- 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.
March, 2026:
Odd Lots
Grokipedia V0.2
Having spent some time with Grokipedia back in October of last year and written it up, I went back earlier today and took another look. It’s now V0.2. More significantly, it now has 6,092,140 articles. (Back in early November, it had 882,279.)
Here are some links that are worth a look:
- Jeff Duntemann
- Assembly Language Step-by-Step
- Turbo Pascal
- Free Pascal
- Pascal MT+
- UCSD Pascal
- Lazarus
- Modula-2
- Modula-2+
- Oberon
- Oberon-2
- Mesa (a programming language created by Xerox PARC)
- Sarah Hoyt
- Brian Niemeier
Wikipedia has an article on Edison Park, the Chicago neighborhood where I grew up. So does Grokipedia—but it’s not the same article. Grokipedia has much more detail, and was not copied from Wikipedia, as many of Grokipedia’s critics claim. Now, I found an error in the Grokipedia article: The northern boundary of Edison Park is not Touhy Avenue but Howard Street. A small enough thing, but if precision is required, will the AI be able to provide it?
I have a few quibbles with the biography Grokipedia posted of me; it made no mention of the 2009 third edition of Assembly Language Step-By-Step, and did not mention Carol at all. There was also some repetition about my projects like Cosmo the robot and my two home-made reflecting telescopes. I had hoped for a detailed bibliography like those on Wikipedia; no joy there. Those are gripes I found while I had my editor’s hat on, and in truth I’d rather have too much information in the piece than too little.
Although I’ve read the other articles in the above list, I didn’t put them under my editorial microscope. I was surprised at its mention of Modula2+ and Oberon 2, languages I’d not heard of before. Xerox in-house language Mesa has an article but its successor Cedar doesn’t. I did learn that there is a programming language called Haggis, for use in (where else?) Scotland. The lack of photos on Grokipedia continues, as I mentioned in my first post on the topic.
My conclusion? Grokipedia is the best AI of the several I’ve tried so far. I saw no gross AI hallucinations (like me being dead, sheesh) and significant topics are mostly covered. I didn’t read anything political and hence potentially biased; I was looking for programming languages and writers who are also friends, like Sarah Hoyt.
The research continues. I’ll post another pertinent entry here when I find something worth reporting.
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.
Scraps: “May You Always”
I haven’t done a piece on scraps in a couple of years, so if you didn’t see it back in 2023, here’s a link to where I define it. Basically, stuff that pops into your head without a trigger or other reason. Happens to me all the time. But today I had a weird one.
While I was grocery shopping, a song popped into my head: “May You Always,” by the McGuire Sisters. It peaked on the Hot 100 on January 5, 1959. I haven’t heard for a number of years. I liked it (still do) for the Sisters’ voices and harmony. I could hear it as clearly as though it were on the radio. I had it on my college-years 8” reel-to-real off-the-radio mix tapes, and heard it a lot. So it’s no huge surprise that I remembered not only the melody and harmony but also the lyrics.
Here they are if you’re not familiar with the song. (I suspect a lot of my older readers might be.) Here’s the Sisters singing it. It’s clearly a person wishing another person well. Given who’s singing, it’s no surprise that I consider the lyric’s viewpoint singer a woman. The lyrics don’t say it out loud, but it sure sounds like a breakup song. The relationship is over, and she’s wishing him all the best.
But…why did they break up? She’s wishing for him to find someone to love as much as she loves him. So it wasn’t that he found another girlfriend. People break up for other reasons, sure. But then it hit me in the back of the head: She’s dying. They love one another deeply, but she’s on her deathbed, saying her goodbyes, with nothing but loving wishes that he continue on with his life and find someone new to love.
In reading the lyrics now, that interpretation seems obvious to me. Why?
I’m 73. A fair number of my friends have died. You get into your seventies, and that will happen. It’s part of the curve that we’re on. It’s a little odd that about as many women as men in my social circles have died. But that’s how it is. (Two of the women were, egad—murdered.)
I bring this up only as a reminder that getting old means you see others leave this world much more often than when you’re young. But young women die too—and that seems to lie at the emotional core of “May You Always.” That wouldn’t have occurred to me when I was 30 or 40. Well, it occurs to me now.
