Click on the image.
More information here.
Quarterly Close (Listen Only)
Tag Archives: Google
Quarterly Close
I couldn’t wait to share this Google Lyria song, “Quarterly Close.” (Public Domain, of course.)
I will be using this song in a video that will be posted to the Bredemarket blog, to my Facebook and LinkedIn Bredemarket pages, and on my Bredemarket YouTube channel.
But you’ll have to wait to see it.
Until Monday, June 29, 2026 at 6:00 am Pacific Daylight Time.
In other words…near the quarterly close.
Some Hallucinations Are GOOD Hallucinations
Most of us treat hallucinations as an evil, scary thing. With some exceptions.
This negative perception of hallucinations extends to our views of generative artificial intelligence. Although perhaps what generative AI does is more accurately called “confabulations.”
““A hallucination is a conscious sensory perception that is at variance with the stimuli in the environment. A confabulation, on the other hand, is the making of assertions that are at variance with the facts, such as “the president of France is Francois Mitterrand,” which is currently not the case.”
Whatever you call it, the result is not consciously intended. And it can sometimes be bad.
Lying on a job application
Take those AI tools that jobseekers can use to not only apply for a job, but automatically customize their resume for that particular job.
When automatic resume rewrites are not reviewed, the new resume may end up with confabulations, hallucinations, or outright falsehoods.
If my rewritten resume claims two years’ Python experience, that just ain’t true.
And I could lose a job opportunity if I lie on my resume.
Fly (on) an eagle
But those who praise hallucinations as good are not limited to Timothy Leary.
Take the time I intentionally asked Google Gemini’s image creation engine (Imagen 4 at the time) to make something up.
Perhaps I’m wrong, but I don’t see any harm in creating a Tolkienesque illustration of Theodore Roosevelt riding a flying bald eagle. Actually, TR fans may think it’s pretty cool.
By definition, ANY generative AI engine HAS to invent stuff. A prompt can’t specify everything.
Audio inventiveness
Let’s look at another example, the two-plus minute song that formed the audio for my recent reel “The Cooling Blue.”
Now here is the prompt that I used to create that audio track.
“Create a moving song with violin, harp, and guitar about overly long meetings. The opening male spoken words are “meeting hour 1, meeting hour 2, meeting hour 3, meeting hour 4.” The female singer, accompanied by a female choir, sings of her despair in pointless meetings with no purpose. The chorus consists of the choir singing “When will this madness end?””
When you review the prompt you can see many of the elements of the final song.
But I never told Lyria to sing “the coffee turned to ink.” Lyria made that up.
But I like that addition.
And I have another example.
Image inventiveness
This example is from the images that appeared throughout the video. These were also created by Google; is the image generation capability still called Nano Banana this month?
Anyway, here is the prompt for the noon scene.
“Edit the picture so the time is noon and the lead wombat is still droning on and on. The attendees are restless.”
Google executed my image request.
But look more closely.
I did NOT specify that the koala write the note “Make it end…so sleepy.” Or any of the other notes that this particular koala wrote throughout the day.
Nor did I specify the “out of order” note that appeared on the coffee urn at 10:10 am.
(My little secret: that time was NOT supposed to be 10:10. I asked Google to display a time of 10:45. But since so much of the clock training data uses at 10:10 time, Google got confused.)
But I like those additions.
Take two minutes and twenty-four seconds and watch the reel again, taking note of the few elements specified by me, and the many elements that were “made up” by Google.
Hallucinations can be good, evil, or indifferent
Adding a koala note of frustration is a good thing.
Lying on a job application is a bad thing.
And showing a time of 10:10 instead of the requested time of 10:45? It didn’t materially affect my story, so I was indifferent to it.
Come Back In Two Hours
UPDATE: “Forge Your Future” went live Monday 6/15 8am PDT.
And I will explain what “forge your future” really means.
Why Mountain
Communicating Benefits Over Features, Revisited and Repurposed
In 2021, I wrote a series of posts on the topic of communicating benefits, not features, to identity customers. The first post in the series is here; click at the top of the post to view the other three parts. (And yes, it was originally supposed to be a three-part series, until I wrote a fourth part on a company’s distinct voice.)
But if you don’t want to wade through four Bredemarket posts, just wade through the following two words:
So what?
But if that’s too short for you, I plunged into the Google NotebookLM world and repurposed the four posts as three separate pieces of content: an infographic, a podcast, and a video.
The benefits over features infographic, “Winning the Identity Customer”
I’ve never created a NotebookLM infographic before, so I was interested in seeing how this would turn out.
It’s busy, but ALL infographics are busy. And I like how it visualizes the response-time differences between rapid DNA, biometrics, and computer aided dispatch, where “real time” can mean very different things.
