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More Grok. More Crock.

May 10th, 2025
by Jeff Duntemann.
3 comments

Everybody’s going nuts over AI—and tossing endless billions into the AI funding pot. I’m skeptical (about that and plenty of other things) and I run tests now and then to see whether that skepticism is justified.

Hoo-boy! Got another Grok crock in a hammerlock, to coin a (useless) phrase.

Last night when I was beginning to wind down for the night, I decided to throw another question at Grok, the X/Twitter AI. Here’s the question: "What are Jeff Duntemann’s humorous works of SF and fantasy?" Here’s what it said:

Jeff Duntemann’s humorous works in science fiction and fantasy, based on available information, primarily include:

  1. Firejammer (Science Fiction, 2017): A short novel (or novella, depending on classification) that’s a playful homage to 1960s-90s pulp sci-fi. It follows a shapeshifting alien, Flammenwerfer O’Bernt, who crash-lands on Earth and gets entangled in comedic misadventures with humans. Readers on Goodreads (4.0 rating) praise its lighthearted, humorous tone, witty dialogue, and absurd scenarios, comparing it to Douglas Adams or Robert Sheckley. Its brevity and focus on fun make it a standout for humor.

  2. Short Stories in Ten Gentle Opportunities (Fantasy/Science Fiction, 2016): This collection of short stories blends humor with speculative elements. Notable stories include:

    • “Whale Meat”: A comedic fantasy tale about a magical spell gone wrong, with absurd and whimsical consequences.

    • “Drumlin Boiler” and “Drumlin Amplifier”: Part of Duntemann’s Drumlin series, these stories mix fantasy with quirky, humorous worldbuilding, featuring magical artifacts and eccentric characters in a steampunk-inspired setting. Readers note the dry wit and clever premises.

    • Other stories in the collection, like those involving time travel or oddball tech, often carry a satirical or lighthearted edge, though not all are overtly comedic.

Notes:

  • Duntemann’s humor leans toward witty, satirical, and absurd rather than slapstick, often poking fun at genre tropes or human quirks.

  • The Cunning Blood (2005), his other major novel, has some satirical elements but is primarily a serious hard SF thriller, not a humorous work.

  • His short fiction, especially in Ten Gentle Opportunities, is where most of his comedic fantasy and SF shines, as he experiments with whimsical ideas and quirky characters.

  • Limited information exists on other humorous works, as Duntemann’s output is relatively small, and some stories (e.g., from Drumlins or Soul Bent series) remain unpublished or obscure.

If you’re the least bit familiar with my fiction, you’ll probably spot some elements of Grok’s acid trip. (Calling them “hallucinations” is a slander on the word “hallucinations.”) So let me lay them all out in a bulleted list:

  • Firejammer was published in 2019, not 2017.
  • It takes place on an alien planet, not Earth.
  • Although there is some humor on the surface, the novel’s theme is serious, and there is plenty of danger, mayhem, and potentially fatal situations.
  • There are no shapeshifting aliens in the story, certainly none named “Flammenwerfer O’Bernt”. (The German word Flammenwerfer means “flamethrower.”) I checked several search engines and saw not one hit for “Flammenwerfer O’Bernt.” Grok made it up from whole cloth.
  • I checked Goodreads, where Firejammer has 3 reviews. None of the reviews emphasize its humor, nor compare the work to Douglas Adams or Robert Sheckley. Maybe this is picking nits, but the novel has earned a 4.6 rating there, not 4.0.
  • Ten Gentle Opportunities is humorous. But it’s a novel, not a collection of short stories.
  • “Whale Meat” is a dead serious fantasy story, without any humor at all.
  • I have attempted but never finished (much less published) a time-travel story, and don’t much care for them as a category.
  • There is no story named “Drumlin Amplifier” by me or anyone else. Intriguing title, though.
  • “Soul Bent” is not an SF book series. It’s a rock band.

You get the idea. I think the problem is this: If you ask an AI like Grok about a well-known figure, author, musician, whatever, you’ll probably get correct answers, with perhaps an occasional slip. I’m not famous but I’ve been around for a long time and there is plenty of material about me online. It looks like, when Grok doesn’t have enough information for a quick answer (what I quoted above happened in less than ten seconds) it starts making things up.

