- 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
Holy Saturday…
…may well be the strangest day in the entire Christian calendar. On Good Friday, Christ suffered and died on the cross. He was then buried, to rise again from the dead on Easter Sunday. So what did He do on Holy Saturday?
He harrowed hell.
You don’t hear much about the Harrowing of Hell anymore. The creeds say that “He descended into hell” but nothing about what He did there. I get reminded from time to time that “hell” once meant “the grave.” True enough. They laid Christ in a tomb. He wasn’t exactly buried as we understand the term today, though if a tomb is a burrow into a hillside as often pictured, it’s still a burial in the earth.
Later Catholic tradition holds that in harrowing hell, Christ released all the people from hell who had been there after their death, since there was not yet redemption or baptism. The tradition does not say that they were all being tortured. I’ve read of those who call this release from “the limbo of the fathers” the Harrowing of Hell. Limbo as it was later understood is something I won’t be discussing in detail here, as I’ve not heard it mentioned in a Catholic context in a good many years and am not sure of its current status. Later Catholic tradition morphed limbo into the eternal home of unbaptized infants who die, without torment but also without the Beatific Vision.
There are problems with hell generally. I’m no big fan of Bertrand Russell, but he made a salient point in asking how infinite punishment for finite transgression can be just. When I was a college freshman at a Catholic college in Chicago, the (old) priest teaching a lesson on Christ’s redemption emphasized that against an infinitely perfect God, all imperfection is infinitely evil and thus deserving of eternal torture.
Huh? What the, er, hell?
Naively assuming that college allowed for interesting discussions in class, I raised my hand and asked whether, compared to God’s infinite perfection and goodness, wouldn’t our imperfections seem so small as to vanish into the noise? In an obvious state of agitation, the priest said that made no sense. After that session, he threatened to eject me from the course for saying such things. I kept my mouth shut in later class sessions, having learned a few lessons that were not in our textbooks.
To this day, believing that God always wins, I can’t figure how I could be more merciful than God, nor that an all-powerful and all-loving God could eternally lose and torture countless people that He loved, even for dumb things like eating meat on Friday.
Anyway. Holy Saturday is clearly the day when Jesus descended into hell, preached a little (according to some traditions) and then let everybody out. Did He close the gates? Lotta arguments about that, which I won’t go into here. Tomorrow is the Big Day, in whose shadow Holy Saturday will always remain. I feel sorry for it now and then. Harrowing hell was no small victory, for God and everybody else. I raise a glass of good red wine in today’s favor. God wins, today and always!
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.
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.
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.
Crosstrekkin’
Well, our poor 2001 Toyota 4Runner, which we bought new in 2001, started to fail often enough that we decided (months ago, actually) that we needed to start shopping for another second car. We did a fair amount of research, primarily because of our screwy garage door, which should have been a 16-footer but is only 15’ wide. So getting in and out of the garage can be tricky, mostly because our primary car is a 2014 Dodge Durango. The 2001 4Runner was built on a small pickup truck chassis. so it was relatively narrow but still reasonably tall. Its narrowness made slipping it in beside the Durango easier than it would be with a modern 4Runner. We looked hard for something that was no wider than the 4Runner, and as close as we could come was the Subaru Crosstrek. Ok, there were a few other candidates. Our choice was driven by what we could find.
Subaru has a good reputation for reliability. So we did what we did when we bought our Durango: drove up to CarMax to see what they had. CarMax had treated us very well when we bought the Durango there at the end of 2014. And the Durango itself has treated us very well in the 11 years that followed.
The Scottsdale CarMax had no Crosstreks on the lot. No sweat. They trucked one in from their larger facility on the west side of town, no charge. It was a white 2022 with about 15K miles on it. I brought my 25’ tape measure with me when we drove over to see it the first time. The car was within striking distance of 71” wide, mirror-edge to mirror-edge, as was our old 4Runner. So it would fit in the garage. It was a little lower than Carol would have preferred, but I doubted that anything only 71” wide would be as tall as the ‘01 Toyota.
We were offered a free 24-hour test drive. Getting the paperwork in order was an issue, especially with insurance. We basically bought a 2-day policy on the Crosstrek. Then off we went. It drove beautifully. We went back to CarMax and told them they had a buyer. A few days later (more paperwork!) we gave them a cashier’s check—and our 4Runner—and they gave us the car.
Again, it drove very well. Our problem with it was not about quality but complexity. It has a huge touch-screen control panel, as well as plenty of buttons. The stack of manuals that came with the vehicle is 2” high. Carol and I (but especially Carol) spent a huge amount of time going through the books and trying to figure out how everything worked.
There was a lot of everything.
We’re still learning. But that said, Carol loves the car. She drives it when she’s driving alone; when we go somewhere together we take the Durango. It’s an SUV with more cargo space than I would have guessed a car that small might have. Overall, a very big win. We also recommend CarMax if you’re looking for a used car. They were attentive, courteous, and had none of the weaselly arrogance that conventional car dealerships are famous for. Keep CarMax in mind if at some point you’re facing the same, um, adventure.
RIP Mass-Market Paperbacks
When I saw three articles on the death of mass-market paperbacks (MMPBs) in the last couple of weeks, I knew something was up—and the articles said what was up, if not why: ReaderLink, the largest book distributor in the US, announced that it would stop distributing mass-market paperbacks. The piece from The Guardian (an affiliate link) mentioned ebooks in passing as one factor in the collapse of the format. (The other two articles did not mention ebooks at all.) A Kindle Paperwhite is more or less the same size as an MMPB, and thinner. Furthermore, a lot of people—Carol included—now read ebooks on their smartphones.
