- 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
Short items presented without much discussion, generally links to other Web items
Odd Lots
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.
Odd Lots
- Fascinating piece on how cussing can make you stronger. It can apparently (though I remain skeptical) alleviate the immediate pain caused by bashing your shin on the coffee table or other immediate trauma. Forcing back dirty words reduces your ability to combat the pain and other possible threats in more complex crises.
- Could this be another term in the Drake Equation? Given how many satellites now orbit Earth (most of them comm constellations like Starllink) a single Carrington-level solar storm could cause countless chaotic collisions in near space that could create a layer of debris all around the planet. It’s called the Kessler Syndrome. Such a cloud would be risky to try and poke through, especially with manned spacecraft, and could set back space travel for a thousand years or more. (Hmmm. I smell an idea for an SF story or five.)
- Related: Estimates of half a million satellites in orbit by 2040 suggest that sunlight reflected from the satellites could reduce the quality of images taken by both ground-based and orbiting astronomical telescopes.
- Here’s a passel of safety tips I expect never to need again.
- I recently discovered an interesting piece of music by Josef Suk, who also composed the wonderful “Towards a New Life.” It’s called “Fantastic Scherzo,” and it’s a sort of high-energy gonzo waltz with peculiar interstices that qualify as scherzo cubed.
- I do this in private and always considered it just another facet of my legendary eccentricity. Turns out it actually helps you remain a functional human being. I guess it’s the vocal analog of journaling (i.e., writing about your emotions by pen or keyboard) and that mechanism helped me a great deal after Coriolis caved in.
- What happens when a 2,000 pound bison dies in Yellowstone National Park? Besides requiring heavy equipment to move, the carcass is taken to a top-secret location. It’s peculiar, but it all makes sense when you get the full story.
- Yet another AI hazard: Google AI is summarizing similar recipes, causing a significant dip in recipe site ad traffic. Although a given text description of a recipe is copyrightable, sets of steps are not. An AI can change the wording of a set of steps comprising a recipe and deliver an equivalent recipe to an AI user as a result of a query like “How do I create a coconut cream pie?” At some point people won’t bother looking up recipes on recipe sites—they’ll just let ChatGPT etc. do the work.
Odd Lots
- This (scary) item is the most significant I’ve seen recently: Microsoft is working on features that obsess with granting a Windows AI its own private workspace on your machine, plus access to your Documents, Downloads, Desktop, Videos, and Music folders. This will go nowhere good. Keep it in mind, and if MS asks for permission to enable this feature, weigh the consequences. MS admits the damned thing could install malware and have hallucinations. Huh. I won’t use a computer that thinks I‘m dead.
- There’s a cool group on Facebook called Old Radio Garage. Lots of pictures of tube-era radios, including a few on the bench being repaired, but not a lot of discussion.
- Speaking of radio, I (finally) took a closer look at AccuRadio, which is a free music streaming service that offers bits’n’pieces of almost everything musical. It takes a little study to find your preferences, but I was amazed at the breadth of coverage. You have to create a free account to avoid most commercials and have access to some features, but I think it’s worth the benefits.
- Google is evidently in the process of merging Android with ChromeOS into an OS called Aluminium. (No, I didn’t misspell that. It’s the British spelling.) The Aluminium OS will evidently have AI all over itself, inside and outside. Gosh, I just can’t wait to pass on it!
- We have AA, AAA, C, and D batteries. Why not B batteries? Reader’s Digest has a short-form explanation. What they don’t emphasize is that B batteries providing high-ish DC voltage to portable tube radios never had a standard size, not that I’ve ever heard of. I bought a 45-volt battery when I was 12 or 13 for a tube radio I was building, and it was like a long 9V battery, with the same power connectors, just more cells stacked up inside the rectangular case. I later saw all sorts of “B” batteries (most of them dead) in many shapes and voltages. Given the broad range of radios that would use it, a standard size and voltage would be impossible, which in truth explains all that needs explaining.
- Lazarus v4.4 is out. Built with Free Pascal 3.2.2. It’s a bugfix release, but hey, there’s no reason not be up to date. It’s worked great on my several Lazarus projects under Windows 11.
- I used to call Free Pascal FreePascal, but that’s no longer how the product’s creators spell it. Free Pascal it is. Sooner or later I’ll update FreePascal from Square One to reflect that spelling.
- And least but not last (ok. both least and last) Politico posted a gigantic, high-fat article about a crew called Stardust who want to make chemtrails real, in essence squirting air pollution back into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight and cool the planet. This is not a new idea, and not necessary, especially since Stardust refuses to say what the particulates they want to squirt into the atmosphere are made of. There is no climate crisis. Polluting the atmosphere with unknown crap is a scam. Don’t fall for it.
Odd Lots
- Here’s another hyperenergetic instrumental piece—with a short rest in the middle, granted—from Joseph Curiale, he of “Sky Blue After Rain.” It’s called “Double Happiness,” and it’s nutso optimistic, kinda like…me.
- Speaking of music, I remain and have always been puzzled why the purely orchestral works of Leroy Anderson are not considered “classical” and are not played on classical stations like our KBAQ. Some are quirky, like “The Typewriter,” but my all-time favorite Anderson composition, “Bugler’s Holiday,” which is really a manic trumpet concerto, somehow doesn’t qualify. Too fast? Hey, if “Sabre Dance” is considered classical, why not “Bugler’s Holiday”?