The one thing Grok simply can’t say is, “I don’t know.”

I am supremely puzzled by one thing: Grok completely botched descriptions of two of my books, both of which are published on KDP and have detailed descriptions posted there.

Anyway. You get the idea. Be careful with AI. I think of it as the poltergeist of computing: It throws data around, emits odd statements, and tells lies anytime it damned well pleases.

Posted in: None Of The Above.

New Edition of FreePascal From Square One

May 7th, 2025
by Jeff Duntemann.
10 comments

Once I got The Everything Machine published on KDP this past March, I went back to a project I’ve tinkered with for almost 15 years: FreePascal from Square One, a 354-page PDF providing an introduction to programming, using the FreePascal FOSS compiler and the Lazarus IDE for editing and building. I need to mention here that the book does not go into Windows programming, OOP, software components, or the Lazarus GUI builder. I have a concept for a second book for those topics, and have written some of it, and borrowed a little from my portions of The Delphi 2 Explorer. No schedule yet, but I work on it when time permits.

FreePascal from Square One really is a free ebook. It’s a distillation of the four editions of my Pascal tutorial, Complete Turbo Pascal, which first appeared in 1985 and culminated in Borland Pascal 7 From Square One in 1993. I sold a lot of those books and made plenty of money, so I’m now giving it away, in hopes of drawing more people into the Pascal universe.

The book begins at the beginning of the beginning, and explains the ideas behind programming, drawing on metaphors from daily life, before jumping into coding. I’ve turned loose increasingly polished revisions on a regular basis since 2011 or so. This one has things none of the earlier revisions had: A new chapter on simple Pascal file I/O, and a clickable table of contents.

The TOC thing made me nuts for awhile. I tried to make it work using InDesign, but InDesign (my 2005-era copy, at least) can’t do it. I know it can be done—I have a couple of technical ebook PDFs with clickable TOCs—but needed to buy a high-end PDF editing tool to make it work. The product is PDF X-Change Pro from Tracker Software. It’s not free, but if you do any amount of work with PDFs, it’s essential. The Pro-level product comes with a 1,372-page manual—in PDF format, of course. It took me most of a day plowing through that monster manual to find out how to make clickable links in PDFs, but once I located that part, adding links to the TOC took me less than an hour.

It’s not tied to TOCs. You can define a clickable rectangle anywhere in a PDF, and specify what page that clickable rectangle will send you to. I drew rectangles all around the lines in the TOC, then right-clicked each rectangle and specified a destination page number for each line.

If you want the book, it’s right here. You’re welcome to share it around, post it on your site, or give it to anyone who might be find it useful. If you’re interested in FreePascal and Lazarus, here’s where to go to download them. They’re as close as you’ll get to Delphi in the free software universe, and it’s about the only programming environment that I use these days, unless I duck back into x64 assembly. Give it a try. It’s bogglingly good.

Posted in: Daybook.
Tagged: · · ·

Do Italics Demean or Exalt?

Apr 22nd, 2025
by Jeff Duntemann.
3 comments

I recently stumbled across a weirdness in the culture of writing: People (editors mostly, but some authors) objecting to the use of italics to set off literal text in another language. To them, the practice is othering, which after sniffing around for a bit I found a number of definitions. The Cambridge Dictionary’s definition is this: “The act of treating someone as though they are not part of a group and are different in some way.” There are others. What the definitions have in common is that othering is about people, not words in a language. I would use the word “shunning,” which is specifically about people, to demonstrate their otherness.

There are a lot of different uses of italics: simple emphasis, a term’s first definition, literal thoughts of characters, formal names of books, plays, ships, and so on. With one exception (stay tuned) I rarely use words from other languages unless they are being absorbed into common English usage and are already chin-deep. With a lot of these, the italics could go either way: Do we italicize “bon mot”? How about “fin de siècle”? or “que sera, sera”? I lean toward italics; again, stay tuned.

People who have read Drumlin Circus or The Everything Machine (and if you haven’t, please do!) are aware of the Bitspace Institute, a cult on the drumlins world obsessed with returning to Earth. They other themselves by excluding women, wearing distinctive clothes, living in a ritual-rich, monastic sort of setting—and speaking classical Latin among themselves, especially in front of non-Institute people, to further demonstrate their otherness. Here’s a sample, from The Everything Machine:

With one foot set a few decimeters ahead of the other, McKinnon tipped
his head back slightly and shouted his command in the Tongue: “Ego Alvah
McKinnon, Consul! Regulam ordinis nostri violastis! Arma ponite, exite et
ante me flectite!” [I am Consul Alvah McKinnon! You have violated the Rule
of our order! Lay down your weapons, come forth, and kneel before me!]

