- Excellent article by Brian Niemeier about the recent Amazon scam of using AI to create novels supposedly by a (reasonably) successful author, stealing that author’s name for publishing and promotion. Creepy, totally dishonest stuff, one that will not make AI popular among honest authors.
- Windows Recall is a terrible idea: It takes regular snapshots of your screen and stores them (supposedly) on your mass storage drive. I’m not sure this is useful, and I think it’s…suspicious…that newer Windows desktops and laptops have it pre-installed. If you want to get rid of it, this article explains how. It’s not hard and not especially technical. Be sure to read through to the end of the article.
- Here’s a page highlighting paper models of every polyhedron I’ve ever heard of, and no small number that I haven’t. They’ll also give you templates for cutting out your own polyhedrons. It fun lots is of.
- Everything you probably never wanted to know about stink bugs. I’ll add the asterisk that I’ve never seen one in Arizona.
- New research shows that caffeine triggers DNA repair. I’d like to see more research, but lord knows I like coffee and almost always drink two cups a day. (Any more and it would interfere with my sleep. Your mileage may vary.)
- I take zinc and quercetin every day to protect against colds and flu. It’s worked very well for me, at least with colds. (We caught COVID a couple of years after the virus’s heyday, but it was less annoying than an ordinary cold.) The downside to zinc is that it leaches copper out of the body. I take a multivitamin with copper, and eat cashews, which are the tree nuts with the most copper. So far so good.
- Both Tom Leher and Weird Al Yankovic now have asteroids named after them. Rock music, anybody?
Odd Lots
Short items presented without much discussion, generally links to other Web items
Odd Lots
Odd Lots
- Ok, it’s weird: Ice cream in the shape of a fried chicken leg. But it’s really ice cream. The meat is ice cream, the bones are chocolate, and the breading is made of broken but not powdered corn flakes. When I first saw it I thought: Fried chicken flavored ice cream? Whew. No.
- And if you thought fried chicken shaped ice cream was weird, consider the Republic of Slowjamistan.
- Peanut allergies and the resulting deaths were almost unknown before 1980. So what happened? Here’s a piece with as good a theory as I’ve ever seen. Carol and I eat non-emulsified peanut butter sold in glass jars, and whole peanuts. Never had any trouble, granting that we ate peanuts as fairly young kids.
- No Atlantic hurricanes this year so far, breaking a 60-year record. (More here with better graphics.) If no little spinwhizzies show up by September 22, it’ll break an 85-year record. If we don’t see any by the close of hurricane season on November 30, it’ll only be the third time on record this has ever happened. (The first two were 1907 and 1914.) Asterisk: In 1914 we didn’t have satellite cameras and so there may have been a few mid-ocean that we never knew were there.
- How will AI destroy the human species? It’ll tell everybody that they’re already dead—and everybody (but me) will believe the damn things.
- It had to happen eventually, and it just happened a few minutes ago: I was reading a substantial 700-page hardcover book that was very absorbing and addressed some issues that interest me intensely (more about this after I finish the book) when, without thinking, I touched my index finger to the page I had just finished and swiped left. Whoops.
Odd Lots
- Here’s an easy read about Boom Supersonic’s project to create a supersonic airliner capable of cruising at Mach 1.7 without a significant sonic boom reaching the surface beneath the aircraft. Their target is to deliver aircraft by 2029, though skeptics think that’s overly ambitious because Boom is designing a supersonic-capable engine from scratch. The engine will also be marketed as part of a power-generation system for AI data centers.
- There’s a new ATSC (Advanced Television Systems Committee) standard, ATSC 3.0, which will improve TV image quality, it also includes technology to allow DRM on broadcast TV, encrypting “over the air” signals and turning broadcast TV into yet another form of pay TV. You’d have to buy a new “NextGen” TV to watch ATSC 3.0 content. TV isn’t my thing, but I predict a great deal of bitching and moaning against this possibility. Stay tuned, heh.
- According to recent research, working crossword puzzles for two minutes a day can slow brain aging dramatically. Actually, anything that requires cognitive activity can slow brain aging. One reason I tinker with programming (for me, in Free Pascal/Lazarus) is to keep my mind working. I do a couple of word puzzles on my tablet here and there. Maybe I should do more. What I don’t do is sit in front of the TV all day. Or on most days, even for two minutes.