MMPBs first appeared in the 1930s, as a means of spreading book retail sales beyond traditional bookstores. MMPBs were designed to be sold like magazines: In drugstores, grocery stores, gas stations, dime stores, train stations, and other places where casual, low-value sales occur. They were cheap to broaden the reader base beyond trade paperbacks and hardcovers. When I first began buying my own books with allowance money in high school (1966-70) MMPBs started at 60c or 75c, with fat ones (like Dune) sometimes 95c. (The obese 1970 MMPB of Blish’s Cities in Flight cost a stinging $1.25.)
How do I even know this? I still have the books. I have hundreds of MMPBs on my shelves, many going back to my high-school days. They look amazingly good for a peculiar reason: I coated most of them with my mom’s ConTact self-adhesive transparent shelf plastic. I don’t pull them off the shelf much anymore. When I have tried to read them in the past five or ten years, the yellowed and sometimes crumbly pages came loose in my hands.
I wasn’t surprised. Like the magazines that inspired them, mass-market paperbacks were intended to be read once and thrown away.
But there’s another issue that none of the articles I linked to mentioned at all: The audience is aging, and aging eyes often can’t read MMPBs comfortably. I remember when I tried to read Charles Harness’s The Ring of Ritornel two or three years ago, that I needed my strong readers to make the near-microscopic text readable. And even then, while possible, the reading was nothing anywhere near comfortable. Ink fades over time, and type contrast matters.
I’ve asked several of my contemporaries in their 70s and beyond, and they agree: The type is too small. It was small to make the books cheap. Now they’re mostly unreadable.
The answer is obviously ebooks. I don’t buy print books very often anymore, and when I do, the size of the type is often the decision hinge. I have two Samsung Galaxy Tab tablets, which I read ebooks on for a simple reason: I control the size of the type. This doesn’t work well on books containing photos/graphics or stuff like source code, but print books like that are often twice the size of MMPBs or more. And I don’t generally sit down and read print books like The Rust Programming Language from start to finish in long stretches. I read them until my eyes start to hurt.
Alas, the only serious downside to the death of mass-market paperbacks is that a lot of them haven’t made it to ebooks and probably never will. Most of the short story collections I read in high school are just gone. Groff Conklin did a lot of good anthology work. Amazon carries the crumbling print editions.
Anyway. Ebooks are the answer. My Galaxy Tab S9 is full of ebooks, many of which cost less than $5. Those old MMPB covers on my shelves remind me of being young. Sooner or later I’ll have had enough of that, and they will feed the dumpster. I just wonder what will take their places on my shelves.
Idea: A GUI Vibe Coding Prompt Editor
I was poking around my substantial library of technical books earlier today, and in a far corner getting dusty was a copy of Java Studio By Example by Lynn Weaver and Leslie Robertson. It was published in 1998, and Java Studio (along with its creator, Sun Microsystems) are now extinct. But the gist of it was that you draw a sort of schematic diagram of a program’s logic on the screen. Then you use the Studio program to generate executable Java code.
I never got to play with Java Studio, but the idea fascinated me. After all, back in the second half of the ‘90s I was Editor in Chief of Visual Developer Magazine, focused on Visual Basic and Delphi and associated products. (I was sent the book by Sun as a review copy.) And flipping through the book, it hit me: How much bad code is produced by AIs like Claude simply because the developer doesn’t know how to construct a prompt that Claude will understand correctly? I’ve never tried vibe coding, but prompt engineering sounds to me like the critical link in application development’s complicated chain.
So how about a GUI editor that gently helps a user create prompts that will allow an AI to craft workable code?
Although I’m still a vibe-coding virgin, from my reading I would guess it would be a conversation with an AI, each programmer response to the AI being a more detailed clarification of the one before it. Maybe prompts like this:
- Create a desktop Free Pascal application for Windows that accepts and validates data-entry fields describing an MP3 music collection, stored in and managed by a desktop SQL database.
- Create data-entry fields for these data items: cut name, cut length, cut genre, album name, performer name, composer name(s), recording year.
- Create validator procs for each data entry field according to field rules.
- Create a 12-line table on the main form to display cuts, with clickable header sorting and a search dialog with pull-down menu lists of all fields.
- Create database output reports summarizing cuts by name, albums by name, albums by performer, composers by name.
- Create buttons for adding new cuts to the database, deleting cuts from the database, saving the database, and exiting the application.
I’m a programmer, so such prompts come easy to me. That might not be the case for people who have no programming experience. The AI would be capable of natural language and could craft a list of prompts from a back-and-forth chat that the user could see on the screen and clarify if necessary.
What would the AI do in response to user prompts? It would primarily ask for clarification of prompts, but would also build an application main window mockup and dialog mockups to one side of the AI vide coding conversation window. The user could drag mockup fields around in the mockup window, or simply say, “Center the table and put the buttons evenly spaced in a line below the table.” If the application uses database tables, the AI could create a window for each table to verify field nature, size, and validation rules.
The AI could put questions or suggestions in little hover balloons that would pop up if the user spoke a field name or hover the mouse over a field.
I’m not sure how an AI would be trained to design the application. The purpose of the vibe coding editor would be to help management or other non-technical users write prompts that are sufficiently clear and unambiguous for the AI to construct code embodying what what the user is trying to describe. It might all be done by one AI, or it might be done by two AIs: One to help the user create prompts, and another to build the app from those prompts.
That’s most of the idea as it came to me. Maybe somebody’s already done this. I don’t know. From a height, the idea is to raise the abstraction level high enough through user/AI conversation so that code could be generated from clarified user prompts rather than flowcharts or source code. If nothing like this has been created yet, trust me: It will happen, and soon.
