“AI” is drivel

08.04.2024/03.14

This is from Perplexity, showing how convincingly these bots with their large language models spit out utter drivel: And not everyone will have the actual knowledge to call them out on it: “AI” is only useful when you already know the answer, because it does get it wrong and you need […]

Two Mastodon polls: on 50 shades of Grade, and the best non-Bond Roger Moore film

07.04.2024/12.19

Asking the tough questions on Mastodon. Very tiny samples, and I was limited to four possible answers—but now you know. Meanwhile, I see Linkedin has not been very good at removing misinformation about me. Not as bad as Quora, but still down there. The latest post says ‘jackyan’ is a metaphor for […]

A decade after Google, Meta dishes out fake cybersecurity warnings

/11.30

There’s nothing original with Big Tech It shouldn’t matter what Little Green Footballs’ politics are, as long as its blogger, Charles Foster Johnson, isn’t advocating anything hateful, and from what I can see of his current stance, he doesn’t. However, he’s found his blog links are being cancelled on Facebook. Links to posts going […]

Semrush allegedly glitched, misinformation followed

05.04.2024/01.34

A number of people did the right thing when they learned about the misinformation with my name in connection with Google and SEO. Urbanitek was one. They clarified who I was, and noted, ‘While his credentials are impressive, it’s noteworthy that Google rarely associates updates with specific individuals in their SEO guides. Google hasn’t officially […]

To those who take technology and make life harder: you’re doing it wrong

04.04.2024/09.11

I like technology. I don’t hate technology. But I hate what a bunch of idiots have done with technology. You’d be forgiven for thinking I was referring to the mass misinformation-authoring that used my name over the last three months, but, frankly, this level of technological misuse is everywhere in various forms. Take today, when […]

Autocade hits 36 million page views, with shifts in the leaderboard

31.03.2024/09.42

We’ve hit 36 million page views on Autocade now, with the counter showing 8,356,587. Add that to the 27,647,011 just before the old server was decommissioned, and we’re on 36,003,598. We hit 35 million on February 1, so it took 58 days to net the latest million, 17 days longer than last time. We’ve noticed […]

Copyright trolling: another fishy mob to block

30.03.2024/10.04

After four months, we received another notice from Copytrack—it must be our 14th. As usual, I went back through our digital files and sent them our licence info. But this time, I got rather fed up, since we’ve successfully proved our position 100 per cent of the time, and I think we should be whitelisted. […]

What do the authors of misinformation have to gain?

/03.01

Medium, which has been great at removing misinformation about me, rightly asked (after removing yet another fake story about me), ‘Why are they using your name? What are they gaining?’ I replied: Thank you, and I’m glad you’ve asked. I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of this for a while, ever since these […]

Replacing misinformation with misinformation

28.03.2024/02.09

I didn’t know this till I reported a post, but Medium informs me that their set-up is like Wordpress: anyone can install one. UX Collective, which hosted one of the latest misinformation posts about me, informs the writer who made a report against them: the reports aren’t anonymous. Because here’s the latest post I reported […]

Eudora users, welcome Aurora: finally, a modern, secure, Unicode-friendly successor

27.03.2024/02.37

We have lift-off. For those of us who have been waiting for a successor to Eudora 7.1.0.9 from 2006, our patience has been rewarded. Some years ago, I had heard of a project called Hermes, and they have now delivered an alpha version called Hermes Aurora that does everything they promised. Back when Hermes was […]