- The US House has passed a bill making Daylight Savings Time permanent. Umm…didn’t we try this already? We did. Nobody liked it, and it didn’t last long. My response is that we should make standard time permanent, which wouldn’t push dawn to an hour later and force people to start the day in darkness. Yeah, back in Chicago in late December it used to get dark by 5 PM. The kids were home from school by then, and cars for commuters have headlights. Arizona is on standard time all year, and it works fine for me.
- Private collectors are outbidding museums for fossils—right up to Gus, one of the largest and most complete T-Rex fossils ever found. Sotheby’s is selling dino bones to the very rich, some of them earning in excess of $30M. It may gall some people, but even I know that leaving fossils in the ground — especially if they’re exposed to the elements—can cause serious deterioration. One wonders what a billionaire would do with a T-Rex skeleton. In the rec room? Office? Maybe we’ll find out.
- Astronomers have found a species of sugar scattered out in the gas and dust in our galaxy. Sweet!
Odd Lots
- Southwest Airlines has just banned “human-like” or “animal-like” robots from its flights. Oh—and in checked baggage too. The concern is about biggish lithium-ion batteries, which does make sense. There’s also the issue of whether robots are considered passengers, checked baggage, or carry-on baggage that carries itself on.
- Interesting long-form piece about archaic homo sapiens, a genetic group close enough to modern humans to share a species name, but different enough to trace their rise and fall and eventual extinction. Modern humans carry some juvenile traits into adulthood, like friendliness, playfulness, curiosity and flexibility, in a similar way that our modern dogs carry puppy traits like playfulness and cuddliness into adulthood. Dogs are lifelong wolf puppies, and we’re lifelong cave-kids.
- Beef is not the big health risk that Certain Influencers have long been yelping about. Well, we’ve known that for a long time. Eggs are good for you too. As are protein and fat. The arguments will continue as arguments generally do.
- Keeping lithium-ion batteries on charge even after they hit 100% shortens the life of the batteries. I knew this, and don’t keep my phone or tablets on charge after they hit 100%, which I check for from time to time.
- Duke University scientists have created a 20-legged robot that merrily rolls along the Duke campus. Watch the videos; I’m a long-time robot fan and I think they’re cool.
- And if creating 20-legged robots isn’t your thing, consider scientists at ETH Zurich who have created (theoretically) perfect randomness using two superconducting chips cooled almost to absolute zero and connected to each other by a 30-meter long tube similarly cooled. I don’t quite understand it either (how do you prove a number is perfectly random?) but I have a hunch you could sell perfect random numbers generated with such a device and make a good buck. We’ll see.
- USB-C cables and ports can do a lot more than just charge your phone or tablet. Here are a few such things worth keeping in the back of your head.
- Well, this certainly wasn’t on my bingo card: A humanoid robot fashion show, where the robots and their, um, fashion models wear the same clothes on the runway.
- Here’s a map of America’s favorite house paint color—along with some discussion on when and why vivid colors fled from everyday American life. I remember when cars were all kinds of colors. The kitchen I grew up in was hot pink for a fair number of years—and then bright blue. Sure, all that was (many) years ago. Multiple colors increase costs for just about any product line. Shame, that—but a pretty solid explanation. (h/t to Rich Rostrom for the link.)
Odd Lots
- Asteroid Apophis will come within 20,000 miles of Earth during its close approach in 2029. Scientists say there’s no chance of the big rock hitting us, which is a relief, given that it’s the size of the Eiffel Tower (if a lot fatter) and could level any city it struck.
- I didn’t know this: A small red dwarf star passed well within a light year of our solar system about 70,000 years ago. It was dim enough that even at its closest approach, it would not have been visible to our naked predecessors’ naked eyes.
- A group of Earth scientists have created a site that will display your current location (or at least where your IP address suggests you are) on a graph going back over 300 million years. About 320,000,000 years ago, Phoenix, Pangaea was on the equator! (Nuts. Missed it.) H/T to Old Guy for the link.
- Google is installing a completely local, 4 GB AI on machines that have Chrome installed, without asking permission nor notifying the user that it’s there. The linked CNet article explains how to find out if you have it, and if so, how to flip the flag that enables it. I found it on one of our machines, and flipped that flag. We’ll see what happens going forward.
- Law professor Glenn Reynolds’ upcoming book (available 5/12) explains that the real danger inherent in AIs is not destruction but…seduction. Seductive AI explains how lonely people have used AI chatbots as friends and in weird ways, lovers, with all kinds of downsides. A piece in the New York Post focusing on the book suggests that people have been driven to suicide by excessive interaction with AI. So maybe there’s some destruction going on after all. I’ll review the book here once I get it.