(McKinnon is the senior consul of the Institute. When he speaks a command, Institute men are required to obey.) The use of Latin is a characteristic of the Institute, so across the novel are short exchanges in “The Tongue” as they call it. I put a translation within square brackets after each Latin section. It’s part of the atmosphere surrounding the Institute, and I want it to be noticed. So in a way, it’s another use of italics as emphasis.

In my YA novel Complete Sentences, Eric’s mother speaks some Polish here and there:

Charlene set down her kielbasa. “Mrs. Lund, How do you say ‘Thank you’ in Polish?”

“Dziękuję.”

Here, that dziękuję is Polish is obvious from context. This isn’t always the case:

It might be too late. Bialek poked at the lock’s keypad. Szczury! Someone had gotten to it first!

You might guess from context that it’s some kind of expletive, and it is. Here, “szczury” is Polish for “rats”. The singular form is szczur. Now, there’s a problem with some words, especially from Slavic languages: If you’ve never seen them before, they could look like typos or evidence of corruption in the underlying file. The word “tak” in Polish means “yes.” Used alone, some readers might think it’s a misspelling of “tack.”

Another issue is that the same word might exist in two languages and mean very different things. In Tagalog (the language of the Philippines) the word for sister is “ate.” “Taco” in Japanese means “octopus.” “Slut” is Swedish for “the end.” There are lists of more here and here. My position is that italicizing a word from another language will warn the reader not to jump to conclusions. What italicization means is “this is a word in another language.” There is no judgment whatsoever in that caution.

To the contrary. English is famous for absorbing words from other languages into itself, essentially “othering” those words away from their origins and dropping them heedlessly into the English stewpot. In a sense, italicizing a word from another language honors it as a part of a language and a worthy culture that should be respected, and not treated as just another word collection that we can pick and choose from to fatten up our English.

All that said, it’s really not something worth fighting over. From what I read earlier today, the AP Stylebook recently picked it up. No big deal; I learned on and remain a Chicago Manual of Style guy. I just wanted to point out that most arguments of this type can go both or many ways, and there are nuances that should not be conveniently ignored in the cause of self-aggrandizement. I’ll keep writing the way I’ve always written. Others may do what they want. English survived Finnegan’s Wake. It’ll survive the nuanced uses of italics, whatever those turn out to be as the years roll on.

Posted in: Ideas & Analysis.
Tagged: · ·

Odd Lots

Apr 9th, 2025
by Jeff Duntemann.
5 comments
  • I wrote about the dearth of color variety in cars a few years back. This morning I ran across an article about the same topic. And not only in cars, but in clothes and much else. He sees color variety as way down, along with color saturation.
  • He may be on to something: There’s a new style of houses being built here in our area that I refer to as “Etruscan tombs” because they’re entirely white and all right angles, without curves or any kind of ornamentation. They look like they’re made of limestone or white marble:

BoxyWhiteHouse

Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: · ·

Trunk Archaeology: The Song That Wasn’t

Apr 7th, 2025
by Jeff Duntemann.
1 comment

Digging through a box of my (very) old manuscripts, I’m finding things I wrote long ago that I had more or less forgotten about. One of those is a song. No, scratch that. It’s not a song. It’s a lyric. A song has to have a melody. And in trying to write a song, I discovered that I have no talent whatsoever for creating new melodies. I think it was Mozart who said that tunes were always walking into the back of his head. The one time I tried to compose a tune, they ran screaming.

Carol and I attended a couple of high-school Catholic retreats in 1970 or thereabouts, and also took part in a new wrinkle in Catholic culture called a “guitar mass.” These were held in the church basement, and included songs that weren’t anything like the hymns we knew. They were melodic, upbeat, affirming, and strong in their statements. One of these was a well-known song by folk guitarist Ray Repp called “To Be Alive.” It was manic and borderline political and I’m sure rubbed traditionalist church people the wrong way, but considering the pre-Vatican II church that we all grew up in, it was bogglingly infectious. Less bouncy and more thoughtful was “Easy Come, Easy Go” by Kevin Johannson, which I much liked and often whistled when I was working in the basement on a telescope or something.

