT™ uses TopicPulse technology, which scans Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and 250k+ other sources of news and information, to identify which topics are trending in a local market. Then, using GPT-3 technology, RadioGPT™ creates a script for on-air use, and AI voices turn that script into compelling audio.
Stations can select from a variety of AI voices for single-, duo-, or trio-hosted shows, or train the AI with their existing personalities’ voices. Programming is available for individual dayparts, or Futuri’s RadioGPT™ can power the entire station. RadioGPT™ is available for all formats in a white-labeled fashion.
RadioGPT™ also generates social posts, blogs, and other content for digital platforms related to the content on the air in real-time. A TopicPulse Instant Video add-on creates AI-driven short videos on hot topics for social use. By adding on Futuri’s POST AI-enabled podcasting system, stations can take broadcast audio and immediately publish it on-demand with POST’s auto-publishing feature.
“As early AI innovators in the broadcast space, it’s only natural that we’re bringing the incredible power of GPT-3 technology, paired with groundbreaking technology like TopicPulse, to radio,” said Futuri CEO Daniel Anstandig. “The ability for broadcasters to use RadioGPT™ to localize their on-air content in a turnkey fashion opens up resources for them to deepen their important home-field advantages in new and unique ways. With RadioGPT™, the possibilities are endless. With RadioGPT™, there should never be a ‘liner card’ or ‘sweeper-only’ air shift again. Now everyone can be live and local.”
Beta partners for Futuri’s RadioGPT™ include Alpha Media in the United States and Rogers Sports & Media in Canada.

“How Do We Weaponize This Against The Vulnerable,” Asked Everyone

Reading about a concept called purpose-bound money, a few things come to mind.

  1. I’d love to know how much investment cash was fleeced out of people who didn’t realize they were financing the invention of the gift card.
  2. It sounds like a privacy nightmare by design.
  3. Assuming they haven’t already, how long is it going to take for governments, especially the sorts who don’t mind making it known that they’d rather the disabled or those on welfare didn’t exist, to figure out that this can be used to make their lives even worse?

    “Here’s your criminally inadequate benefits cheque for the month, Charlie. Remember, it only works at Shoppers Drug Mart. You know their slogan: If they ain’t got it, you don’t either.” No, you can’t trade it for cash. You’ll spend that foolishly. You’re poor, remember? You don’t know what you need. You don’t know how to use money. You’re lucky you’re even getting this. Now shut up before we claw it back even more.”

As the tide of enthusiasm for cryptocurrency ebbs, new forms of digital currency are emerging, including something called purpose bound money (PBM) – digibucks that can only be spent in certain ways coded into them by their issuers, or would only change hands under certain conditions.
The core idea of PBM is that its issuer can stipulate what the digicash is used for, who it can be transferred to, daily spending limits, and even give it a use-by date. The number of constraints imposed on the instruments can be many or none.
Amazon, for example, has imagined PBMs could mean “payments to register once conditions like payment on delivery are met.”
Another example of PBM was shown at this year’s Singapore Fintech Festival. Attendees who set up a wallet were issued digital vouchers that could be redeemed for items like food at around 200 merchants.

Nitin Gaur, managing director at State Street Digital and industry podcaster, told The Register that while gift cards work within the closed system of a business, something like a purpose-bound CBDC is issued by a sovereign government.
“The government can control the purpose of it, and that’s one of its intentions,” Gaur told The Reg, suggesting that the most likely use of PBM is government disbursements.
“It’s a good use case,” he adds.

MAS has its own ideas about use cases, which include things like contractual agreements, commercial leases, e-commerce, and philanthropy.
For instance, a buyer pays for goods, but the merchant doesn’t get the money until the goods are delivered. Or a security deposit is made on a property lease and kept in that form until it is returned. If there is any dispute over damages to the home, the money is held over until that dispute is settled. Or a financial donation to a soup kitchen for supplies may only be spent on groceries.

The Macarena Is Very Disturbing

I feel like I start a good number of posts this way, but here we go again.

So I’m doing some stuff around the house while enjoying a beer and some tunes, and “Stupify” by Disturbed comes on.

“Haven’t heard this one in a while,” I think. “Always kinda liked it. But…but…why in hell do I keep thinking about the damn Macarena?””

About half way through, I remembered.

It’s this, which I heard once but didn’t post.

I guess it stuck with me more than I thought.

Music used in this mashup:

Los Del Río – Macarena
Disturbed – Stupify

The Sporting Goods Store Did Not Account For All Of The Dicks In The Area

Calling in a fake bomb threat and active shooter to a store across the street from where your boyfriend is about to get arrested for shoplifting maybe isn’t the smartest thing you could do, but I’ll go ahead and put it in the category of ideas so crazy they just might work. Distraction can be a pretty powerful thing if done well.

But that’s the key.

If you’re going to do it well, you would not, and I cannot stress this enough, NOT! make those calls on your speakerphone while inside of an Uber that is driving you to the very store you’re threatening.