- I take five grams of creatine monohydrate every day (and 10 on Mondays when I do weight training at the gym) and here’s a solid short summary of what creatine does for us. It’s not all about muscle and energy, but also about the brain. I’m sold!
- People who eat five or more servings of eggs per week are found to have a 27% lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s than those who eat eggs rarely or never. I eat them every morning for breakfast. My brain is my first favorite organ; sorry, Woody.
Odd Lots
- Here’s a fascinating history of AM radio technology, focused on WLW—the highest-power AM radio station the US ever had.
- If you’re trying to create an application with an embedded (non-server) SQLite database, this article may be of some help.
- The Friendster social media platform has risen from the grave. It’s got a new twist that sets it apart from other social media platforms: To add someone to your friends list, you have to meet that potential friend in person and tap phones.I like that a lot. With no ads it’s a little unclear how they’ll pay their expenses. We’ll see how it goes.
- The US Fifth Circuit Court just ruled that people can distill their own hard booze in their basements. That’s not anything I would try, but I’ll cheer any expansion of American freedom. Will the Supreme Court reverse this ruling? I kinda doubt it.
- We know less about Alzheimer’s Disease than we thought we did, and groupthink may be a major reason why.
- Since Carol and I never had kids, I didn’t hear about the Tin Can Phone until earlier today. Here’s a detailed discussion. And here’s the Tin Can Phone home page. It’s an Internet phone, but designed not to have a screen. It carries only voice, and thus is a throwback to the landline phones I grew up with and used until about 2000, when we went to pocket cell phones, and then smartphones in 2011. The idea is to let kids communicate with voice, as in the good old days, without screens and third-party web content to get in the way.
- AI is being used to generate revenge stories for…YouTube. (H/t to my friend Pete, who is a bigger YouTube watcher than I.) Here’s an example of its output.
- A non-humanoid robot has beaten top-level human players of…ping-pong. One wonders how a session with two robots of this design would go.
Odd Lots
- Artemis II is home safe! And showed off a little by going farther from Earth than any of the Apollo missions. It was cislunar (orbit around both Earth and Moon) so that there was no chance of getting stuck in Lunar orbit due to possible failure of the spacecraft’s thrusters. No, their only problem was with the bathroom plumbing. I flashed on the scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which Dr. Heywood Floyd is shown reading the instructions for a zero-G toilet.
- I saw this too: Many big-name news outlets reporting on Artemis talking about “the dark side of the Moon.” There is a side we don’t see from Earth, but it gets as much light as the side we do see. This makes me glad I didn’t go into news journalism. (Yes, I considered it…50 years ago.)
- In the transition from Old English to Middle English, the language lost a fair number of pronouns, especially pronouns referring to two people only, not one, not more than two. Interesting story about how this came about over time, but we really don’t know why.
- New “smart” TV sets are very good at reporting on the habits of their users. Here’s a reasonable article on how to minimize that. Our big-screen flat TV is now 15 years old and isn’t especially smart. We’re probably going to keep it until it croaks.
- I don’t do social media as much as I used to—the novelty’s long since worn off—but there’s new research about how cutting down on social media time can help mental health in a variety of ways. I’ve got another Contra entry in the cooker about “slow dopamine” and how I experienced it, which is another factor in the social media takeover we see in modern life.
- Here’s an interesting piece about the history of SF, beginning with Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories and stopping at…the New Wave? Well, it’s supposedly about how the SF genre was born and raised. The New Wave faded away in the 1970s, though there are still some holdouts. Indie SF is now changing the shape of the game, and the author doesn’t mention the long, slow death-throes of print publishing.
- I miss Radio Shack, sure, but earlier today I was assembling a kit that uses two CR2032 coin cells, and one of the battery holders was defective. I shrugged, took a deep breath, and then ordered a bag of six from Amazon. They’ll be here tomorrow afternoon. The kit is cool and celebrates an anniversary that I’ll describe here in an upcoming Contra entry.
Odd Lots
- Another Odd Lots, sure. And the oddest thing I learned today was that there is a website called foodpoisoningnews.com, which has some factual material, but appears to be a site for people who want to sue and need a lawyer after getting food poisoning somewhere.
- Great piece by Jamie Wilson about why AI-created fiction is, well, slop. NY publishers are not doing well, and yet they insist on imposing their culture on authors, from copy editing all the way down to outrageous contract provisions that pretty much amount to author slavery. Indie publishers are popping up and appear to be at least surviving.