I’m pretty sure it was “Easy Come, Easy Go” that prompted me to write a song in a similar vein, with perhaps a little more religion in it. I got the lyric down quickly. Words, no sweat. Music, heh, no chance. Here’s the lyric to a tuneless song I called “I See God”:

In every sunrise there’s a glow,
In every dawn a light
To help me look and see and know
The things that fly and crawl and grow
That weren’t there last night.

For every day is different; new buds on life’s tall tree.
And I see God in everything, in everything that be.

I know things change with time and tide;
Today will soon be gone.
But though today’s grown old and died
I watch the tears today has cried
And see tomorrow born.

Then all its shape and all its sound will sing new songs for me
While I see God in everything, in everything that be.

Life’s a very precious thing,
Whatever turns it takes.
And glad I live the days that sting
For hurt’s a very tiny thing
Against the good He makes.

For as He brought me to this day, He brings this day to me,
And I see God in everything, in everything that be.

Sure, it’s sentimental. Corny, even. Remember that I was 19 when I wrote it. Keep in mind that it’s not a poem. It’s a lyric. And without a tune it’s incomplete. I had no idea what to do with it back in 1971. So I did what I was good at: I wrote an SF story around it. Really.

The story (called “I See God,” natch) involved a race of high-gravity aliens who gently take over Earth without saying why or what they’re up to. They are building enormous inexplicable machines all over the planet, with high-tech roads running between the machines. One of the aliens, Caeliph, suffers a vehicle malfunction while tearing down a road from one machine to the next. He ejects from the vehicle and watches it go into a ditch. In poking around the rural area he finds himself in, he encounters a small group of human teens, who when they see him, shrink back in fear from a “tightfist” (what humans called the aliens) but also shout “I see God!”

It turns out that this quirk originated with one of the older teens who plays a guitar. Every time one of the kids sees something he or she has never seen before, they say, emphatically, “I see God!” The leader of the group plays the song for Caeliph and the group sings it. They explain it as best they can, but Caeliph is an engineer, not an anthropologist. Humans are not supposed to know that the Ynyr (the tightfists) are building a hyperdrive for planet Earth, because the Ynyr know that the Sun will soon go nova. Their plan is to move Earth to a similar star system before the Sun blows up and takes Earth with it.

When Caeliph is picked up by one of his colleagues, another Ynyr, Gwerrbach tells him that the humans appear to be catching on to the Big Plan. “They are more intelligent than we thought,” Gwerrbach says. It’s the first time Caeliph has heard one of his colleagues admit that humans aren’t stupid. “I see God,” Caeliph says with a certain wry satisfaction, and roars off into the sunset to continue his job of saving Earth.

Even I could tell that the story wasn’t good enough to try to sell to one of the magazines, so I tossed it into a box full of other manuscripts, and went on to other, better ideas. I wrote the first draft of “Our Lady of the Endless Sky” in 1972, and sold it (my very first sale) to Harry Harrison’s Nova 4 anthology in the fall of 1973.

Sure, not every story is publishable. But every story is practice, which helped me down the road as I began to sell my tales to the mags and anthologies on a regular basis. I offer this advice to writers: Whether or not your juvenalia passes that test, don’t erase it or throw it away. Above all else, it’s the best way possible to remind yourself how far you’ve come.

Posted in: None Of The Above.

Is That Tablet Broke, or Just Crashed?

Apr 1st, 2025
by Jeff Duntemann.
2 comments

Way back in 2019 I bought a Samsung Galaxy Tab S3 tablet, and used it mostly for the sake of the Kindle Reader app. I bought a couple of games to run on it, but for the most part is was Kindle plus debris. About a month ago, I took the S3 off its charger and woke it up. The screen came up just fine…but the touchscreen didn’t work. No matter what I touched or slid or tapped, nothing happened.

I’d never seen that particular failure mode before, but any time a computer gets weird, well, reboot. The S3 had been marvelously reliable up to that point, though recent games had animations that strained the S3’s ability to render. So I pressed the wakeup button down and held it.

