Technology, futurism, blogging and related matters.
Anyone remember Andrew Niccol’s film Simone? It remains one of my favourites—I liked it so much I saw it at the cinema in New Zealand, a country which never gave it a proper release. (I still remember the media going on about how much we supported Kiwi filmmakers around that time. Evidently not all […]
Read More… from Andrew Niccol’s Simone: I think we are now there
Contrary to my earlier post, I allowed the trackbacks from AI-Summary.com after its owner reached out to me. The fact he reached out does show he read the post, and there was some human agency involved. That very courteous email even offered to remove this blog from further mining. When you know a human’s there, […]
Read More… from Where do we draw the line on LLM- or “AI”-generated content?
Mastodon continues to be buggy, and it reminds me of the failures I have seen on other platforms. As detailed earlier, spammers hit Mastodon.social (and, eventually, others), causing admins to limit their own instances’ connections with it. Two, Mastodon.nz and Koletiva.social, went further and suspended the connections. Due to poor documentation, as far as I […]
Read More… from Suspension might expose Mastodon’s following bugs
Proof once again that your Mastodon data are not portable. New Mastodon.social users apparently sent out a lot of spam. I never saw any—the only one I received was from Mastodon.uk overnight—and this morning I found myself cut off mid-conversation with a friend on Mastodon.nz as the admins there made the decision to suspend its […]
Read More… from The way I define data, they’re still not portable on Mastodon
This was an incredibly interesting trackback in the queue for this blog: an LLM-authored summary about a blog post of mine, linking back to it. It’s better than a spun article to read, but at the end of the day, it’s not something I want to give oxygen to by allowing the trackback […]
Read More… from Should I link back an “AI” or LLM-authored splog? I vote no
Here’s an update on how three of the western search engines I’ve been watching are performing, with a site search here (site:jackyan.com). The traffic here is still well down on 2022, I believe caused by two main things: a worsening Google that is failing to pick up PHP pages; and the collapse of the Bing […]
Read More… from How Mojeek, Google, Bing and Brave perform on a site: search here
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has one of the clearest stories explaining ‘AI’, the misnomer used to describe the likes of Bing AI and ChatGPT (which, I understand, is French: Chat, j’ai pété translates to ‘Cat, I farted’). Vaughan-Nichols explains that LLMs (large language models) simply rely on statistics, which is why they get things factually wrong. […]
Read More… from ChatGPT and other ‘AI’ aren’t that mysterious, after all
Google is still getting things wrong when it comes to showing the results from this site. More PHP pages are showing (up from 1!), but looking through the top 10, it might as well still be 2013, showing pages that haven’t been linked for a decade or more. And its latest problem seems to be […]
Read More… from Google now might show blank pages high up in a site: search
I relayed this to one of my editors after recalling an old colleague we used to work with. He was kind enough to put me up once, pre-9-11, when I was on the US east coast. I was meant to stay with him for a few days and work on some stories together. I envisaged […]
I had a bit of fun with Bing Chat last week, during which I got it to admit that when it searches the Bing index, it does not look at the content of the web pages. Bing Chat says it only has access to the snippet, URL and date. Of course, it lies, […]
Read More… from Bing Chat doesn’t pull from web page content—according to Bing Chat