- 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?
September, 2026:
Odd Lots
Advice from an AI on YouTube
I don’t watch TV much, and haven’t for quite awhile. It’s a bad use of my time, and never more than recently, when a friend sent me a link to a YouTube group called Isabella Advice. The link was to a video on prostate health, which is a topic of considerable (if fairly recent) interest of mine.
Well. What we have is a video of Isabella, a pleasant-looking forty-ish African American woman who says she’s an MD. It’s a 24-minute video, and I watched it to the end. By the time I reached the end, I knew the truth: The video was generated by an AI, and although the advice was fairly sound (and mostly aligned with the rest of my research) the presentation was a little, well, freaky.
What I noticed first were her hand gestures. There were five or six variations, but each variation was used identically many times during the video. She raises her hands to the same height, sometimes alone, sometimes clasped, sometimes just rising at once without touching one another. Her hands remained in her lap unless she was raising them, and the position of her body didn’t change except for a very slight up-an-down bounce. I’ve seen enough videos to know that presenters rarely sit this odd sort of stock still—not for 24 minutes, at least.
There are captions of what she’s saying, and her voice is good, if a little monotonous. But then…the caption contained a weight, something like 20 lbs. She didn’t say “twenty pounds.” She said, “twenty ell-bees.” Later the caption read ”with your daily 30-inute” with the initial “m” missing, and that’s precisely what she said, “thirty in-oot.” (It’s at 16:35 in the video.) She was literally pronouncing typos.
That nailed it. I’m guessing that someone who knew something about prostate health wrote a script, and the AI voice read it mercilessly verbatim.
When I’ve watched YouTube, it’s usually because somebody is doing something visual and explaining it: crafts, ham radio, building electronic projects, robots, telescopes, and so on. The visual focus isn’t 100% on the presenter. I could have read what the AI was saying in probably five or six minutes. For the most part, I research by reading, unless there are necessary graphics. Watching an AI sitting in a chair reading a script for half an hour is truly a waste of my time. I won’t do it again, but I’m going to watch for other examples of AI in use, not just on YouTube but anywhere else I run across it. If I spot any, you’ll read about them here.
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.
Review: The Commons Captured by Michael J. Bommarito II
I’ve had an eye out for a history of Wikipedia for some time, and the other day stumbled across The Commons Captured, by Michael J. Bommarito II. And yes, it does provide a reasonably detailed history going back to Wikipedia’s origins in 2001. But that’s not really the book’s focus, as the title suggests.
In addition to the history of Wikipedia, the book provides a history of what Richard Stallman created and called “copyleft:” a system of licensing that provides intellectual property for free, with the caveat that all derivative works maintain the price tag of $0.00. It’s the Creative Commons, along with ShareAlike, generally abbreviated as CC BY-SA, now at version 3.0. (See this link for details.) I released my Free Pascal from Square One ebook under CC BY-SA 3.0. From a height, this means that you can share it, pass it around, and borrow parts of it for your own projects, but you cannot sell it. This is the license that supposedly surrounds Wikipedia and its (now) seven million articles. And it worked great for over 20 years.
Then alluvasudden AI happened, and everything changed.
That’s the book’s focus: How AI took advantage of Wikipedia’s freeness, and how the powers that operate Wikipedia broke Creative Commons and licensed Wikipedia’s content to AI companies…for money.
Really. Wikipedia’s operators created the Wikimedia Foundation as a licensed nonprofit. AI tech firms had begun training their AIs on Wikipedia’s content almost as soon as there were AIs, without paying or asking permission. Hey, reading Wikipedia is free, right? So why not? Well, because the AI companies sold access to their AIs to the public for money. And having digested Wikipedia’s seven million articles, those AIs began answering questions from AI firms’ customers using Wikipedia’s content.
The Wikimedia Foundation created a licensing system that offered a license to AI firms. Many (but not all) of the AI firms paid money—big money—for the right to train their AIs on Wikipedia’s content. Granted, it takes money for servers to host something as big and as popular as Wikipedia. But the Foundation brought in way more cash from licensing AI training than it needed to keep the servers pumping.
The real bummer is that Wikipedia’s articles are written and edited by volunteers who pocket nothing for their time and effort. And none of that license money ended up in those volunteers’ pockets. None. Also, as more people hooked up with AI, fewer people went up to read Wikipedia itself.
So what’s the end of the story? Well, the story hasn’t ended. Michael Bommarito sketched out four possible outcomes of the AI licensing issue over the coming years, but he isn’t optimistic, and I won’t summarize those here. Buy the book.
What I found most fascinating was the gray haze that still surrounds the issue of what AIs store, how they store it, and whether or not training AIs falls under the legal category of fair use. Wikipedia is not copyrighted, but copylefted, so that shouldn’t matter. But…the Foundation is selling Wikipedia access to the AI firms, who sell access to their trained AIs to a (mostly) paying public. So much for copyleft.
The book is very well-written but dense, and demands close attention. I found it puzzling that the book makes no mention of Justapedia, which is a very good Wikipedia fork that I use and may someday (as time permits) attempt to write some articles for. The book does mention Grokipedia and Everipedia, though not at length. So I’ll keep looking.
But if you’re interested in the emerging legal issues surrounding AI training, this is definitely the book to read.