Two icons appeared on the display, allowing me to select restart or power off. I tapped the restart icon. Nothing happened. I tapped the power off icon. Nothing happened. Holding the button down after the icons appeared did nothing. I started to wonder if the touchscreen had somehow failed. Well, there’s another way to power down a tablet or any other portable device: Set it on a shelf and wait for it to run its own battery down.

It took two weeks. During those two weeks I got restless and bought a nice new Galaxy Tab S9, figuring that the S3 was not coming back. The S9 is a little bigger than the S3, with more memory and a much faster CPU. I installed Kindle and a couple of games that I like. It’s a marvelous piece of work, if a little bigger than the S3 and slightly more 9X16-ish.

So after the S3 sat on a shelf for two weeks, my pressing the button no longer brought up the icons or anything else. Outa juice. I plugged it into its charger and went back to whatever I was doing. Two hours later, I pressed and held the button, and the S3 booted. The touch screen was not dead. Once it had a full charge, it came up and was fully functional. So the touchscreen hadn’t failed. Something, somewhere, probably whatever software managed the touchscreen, had crashed.

And now I have two tablets. I’m not complaining; having a spare for something I read on a lot is a good idea. But assuming the S3 was dead and dropping it in the recycle box at Best Buy had crossed my mind. I dislike dumping old hardware, so…lesson learned: Drain the battery, boot the tablet, keep the spare.

Posted in: Reviews.
Tagged:

How Lithium Batteries Sometimes Die

Mar 31st, 2025
by Jeff Duntemann.
6 comments

IMG_1056

…at least when they’re not exploding.

We bought a new living room couch several years ago, seating three, with the rightmost seat an electrical recliner with a battery-powered motor. (We could have plugged it into the floor if there were outlets in the floor here. There aren’t.) Carol and I have not used the recliner feature much. When we want to recline, we typically lie down on our bed. But whether the recliner feature was actually used or not, the battery would discharge every few weeks to the point where it wouldn’t move the seat. A week or two ago, I pulled out the battery to charge it up via the charger that came with the couch, and…I saw what you see above.

Note well that I did not unscrew or pry the case open. What you see above is exactly what I saw when I pulled the damned thing out from under the couch.

The battery consists of seven flat lithium cells in a stack, with a charger board on one side. The cells all inflated like cushions until the pressure of their expansion popped the plastic case.

When electronics die, I often pry them open to see what’s inside. Not this time. I exiled the pack to our patio just as I found it, and set it atop a thick travertine slab just in case things got…hot.

Our local Batteries & Bulbs store (where we have occasionally recycled dead 18650 lithium cells) won’t take it. So now, with a possible firebomb sitting on a fat tile on our patio, I have to scan around and find somebody who will take it. So far, nothing. I’ll add a coda to a future Odd Lots when we finally get the damned thing out of our hair. And no, we are not going to buy a replacement battery pack for the couch.

Posted in: Daybook.
Tagged: ·

The Real Danger of Textual AI

Mar 28th, 2025
by Jeff Duntemann.
3 comments

Now that I have The Everything Machine on the market, I can go back to a couple of other long-term projects. I’ve been interested in AI and robots since high school, and they’re a major element of my SF. All of my AI short stories are gathered in my book, Souls in Silicon. (The stories are almost all upbeat, and a couple of them are pure humor.) The AIs in Souls in Silicon are not what we call AI today. I’m starting to hear a new term: Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) which makes more sense in terms of science-fictional AIs. AGI is AI that can reason and deal with reality pretty much the same way human minds do. Will this ever happen? I doubt it. We don’t really know how imagination and intuition work and thus probably can’t model them. What we have today are not AGI but large language models (LLMs). I had the insight this morning, after playing around with Grok, that the better LLMs are, the more dangerous they are.

They are definitely getting better. And they are already pretty dangerous.

This time around, I’ve been testing Grok, the AI component of X/Twitter. My tests consist of asking it questions with verifiable answers. (I have not yet tested Grok’s image generator. Patience, patience.) Most of these tests are of the form, Who is XXXXXXXXX? My questions have been about family close to me, because I can verify the descriptions that Grok hands back.