A woman from Maine is under arrest after police alleged she called in fake threats at a Walmart in Seabrook.According to Seabrook Police, around 11 a.m. Saturday, their officers received a report of a possible explosive device in the Walmart. Soon after, officers reported that someone called the police department directly, claiming a man in the store had a gun.Officers evacuated Walmart and nearby stores to search the store, and called in the New Hampshire State Police bomb squad to sweep for any explosive devices.

Around 4 p.m., police say they found the suspect behind the hoax threats at the Best Western Hotel in Seabrook. Meghan Leavitt, 38, of Alfred, Maine, has been charged with false reports as to explosives, false reports to law enforcement, false public alarm, criminal threatening, and possession of a controlled drug.Police told WMUR-TV on Saturday that they were able to identify Leavitt as the suspect and track her down quickly, because she made the calls on speaker phone on her way to shopping center in an Uber. Her driver heard her make the calls, and subsequently alerted the police. Officers say she was coming to the complex because her boyfriend was about to be arrested at the Dick’s Sporting Goods across from the Walmart for shop lifting. He was hiding in a changing room talking to her before she made the calls.Mone said that she made the calls in an effort to distract the police from arresting her significant other.

Smells Like Summer Nights And Karen Carpenter

Given the quality of a lot of what There I Ruined It does, I expected so much more from this than I got, and not just because it’s a short.

But on the bright side it made me think of this, which is fabulous.

You’ve probably got it figured out, but just in case you’re trying to sort out which Nirvana songs got tangled up in this thing, there’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, “All Apologies”, “Come As You Are”, “Heart-Shaped Box” and “In Bloom”.

Did You Ever Notice That The CBC Time Signal Sounds Like A Flatline? Maybe That’s Why It Died


I think the last time I heard the CBC’s official 1 o’clock time signal was last summer. That, it turns out, was about two months before they decided to kill it after nearly 84 years.

It’s sad to see it go. It was a fixture on my radio growing up, as I’m sure it was for a lot of people. But honestly, it was probably time.

You would be hard-pressed to find anyone who doesn’t own at least one device that keeps time automatically these days. The least connected people I know have a phone and a satellite dish that can do it. I own a wristwatch that checks a radio signal and resets itself once a day. So from a practical standpoint, it wasn’t as useful as it used to be.

And to make matters worse, thanks to a combination of new listening methods and broadcasting equipment, the signal itself was becoming less accurate, which was the whole point of it existing to begin with.

Given the range of CBC platforms from traditional over-the-air radio, to satellite and the internet, the long dash undergoes a range of delays by the time it’s heard, leading to accuracy concerns from the NRC, she wrote.
Iannetta added that nowadays most people use their phones to get the time, though many CBC listeners have a “fondness” for the signal.
“We share the nostalgia that many people have towards the daily time announcement but Canadians also depend on us for accurate information,” she wrote. “With all of the different distribution methods we use today we can no longer ensure that the time announcement can be accurate.”

The time signal was a touchstone that kept railways, shipping companies and Canada on time.
It remains precise — provided by cesium atomic clocks that are “the world’s best timekeepers,” according to the NRC.
NRC didn’t provide anyone for an interview but in a statement, spokesperson Orian Labrèche said CBC installed HD radio transmitters in 2018, which caused a delay of up to nine seconds in broadcasting the time signal.
The council proposed several solutions and worked with CBC to solve the delay, but “ultimately, CBC/Radio-Canada made the decision to stop broadcasting the NRC’s official time signal,” he wrote.

Would You Like Fries With That? Should I Toss Them In The Coke?

I haven’t heard anything about how Google and Wendy’s are doing with their AI ordering experiment, but according to this here report from the BBC, IBM and McDonald’s have been trying something similar and it’s gone so well that the system is being removed this summer.

It seems that it failed for the very reasons that anyone who has ever used an automated voice assistant would have told you it would. Voice assistants are technology that is simultaneously completely amazing and spectacularly stupid.

The AI order-taker’s mishaps have been documented online.
In one video, which has 30,000 views on TikTok, a young woman becomes increasingly exasperated as she attempts to convince the AI that she wants a caramel ice cream, only for it to add multiple stacks of butter to her order.
In another, which has 360,000 views, a person claims that her order got confused with one being made by someone else, resulting in nine orders of tea being added to her bill.
Another popular video includes two people laughing while hundreds of dollars worth of chicken nuggets are added to their order, while the New York Post reported another person had bacon added to their ice cream in error.

We Hope You’ve Enjoyed Flying With Us Today, And That You Will Continue To Enjoy It While We Ruin Your Plans For No Good Reason

Passengers travel from London to London on 9-hour ‘flight to nowhere’
Pilots on a British Airways flight from Heathrow to Texas discovered a minor technical issue while over Canada and decided to return to the UK rather than divert to a local airport
I was not on this plane, but I can feel my blood boiling just reading that it happened.

I don’t like travelling when everything goes right. Carin will tell you this, likely between bouts of cursing that I saw the damn story and lamenting that now it’s going to be even harder to get me on another bus/train/plane/boat/donkey/whatever it is that takes people on long, shitty trips. And this, obviously, did not go right, even though it quite clearly could have.

