Spoiler Alert: It Isn’t.

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

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
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Five Years Out: Three Weeks in November

Yes, I know, this is Election Day here in the U.S., but—speaking of traumatic events!—it’s also the five-year anniversary of The Event. Well, more or less; the actual anniversary is on November 7th, i.e., this coming Thursday. But we don’t post on Thursdays around here, we post on Tuesdays*, and so you’re getting the anniversary post a couple of days early.

This being an anniversary that both begins and ends with a five, it seems like a good occasion to once again reproduce the entire six-part series on The Event for those readers who may not have seen it before, as well as for those readers who have been following the election and would like to take their minds off it by reading about somebody who was having an even more stressful day than they are. Probably. Anyway, read on for the tale of what to do, what not to do, and what might happen when your brain suddenly starts acting all weird!

* This is of course so that if I can’t come up with anything else to post about, I can always do a Teaser Tuesday.

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Happy Hallow….mas?

The scene at Lowes on October 20th:

If you feel like on All Saints Day there might just be some knocked-over trees and sliced up balloons across from those guys on the left, you’re not alone.

Happy Halloween!

Nice Try, Oregon Trail

So I’ve somehow gotten onto at least half a dozen recipe lists over the past year or so. I’m not sure how it happened, exactly. At first, I kept trying to use the “Unsubscribe” links or buttons in the messages to try to get off the lists, but, to quote Rocky the Flying Squirrel:

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It’s The Words (And Sentences) That Got Small

So the other day, while putting together a post on that other, much more popular blog of mine, I noticed that there were all these mysterious, super-thick underlines appearing all over the place. As it turns out, these were yet another new “AI”* feature that WordPress had activated automatically which was analyzing my sentences so that it could suggest ways to “improve” them. Here’s an example:

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Spamcommentology: Your Moments of Zen

So at first, we were getting all kinds of random spam at the blogs; then for a while we were getting AI spam, where something that seemed very much like an LLM would leave comments that were clearly spam, yet also were clearly in response to the post to which they were attached. After that, for some reason, we entered a joyful period of very little spam, a Pax Spamana if you will. And what have we got now? Well, now we have dozens of spam comments that are clearly being assembled out of random constituents, making them mostly gibberish, yet also, weirdly poetic, almost haiku-ish. Let’s take a look:

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That’s California For You

Spam text received:

Robert? Robert who?

The house at 4006 Arey Drive:

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Happy Annieversary! Or Something!

So it was four years ago to the day that The Event occurred, in which there were various ways I could’ve died but I somehow managed not to hit any of them. Members of the brain aneurysm group I’m in often refer to this as their “Annieversary” or, occasionally, their “Second Birthday”; I’m going with “Annieversary” since it didn’t involve cake or funny hats. (It did involve noisemakers, though, in the form of machines that whirred and beeped and went “ping”.)

Readers who have been around a while may remember my six-part series about this, which I posted a few months after the fact, and of course I’ve linked back to the first installment any number of times. Since it so happens that this year my weekly posting day falls on my “Annieversary”, I thought I would repost the whole spectacle in its entirety. So, be advised: This will be a long post, because a lot of stuff happened over the course of that three weeks. Oh, and, so as not to stress anyone out about it, here’s a little spoiler for you: I didn’t die. Not even once.

Continue reading “Happy Annieversary! Or Something!”

We Don’t Die We Wordiply

So lately I’ve been playing yet another word game, Wordiply, by The Guardian. The way this game works is that they give you a short series of letters (the instructional blurb below says it’s a “starter word” but it is most definitely not always an actual word) and then you have to come up with the longest five words you can think of that includes these letters. This is a more difficult task than you might expect.

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