Grok did a fair job with the question Who is Carol Duntemann? Its answer:

Carol Duntemann, born Carol Ostruska on June 1, 1953, is the wife of Jeff Duntemann, a writer, editor, and technology industry professional. They met as juniors in high school and married in October 1976. Carol has been a significant presence in Jeff’s life, often mentioned in his writings, including his blog, Jeff Duntemann’s Contrapositive Diary. Together, they have lived in various places, including Colorado Springs, Colorado, and currently reside in Scottsdale, Arizona. Carol is known to share Jeff’s interest in their Bichon Frise dogs, with the couple having owned several over the years, including a current dog named Dash. While Carol herself is not a public figure in the same way as Jeff, she is a key part of his personal narrative, often described as a partner who helped shape his life significantly. Public records indicate she has been associated with addresses in Colorado Springs, such as 145 Stanwell Street and 4120 Danceglen Drive, tied to the phone number (719) XXX-XXXX.

(I Xed out the phone number, which was correct, in case it’s been reassigned.) How well did Grok do? Its sole error in this answer is Carol’s birth date. It’s wrong, and thus dangerous. More on that later. Let’s look at another one. Who is Kathleen Duntemann?

Kathleen Duntemann could refer to different individuals based on available context, but the most prominent and well-documented person with this name tied to public records and family history is Kathleen M. Duntemann (1920–1999), who was Jeff Duntemann’s aunt and godmother.

Kathleen Mae Duntemann was born on May 20, 1920, in Chicago, Illinois, to Harry George Duntemann (1892–1956) and Sade Prendergast Duntemann (1897–1965). She grew up in Chicago, and the 1940 U.S. Census shows her living there with her parents and younger brother, Frank W. Duntemann (Jeff’s father, 1922–1978), at the age of 19. Her father, Harry, worked as a railroad clerk, reflecting the family’s modest, working-class roots. Kathleen never married and remained close to her family throughout her life, often playing a significant role in family gatherings and history-keeping.

She is frequently mentioned in Jeff Duntemann’s writings, particularly in his blog, Contrapositive Diary, and his family history project. Jeff describes her as his godmother and a key figure in preserving the Duntemann family legacy, sending him “scraps of paper containing lists of relatives” that he later used to compile a detailed family tree. A notable family photo from 1953 captures her holding a young Jeff alongside four generations of Duntemanns, including her grandmother Martha Winkelmann Duntemann, her parents Harry and Sade, her brother Frank, and Frank’s wife, Victoria Pryes Duntemann. Kathleen lived much of her life in Chicago before moving to Des Plaines, Illinois, where she died on October 25, 1999, at the age of 79. Her legacy within the family underscores her as a connector of generations, though she did not leave a public career or widely recognized mark beyond that sphere.

Grok admits that there may be other Kathleen Duntemanns (there aren’t) as it admits with most other names. It gets points for that. Ok. More errors here: My grandmother Sade was born in 1892, not 1897. My Aunt Kathleen was born on 30 August 1920. She died on 8 July 1999. Grok got the years right, but neither the months nor the dates. My grandfather Harry was never a railroad clerk. He worked his entire adult life for the First National Bank of Chicago, and retired as a vice president of that bank, Chicago’s biggest. The family’s origins were very much middle-class to upper-middle-class. Kathleen lived in Chicago her entire life, and never in Des Plaines.

Now, hold onto your hats. Grok’s answer to my last question is a lulu. This Contra entry is getting long, longer than I prefer to do, but this business is important. Bear with me. Who is Jeff Duntemann? I asked. Heh.

Jeff Duntemann has had a multifaceted career primarily centered around writing, editing, and technology, with a strong focus on computing and science fiction. Born on June 29, 1952, in Chicago, Illinois, he developed an early interest in electronics and writing, which shaped his professional path.

He began his career in technical writing and editing, notably working at Xerox Corporation as an office machine repairman from around 1972 to 1976, where he gained hands-on experience with early office technology. This technical background informed his later work in the computing industry. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, he transitioned into programming and writing about computers. He became a prominent figure in the personal computing revolution, contributing to the development and documentation of software tools. One of his significant early contributions was as a programmer and documenter for the Turbo Pascal compiler at Borland International, starting in 1985. His work helped make Turbo Pascal a widely used tool among developers, and he wrote several influential programming books, including Assembly Language from Square One (1990), Borland Pascal from Square One (1992), and Jeff Duntemann’s Wi-Fi Guide (2004), which catered to both beginners and advanced users.