We on the AFIS side learned this the hard way when we introduced ourselves to our new colleagues.
“Hi, SCC folks, welcome to Printrak. You’re joining a company that sells REAL TIME AFIS that delivers results within one minute! Aren’t you impressed?”
The ex-SCC people responded, gently disabusing us of our pretensions to speed.
“Hello, new corporate overlords. We provide computer aided dispatch systems that send police, fire, and medical personnel to crime scenes and emergency sites as soon as possible. If our CAD systems took AN ENTIRE MINUTE to dispatch personnel, PEOPLE WOULD DIE. We use really powerful computers to get personnel dispatched in a second. Enjoy your real time AFIS…amateurs.”
So the company Printrak learned that it needed separate benefit statements, depending upon the product line the company was promoting at any given time. The CAD customers received one set of benefit statements, while the AFIS customers received a separate set.
Because there are different benefits for different “hungry people.”
The benefits over features podcast, “Sell the Outcome, Not the Math”
Unlike infographics, I’ve created multiple NotebookLM podcasts over the years. If you’re not familiar with NotebookLM podcasts, they have two distinct…um…features.
- The podcasts feature a male and female speaker chatting with each other about the subject matter.
- The podcasts are relentlessly positive. If you are feeling down in the dumps, upload your resume to NotebookLM and have the two speakers talking about how wonderful you are.
Anyway, here’s how the two speakers treated my source material.
The benefits over features video, “Stop Selling Features”
Again, I’ve created multiple NotebookLM videos, such as this one on avoiding false differentiators.
Despite the fact that I haven’t been able to customize the video so it doesn’t have the NotebookLM “look.” One identity/biometric company is sharing these videos, and I can tell immediately that it’s NotebookLM content.
Nevertheless I wanted to see the video that I got.
And I finally figured out that if I explicitly upload specific pictures into NotebookLM, they can appear in the final video. Look for this one at the three and a half minute mark.
Other formats
Perhaps I’ll experiment with some of the other output available in NotebookLM, although there are some formats that I will probably never use.
- If I’m going to create a slide deck, I’m going to create it myself.
- I don’t really have a use for flash cards, mind maps, or quizzes. Unless you, my readers, REALLY REALLY REALLY want to be quizzed on benefits and features.
But I now have these three pieces of content. And perhaps the next time I discuss this topic, I can drag the infographic out of my WordPress media library.
And I now have more content to add to Bredemarket’s YouTube channel.
Take the Field
Just because someone loudly declares who they are doesn’t mean it’s true.
Especially when the voice making the identity declaration is Lyria-generated.
Synthetic identity, indeed.
The Complete Song “The Perpetual Roadmap”
My recent video only used 8 seconds of the 30 second Google Lyria song “The Perpetual Roadmap.”
If you’d like to hear all of Google Lyria’s artificial ruminations on the topic, here they are.
The “Liturgy of the Falling Rain” Repurposing Exercise
In case you missed it, I recently took one Google Lyria-generated song, a Canva template, and other text and images and repurposed them as two separate videos: one for Bredemarket, and one for my personal use.
Repurposing is good.
Here is the audio common to both videos.
It’s Time
Let’s Go
On Android APK Sideloading
Apple and Google (and probably Samsung) defend their lockdown of their app stores (and the resulting 15-30% or so cut they receive from app revenue) by saying that their “App Store” and “Google Play Store” provide safety to users. Would you want to risk your phone by downloading from sleazy sources, or would you prefer to get your apps from the name that you trust?
If that were true, I wouldn’t have to clean a particular person’s phone every once in a while because he downloaded an app from one of those stores, which then proceeded to download a bunch of other apps.
But on the other hand, there are sometimes legitimate reasons to “sideload” Android apps (Android Package Kits, or APKs) from alternative sources. Maybe the app is one that shouldn’t be accessed by run-on-the-mill consumers, so therefore an alternative distribution mechanism is needed. I could name some examples, but if I named them I’d have to kill you.
But as Lifewire notes, you have to take a few extra steps to allow downloads from outside the App Store and Google Play Store.
The biggest step, of course, is to allow the download of “unknown” apps from non-Apple/Google sources. Needless to say, you should only download apps from a site that you trust. No, not mikrosofft.com.
- Open the Settings app and tap Apps or Apps & Notifications.
- Tap the three dots in the upper-right corner. If you don’t see that, skip down to the next step.
- Tap Special access, or Special app access on some Android devices.
- Tap Install unknown apps.
- Tap Chrome (or whichever web browser you use).
- Switch the toggle next to Allow from this source so it turns on.
For more details on APK installation, check the Lifewire page.
Bredemarket 