- Video generative AI is evidently getting so good that people are making bank–big bank–on slop AI videos, some that can’t easily be told from real videos. It’s more than a little scary. I don’t either make or consume video as a rule, but I would be interested in seeing a verifiably AI-written SF novel.
- Here’s another piece that nails why I think generative AI is scary. Watermarks? If an AI can make photorealistic videos, it can fake a watermark. Maybe something incorporating blockchain as is done with NFTs. I’m no expert on blockchain, but this intro to blockchain and NFTs sounds like it’s impossible to replicate an NFT—which suggests a way to prove that a video was not done with AI.
- In case you missed it: Lazarus 4.2 (Built with Free Pascal 3.2.2) was released on July 22. It’s a bugfix release, but hey, bugs are annoying and Lazarus is amazing. Take every release that happens and install it.
- I grew up in Illinois and have always been at least a little interested in monsters, so why did it take 73 years for me to ever hear of the Enfield Monster? Sure, Enfield is at the opposite end of Illinois from Chicago, a long way from anywhere, with all of 794 inhabitants—and only 764 when the monster came calling in 1973. I guess without Internet, even for an eccentric and boundlessly curious 21-year-old, some things just come and go unnoticed. By me, at least. It makes me wonder what other monsters I’ve never heard of.
- Ars Technica points out that it generally takes a garage with a high-current 240VAC outlet to charge an EV at home. And—wow, how could this be possible?—a great many Americans have garages so full of stuff that they have to park their cars outside. Yes, it’s possible; actually, the honest truth, as we see every time we drive around our neighborhood.
Odd Lots
- An AI company went bankrupt after it came out that its supposed “vibe-coding” AI was a team of 700 Indian software engineers. Even Microsoft fell for it, and threw gobs of money at them. Which brings up an interesting question: How do possible investors (or anyone else) know where (and even what) an AI is?
- Not everyone thinks that vibe coding is slam-dunk easy. A Stanford prof does it, and says it’s intellectually exhausting—just like “manual” coding is. The trick with all AI work is knowing how to create the prompts that will deliver the desired results. Although I’ve not tried vibe coding with an AI yet, my experience with text and images suggests that “prompt engineering” is the real challenge, and to me, prompt engineering looks like programming in yet another English-like language.
- Meta signed a 20-year deal with Constellation Energy, to help fund new nuclear generation capacity, starting with a plant in Illinois. If carbon is indeed the problem, nuclear is the solution. I have had some peculiar experiences with AI over the past months, but I’m willing to root for AI as a way to bring nuclear power back from the grips of those Atomic Scientists who simply can’t force themselves to go fission.
- In case you missed it: Lazarus 4.0 is out. Compatibility with Delphi is high. The 4.0 system was built using FreePascal 3.2.2. Go get it here.
- Here’s a wonderful short-ish article on Mark Twain’s rowdy early years in (bogglingly) rowdy Virginia City, Nevada.
- Today is the semiquincentennial of the US Army. Also the sestercentennial. Oh, and the bisesquicentennial too. Big words rock. I love ’em. And next year will be all those big words for the US itself, not to mention Carol’s and my 50th wedding anniversary.
- Classmates continues to send me nonsense. I supposedly have a private message waiting from a Maria G., who was in De Paul University’s Class of 1971. (The message was posted in 2007.) Well, I have that yearbook, and she’s not in it. (Her name, which I won’t quote here, is very unusual and I have been unable to find her online.) Some years back Classmates asked me if I knew a girl named Linda something, who was in the Lane Tech Class of 1970, like me. Uh…no. Lane was an all-boy school until a couple of years after I graduated. I gave Classmates money once. I won’t be giving them money again. They make up stuff like a…like an AI.
- Well, as far as I’m concerned, the famous TED talks are now over. An Australian prof who did all the necessary research was tossed out of the TED universe for a presentation that cast doubt on the perpetrators of useless COVID reactions like lockdowns, and showed evidence that the not-really-a-vaccine (you can get it and spread it!) caused more harm than good. TED stated right out that criticism of political and health leaders was verboten. Read the whole thing. (H/T to Sarah Hoyt for the link.)
Odd Lots
- 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:
- And cars, well, it’s not all bad news. Carol and I are seeing a lot more colors in cars around town these days, and the majority are bright and sometimes electric blue. But there are also yellows and oranges; not as many as blues but way more than we saw four or five years ago.
- By now I’m sure you’ve heard the buzz about “de-extincting” the dire wolf. I was suspicious of that claim, and turns out I’m right: What the genetic engineering firm did was modify gray wolf genes to make them look like what we think dire wolves looked like. The same firm created “woolly mice” through a more authentic process, by injecting a few recovered woolly mammoth genes into lab mice. Whether this is a good idea I’m not sure. We’ll see how far they can take it.
- As I wrote about sometime back, we dodged what might have been global extinction in the thick of the last ice age, when CO2 levels fell to the edge of what could support plant life on Earth. The claims of the climate doomscreamers haven’t panned out, and now we’re discovering that more CO2 in the atmosphere has led to a new greening peak, enlarging crops and reducing deserts. This looks like a big win to me.
- Computer modeling has solved one of mankind’s greatest problems, what some call “tinkle sprinkle”: urine splashing to one side of a urinal or another, getting on the floor, on adjacent urinal users, or on the user himself. The designs are clever and interesting in a number of ways, and one has to wonder what took us so long.