Duntemann also made a mark in technical publishing. He served as an editor for various magazines, most notably as the editor-in-chief of PC Techniques (later renamed Visual Developer Magazine) from 1989 to 1998, under Coriolis Group Books, a publishing company he co-founded with Keith Weiskamp. Coriolis became known for its extensive line of computer books, and Duntemann’s editorial work extended to other publications like Dr. Dobb’s Journal and Byte Magazine. His writing was characterized by a clear, engaging style that made complex technical topics accessible, earning him a loyal readership.

Parallel to his technical career, Duntemann pursued science fiction writing. He sold his first short story, "Our Lady of the Endless Sky," to Amazing Stories in 1979 and continued to publish fiction intermittently, including works like “Cold Hands” (1982) and the novel The Cunning Blood (2005). His fiction often blended speculative ideas with his technical expertise, though it remained a smaller part of his career compared to his nonfiction output.

After leaving Coriolis in the late 1990s, he continued freelance writing and consulting, focusing on topics like wireless networking and software development. He also maintained a blog, Jeff Duntemann’s Contrapositive Diary, where he wrote about technology, science fiction, and personal interests like astronomy and vintage electronics until health challenges slowed his output. In 2018, he was diagnosed with atrial fibrillation and later faced pulmonary fibrosis, which he documented candidly, reflecting his lifelong habit of sharing knowledge. His last blog entry was on December 15, 2024, and he passed away on December 27, 2024, as noted in an obituary by his wife, Carol.

Duntemann’s career reflects a blend of technical innovation, educational writing, and creative storytelling, leaving a lasting impact on the computing community and a niche legacy in science fiction.

Wow. I didn’t know I was dead. I do not have atrial fibrillation nor pulmonary fibroids. Years and dates are all over the place. I was a Xerox repairman from 1974-1976. I sold “Our Lady of the Endless Sky” to Nova 4 in 1973, not 1979, nor to Amazing Stories. “Cold Hands” was published in 1980, not 1982. Coriolis went under in 2002, not 1998. I just pinched myself; I’m not dead yet. Etc.

My point in all this is that the closer AIs come to describing reality in answers to questions, the more people will trust their answers—including facts that are nonetheless wrong. Those bogus facts can be annoying, or worse. Birth and death dates have legal significance, as do many other things. If a scattered few errors are buried in a lot of otherwise correct text, those errors may be taken as the truth by users of the AI software.

In short, the fewer errors there are in AI answers, the more dangerous those answers become, because people will be more likely to trust AI answers as entirely correct. And given what I know about how LLMs work, I’m pretty sure that AI answers of any complexity will contain errors, not just now but probably forever.

Keep that in mind if you ever ask an AI questions on which anything of value depends. You wouldn’t want people to think you were dead.

Posted in: Ideas & Analysis.
Tagged: · ·

Odd Lots

Mar 17th, 2025
by Jeff Duntemann.
6 comments
  • Stumbled on this by accident: A YouTube group that offers audio book summaries/reviews, doing their thing on my x64 assembly book. Short listen (2:40), and not a bad summary for such a short clip.
  • And while we’re talking YouTube, here’s a podcast interview with me now on YouTube, during which I talk about all kinds of things with Jim Lawless.
  • I recently discovered British classical composer Doreen Carwithen 1922-2003, and on the eve of St. Patrick’s Day, allow me to suggest the third movement of her Suffolk Suite, composed in 1964. Although nominally a tune for Morris dancers, Suffolk Suite III has a decidedly Irish air about it. It’s on YouTube, as are the other movements of the suite if you’re interested.
  • Carol and I attend St. Patrick’s parish here in Scottsdale, and every Friday during Lent they have a fish fry in the parish hall. The fish was excellent, and I allowed myself to eat the fries that came with it, carbs though they be. (Once a week won’t kill me.) One of the parish volunteers wore a green T-shirt with “Pat on the back” printed in front, and an old portrait of St. Patrick himself reproduced (in white) on the back. Clever enough for a giggle or two. Again, the food was great and we sat at a table with friends, talking about all sorts of things.
  • Michael Covington sent me a link to an article by Stephen Wolfram in which he explains what ChatGPT is doing and how it works. It’s not cutting-edge, having been published in early 2023, but it’s a good place to start if you want to know what’s inside the concept of large language models (LLMs).

