Thoughts From The Static

 Although current AI systems have many amazing abilities, they are still generally poor at presenting the image you asked for (producing text on a requested subject is usually far better).   Artbreeder's Composer option produces the following map when prompted with "topographic map of england":  This is not what England looks like, needless to say. Here's what it produces when prompted with: "photorealistic image of a neon sign of a piece of pepperoni pizza" It gets the "pepperoni pizza" part correct for the most part, but seemingly has no idea what a neon sign is.  In fairness, if you click on the "variations" option it gives the following image which is closer to a neon sign. After having it generate another set of variations, one of them was the following: This one certainly has a neon sign, but the lettering is gibberish. It has a neon-tinged giant pizza slice in there, but it's seemingly an actual giant slice of pizza and it'...

 Among the problems that Microsoft still has not fixed in the Windows operating system after all these decades: * Copying a bit of text on a long line within a wordprocessor such as Windows Word Pad is needlessly torturous, because if your mouse cursor happens to stray even one pixel outside of the long line of text, it ends up highlighting text on the line above or below. It often takes me so long to copy only the snippet I need that it's actually faster to just manually type the entire thing out from scratch. This is easily fixable. * In Word Pad, when you load a new file the file selection window defaults to some senseless directory that I never use rather than the directory in which the current file is located. This is very easy to fix. * Open windows sometimes get stuck behind everything else even when selected, which makes it impossible to see the window unless you close everything else. 

 The default news feature still doesn't work correctly, but I finally figured out a way to see foreign language results:  you need to edit the parameters in the URL for https://news.google.com/search  by changing the following :  if it says something like  "&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen"  (which means it defaults to only English results because you're in the US), you need to change  all of those parameters: the "en-US" (American English) needs to be changed to a different language and the others have to be changed to a different country (e.g. to get Mexican Spanish, change it to:  "&hl=es-MX&gl=MX&ceid=MX:es").  This is overly complicated and "hacky", but it's the only method I've found which works. Google News used to just automatically provide foreign results if the search terms would naturally produce results in that language: e.g. if you searched for a Spanish phrase then it returned Spanish results. Now...