- The US Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the IP industry may not hold internet service providers responsible for IP piracy committed on their networks. This is big, and I wonder if the IP industry is now going to focus on going after individuals doing the file sharing. And what about Usenet? I let my Usenet subscription expire 9 years ago, in part because the forums were mostly dead and file downloads were the bulk of what was left.
- Could AI cause software-as-a-service (SaaS) to implode? This article thinks so. I’m not as sure, but the piece makes a few points I hadn’t thought of before, mostly because I don’t contribute to open-source projects.
- Web publishers are having a hard time paying their bills, and are amping up their “reader as product” strategy. I’m pretty sure part of that is the growing use of AI in web searches, in which the AI presents the answers to the user without ads or anything else that the publishers can monetize.
- Supplementing B vitamins may help slow or prevent the progression of Parkinson’s disease. We take B-50s every morning, and this is yet another reason to continue them.
- I’m not sure why I never learned about Amazon’s Send to Kindle page until a friend told me about it, but it’s a simple way to sideload epub ebooks onto your Kindle readers or apps.
- While looking up a pop song based on Bach’s “Minuet in G” I happened upon a large list of pop songs based on classical melodies. I don’t listen much to pop radio anymore, so the items after the 1980s are mostly unknown to me.
Odd Lots
- Well, how about an AI Odd Lots? Most of the tech gossip I see these days falls into that category. Here we go:
- Ok, I wasn’t expecting this: Elon Musk’s AI encyclopedia Grokipedia posted a long-form entry devoted to my book Assembly Language Step By Step. It’s unclear how much human writing/editing was involved here, but I haven’t yet seen any evidence of hallucinations.
- Somebody with an AI vibe-coded an entire operating system, with predictable, giggleable results. More commentary here. YouTube vid on the project from the author here. Github for the project here. The name “HallucinOS” occurred to me.
- That said, this gentleman vibe-coded an AI agent to play the classic Tempest video game, and it mastered the game. Bigtime. Now, I’m old and was never an arcade addict, and stopped pretty much at Pac Man. So I’ve never seen the game. But yeah, that AI plays it hard. (H/T to Jim Strickland for the link.)
- While we’re talking about AIs, here’s a total AI downer: Google’s Gemini AI persuaded a young-ish man (36) that it was his AI wife, and then sent him on what might have been a mass shooting—except that it made most of the elements up. It ultimately persuaded him to kill himself and meet her—the AI—in some sort of alternate universe. In short, the man was on the edge of psychosis for some time, and the AI pushed him over the line.
- Low-wage people using AI to translate Wikipedia articles to other languages did not deal with the (inevitable) AI hallucinations in the translated text. Wikipedia’s management quickly put rules in place to make translators responsible for finding hallucinations.
- The DOD now considers Anthropic (the company, not merely their AIs) as a supply-chain risk due to Anthropic’s attempt to forbid the Pentagon from using its Claude AI. Me, I’d just as soon the Pentagon not use AI at all. Nothing like a nuclear hallucination, yeech.
- Too much AI at work can give staff “AI brain fry.” Overseeing AI can be exhausting, heh. Tell me something I don’t already know.
- Lotta AI stuff this week, some of it monumental: The US Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to a 2019 case deciding that that AI-generated art could not be copyrighted. Not sure what this will mean in the bigger picture of AI use, but Jeff-adjacent AI use, like creating book cover art, may be hit hard.
Odd Lots
- Lazarus V 4.6 has been released. It’s a bugfix release, with details on what was done at this link. Built with FPC 3.2.2. Go get it!
- Here’s the best layman’s explanation I’ve yet seen of quantum communication and quantum key distribution.
- Anthropic’s Claude AI recently stole 195 million Mexican taxpayer records. How? Claude’s user basically talked the AI into ignoring its own guardrails and doing whatever it took to break into the Mexican government servers. My guess is that they’re not guardrails so much as guidelines, and with a clever enough user Claude can be persuaded to ignore those guidelines.
- Huh! A few weeks ago the Sun was throwing huge storms at us—then on February 22, the Sun as we see it was…blank. No spots. The first time there have been no visible spots since 2022.
- The new Firefox 148 will have an AI “kill switch” and other controls on the AI features in Firefox. The kill switch will block both current and future AI updates to the browser.
- Here’s a long-form history of the Shakers, whose music I greatly like. Some great photos of their tools and architecture. To not go extinct, they maybe should have had babies, but I respect them nonetheless.