Posted in: None Of The Above.

The Everything Machine Is Live!

Mar 8th, 2025
by Jeff Duntemann.
8 comments

Everything

My newest novel, The Everything Machine, is now available on Amazon’s Kindle store. And thereby hangs a tale. A long tale. I don’t think I’ll be able to tell the whole story today. What I’ll do instead is post the book’s description on Amazon:

Carrying 800 passengers and their household goods, agricultural animals, and farm-related supplies to Earth’s first interstellar colony, starship Origen’s hyperdrive self-destructs, marooning its passengers near an Earth-twin planet orbiting an unknown solar-twin star. While settling in, the inadvertent colonists name their world Valeron, and discover that Valeron is scattered with hundreds of thousands of alien replicator machines—but there are no aliens nor any other trace of them.

Each replicator is a shallow 8-foot-wide black stone-like bowl half-full of fine silver dust. Beside the bowl are two waist-high pillars about 8 inches in diameter, one pale silver, the other pale gold. Tap on either pillar, and the pillar makes a sound like a drum, one pillar high, the other low. Tap 256 times on the pillars in any sequence, and something surfaces in the bowl of dust. Simple sequences create simple and useful things like shovels, knives, rope, saws, lamps, glue and much else. Complex or random sequences create strangely shaped forms of silver-gray metal with no obvious use. 256 taps on the pillars can create any of 2256 different things; in scientific notation, 1.16 X 1077.

That’s just short of one thing for every atom in the observable universe.

The artifacts are dubbed “drumlins,” for the sounds the pillars make, and the replicators called “thingmakers.” Drumlins have strange properties. Although virtually indestructible, drumlins can change shape, especially when doing so will protect a human being from injury. Drumlin knives will not cut living human tissue, but they will cut living animal tissue or human corpses. Press a drumlin knife against your palm, and it will flow and flatten out to a disk. Pull the knife away, and it will slowly return to its true form as a knife. Some claim that drumlins read human minds and grant wishes. Others insist they are haunted by invisible and perhaps hostile intelligences.

After 250 years on Valeron, the colony prospers. Starship Origen is still in orbit, and a cult-like research organization called the Bitspace Institute vows to repair Origen’s hyperdrive and return to Earth. With millions of drumlins catalogued using the thingmakers, Valeron’s people live well and begin to lose interest in returning to Earth. This threatens the Institute’s mission, prompting it to launch a covert effort to undermine public faith in drumlins. A low-key war begins between the Institute and those who value drumlins–including farmers, other rural folk, an order of mystical women, and several peculiar teen girls who have an unexplained rapport with the thingmakers and their mysterious masters.

The ebook is $3.99. The 377-page paperback is $14.99. The cover was designed and drawn by artist/author/Renaissance woman Cedar Sanderson.

The storyline defies easy categorization. Looked at from one angle it appears to be hard SF. There are starships. And AIs. From another angle it looks like a space western. The Republic of Valeron resembles America in the early 1890s.  Valeron City, the capital, has just started running streetcar lines down its main streets, powered by a new dynamo on a river upstream from the city. People ride horses. They pack 6-guns. (Or, if you’re in the Bitspace Institute, 11-guns.) Thingmakers and drumlins are everywhere. There are pinlamp drumlins in many different sizes. Lighting is provided by pinlamps. The thingmakers can provide most other household goods as well, although the thingmaker’s size limits its creation of larger objects. The Institute is developing vacuum tubes and 2-way radios. The Grange (a farmers’ organization that might be characterized as rural Masons) has drumlin radios—and keeps them a secret.

I don’t want to spill a great deal more here. There are a lot of ideas, but in truth, what I was striving for in this novel are interesting characters who struggle, learn, and grow. Characterization was always the hardest part of writing my own fiction. I took great pains this time to make my characters come alive, and my alpha readers seem to think I succeeded.

So go get it. And if you like it, please review it—not only on Amazon but on your blogs and social network accounts. The biggest problem indie authors face is reader discovery. I’m going to post notices on X and Facebook and see how things go. My guess is that characterization is a cakewalk next to indie book promotion.

Posted in: None Of The Above.

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