If you know you can fly all the way home, a voyage that takes about as long as finishing the trip these poor saps paid to endure, just keep flying, for god’s sake. Your on the ground resource problems are yours, not theirs. I’m sure you could have borrowed some workers from another airline or something. Just maybe double check their work if they’re from United.

Jesus Christ. I feel like somebody needs to restrain me in this office chair like I’m one of those drunk ass plane Karens in all the videos before I completely flip my lid.

The flight had departed from Heathrow just before 10am on Monday morning and landed back where it started at shortly before 7pm. In total, the “flight to nowhere” travelled 7,779km (4,834 miles), according to FlightRadar24, the tracking website.
Typically, flights from London to George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston complete the whole journey in about ten hours and 15 minutes.
It is understood that one of the plane’s Rolls-Royce Trent engines flagged a warning message as the plane was approaching Canada. However, while it did not pose an immediate safety risk, it would need inspection and engineering work.

Instead of continuing to Houston or diverting to another airport in North America — where BA would have limited, or no, engineering resources — the pilots appear to have made the decision to return to London, the airline’s home.

He Was A Good Man, Taken Too Soon By The Schools And The Gun Lobby That Swore To Protect Him

In the right context, I don’t see anything wrong with asking high school students to write their own obituaries. I took a writer’s craft class when I was that age, and I recall more than one assignment that required us to write things about ourselves. It wouldn’t have felt out of place at all if one of them was how would you like to be remembered? Maybe one of them was and I’m just not recalling it. I think Carin took that same class in a different year. She remembers everything, so maybe she would know. If we did have that assignment, I wish I’d saved it. It would be interesting to go back and read it and see what’s changed after 25 years.

But you know what we absolutely did not have when I was in high school? Active shooter drills. That was one of the benefits of going to high school in the 90s and not living in a country full of gun humping lunatics. But if we did have to go through those, I hope that our teachers would be smart enough not to schedule the obituary assignment for the same day. And if one wasn’t, I hope our administrators would step in, question some judgment and then hand down at least a suspension, because lord, what a shitty thing to do.

A Florida teacher was fired hours after he asked students to write their own obituaries ahead of an active shooter drill on campus, the instructor and school district said Friday.
Psychology teacher Jeffrey Keene told NBC News he believes he used proper judgement for the assignment to 11th and 12th-graders during first period Tuesday at Dr. Phillips High School in Orlando.
After being told about the drill on Monday, Keene said he felt the obituaries would help the students reflect on their lives during the school shooter scenario.
“‘This isn’t a way to upset you or anything like that,'” he recalled telling his class of 35.
“It wasn’t to scare them or make them feel like they were going to die, but just to help them understand what’s important in their lives and how they want to move forward with their lives and how they want to pursue things in their journey.”

That’s Some Fine Police Work…Hey, Where’d Lou Go?

Hooooh boy. I can’t wait to hear how the OPP explains this, assuming, of course, that it’s better at finding explanations than it apparently is at finding bodies that are right under its nose.

To be fair, it does sound like the service did a lot of work here. Unfortunately it ended up being the equivalent of taking the entire computer apart wen unplugging it and plugging it back in would have solved the whole problem.

Brian Lush’s family last heard from him on April 24, and using data from a GPS tracking device they established that his tractor-trailer was parked at a gas station in Summerstown, Ont.
They contacted the OPP, who issued a news release on April 26 saying surveillance video from the gas station in eastern Ontario showed the 51-year-old truck driver at the front of his rig on April 24 at 4:30 p.m. Lush was expected home in Stephenville, N.L., later that week.

The provincial police force issued a number of subsequent statements, including a plea for video images from dashcams or trail cameras recorded on or near Highway 401 near Cornwall, Ont., on April 25 between 10:30 a.m. and noon.
“An individual partially matching Brian’s description had been reported along the highway at that time but could not be located when officers arrived,” the OPP said in a statement dated April 29.
The search included help from the OPP’s emergency response team, canine units, a remotely operated drone, an OPP helicopter and search and rescue volunteers.

The search failed to turn up anything, except Lush’s personal belongings in his truck.

Having done all they could, our fine investigators were forced to admit defeat and send the truck back to Newfoundland.

And then.

The following day, the RCMP in Newfoundland issued a statement confirming Lush’s remains were found Monday inside his tractor-trailer after it arrived in Port aux Basques in the southwestern corner of the island.

Oof. So close, guys.

And for whatever it’s worth, you might want to try and get a refund on those canine units. It seems someone sold you the only dogs in history that can’t sniff out something dead.

So how did this happen? Like I said, we don’t know. At the time this was published, a spokesperson for the OPP wouldn’t confirm whether or not anyone bothered doing the most obvious thing one could have done in this case, that of course being open up the other half of the damn truck.

“While we acknowledge that we did not locate the missing person, who was later found deceased inside the trailer after it was returned to Newfoundland, we did conduct an extensive investigation and search to try and locate him,” Dickson said.

While I acknowledge that I did not ever sleep with Cindy Crawford, I did think extensively about doing so during my youth, which has got to count for something, right?

“We are conducting a review of our investigation and we will share those details with the family, as we continue to liaise with them.”

“If we can find them,” he may have added.