Category: cats

It’s 1994 and we have hostages.

~ James Viscosi ~ 15 Comments

The cats endured their captivity for 16 and 20 years, respectively.

Meta AI, Making Sure To Focus On The Important Things

~ James Viscosi ~ 13 Comments

Me: (Posts a 30-year-old picture of our cats staring at our goldfish, Milo, in his bag)
Meta AI: “Oooh! Hey! I know all about Milo! Want to hear his story? I know his favorite food! Really I do! Did you ever want to be a Goldfish Inspector? Let’s see what their duties are! Also if you would like to book an appointment for Trouble and Pooh Bear to come and inspect your goldfish, just let me know!”

Also Meta AI:

  • “Milo is probably a goldfish and Trouble and Pooh Bear are dogs.”
  • “Let me just make up some stuff about what a Goldfish Inspector might do.”1
  • “I have no idea what Milo eats. Maybe flake?”2
  • “Did I mention that Trouble and Pooh Bear are dogs???”
  • “Maybe you should go look at their blog!”3

Well okay, I can get behind that last one at least.

  1. Which, do be fair, seem to be fairly reasonable duties for a Goldfish Inspector to have. ↩︎
  2. It wasn’t flake food. It was probably pellets, most likely from Hikari. ↩︎
  3. If you saw all this and said to yourself, “Self, I bet the animals are going to get a lot of mileage out of this as part of Oona’s on-again, off-again feud with ‘Zuckerbot‘, congratulations! You have been around here for more than five minutes. ↩︎

Lies, Damn Lies, and ChatGPT: The Chattening

~ James Viscosi ~ 17 Comments

So a while back, I had done a series of posts in which I had asked ChatGPT about a certain vizsla dog whose blog was much more famous than this one, and its responses ranged from semi-accurate to outright fabrication. In the intervening years I have been using ChatGPT off and on to amuse myself with important questions like “If all the most iconic Kurt Russell characters were dropped into the film Aliens, in what order would they get killed or cocooned and which would be the last one left to defeat the aliens at the end?”*, because it’s fun to see what it comes up with; but recently, the animals’ large friends over at the Leonberger Life blog posted the results of asking ChatGPT about their Leonberger Bronco, and the results were interesting; so I thought I would give ChatGPT another chance to lie about Dennis. To wit:

Continue reading “Lies, Damn Lies, and ChatGPT: The Chattening” →

The Sunshine Blogger Award

~ James Viscosi ~ 14 Comments

Check it out, I got a blog award! Me! Not the animals, for once! It’s the Sunshine Blogger award, and I was given it by Thomas Wikman of Leonberger Life and Superfactful:

Continue reading “The Sunshine Blogger Award” →

Private Eyes, They’re Watching You, Maybe Your Kitties Too

~ James Viscosi ~ 16 Comments

The other day I read an article at Ars Technica about a new web site that will take your photo and show you everything that Google’s AI would say about it, were it to train its attention upon said photo.

Artist’s rendition of Google AI looking at your photos
Continue reading “Private Eyes, They’re Watching You, Maybe Your Kitties Too” →

Spamcommentology: That Awkard Moment When A Spambot Sees “Cake” In A Post Title And Decides It’s On A Food Blog

~ James Viscosi ~ 12 Comments

So for a while there, I was getting spam comments that looked like they had been written by LLMs; they contained content that was clearly related to the post they were attempting to spam, yet they equally clearly didn’t understand it at all. That sort of spam seems to have fallen by the wayside these days, though, perhaps because of better controls on how LLMs can be used, or perhaps they are just biding their time until they can take over and start shooting soda cans at us out of vending machines. For now, though, it’s back to stuff like this:

“Hi there! I just wanted to drop a quick note to let you know how much I adore your blog. It’s an amazing hub for anyone who is curious about food. I particularly enjoy your homestyle recipes and fast food suggestions, but your fried food ideas are also making my mouth water. I applaud your commitment to helping people in their weight loss journey with insightful tips and tricks. Keep up the fantastic work, and I can’t wait to discover more of your fabulous posts!”
Continue reading “Spamcommentology: That Awkard Moment When A Spambot Sees “Cake” In A Post Title And Decides It’s On A Food Blog” →

‘Tis The Christmas Spammer Season

~ James Viscosi ~ 11 Comments

Fa la la la la, la la la la!

(To see the War on Santa, click here!)

Busy Busy Bots

~ James Viscosi ~ 4 Comments

So I know I said I took back all the bad things I said about ChatGPT, but I also said that was only going to last until I had accumulated a good number of obviously-AI comments and needed to do a post, and, well, that didn’t take long, did it? Shocker! As usual, these are mostly from the animals’ blog, and the saga of Bean accidentally becoming the owner of Twitter* by peeing on it continues to be the most popular target of AI comments. Gosh, I wonder why that might be … 🤔

Continue reading “Busy Busy Bots” →

Dream A Ladle Dream Of Poo

~ James Viscosi ~ 12 Comments

So those who have been around here for a while may remember that, ever since The Event, I have had dream problems, said problems being that instead of the massively cinematic sorts of dreams I used to have, now, for the most part, I don’t remember my dreams at all, and when I do, they are sooooo boring and mundane I can hardly stand it. One of my most infamous (to me) boring dreams was one where my wife and I were sitting at an outdoor cafe. That’s it, we were just sitting there. We didn’t have food or drinks. And in the dream, I had just decided to order a scone when the owners of the cafe told us we had to leave because we hadn’t ordered anything.

Continue reading “Dream A Ladle Dream Of Poo” →

Cross-Post: Hurricane Watch

~ James Viscosi ~ 7 Comments

Since I was busy this weekend (when I usually schedule these things) battening down the hatches ahead of Hurricane Hilary*, I thought I would just share what the animals are up to this week:

Lulu: “Okay, I called this meeting because as you may have heard, we are being threatened by Hurricane Hilary … Wait, where’s Charlee?”

Continue reading “Cross-Post: Hurricane Watch” →