I see of late this blog gets weird traffic spikes. They are for older posts, so unlikely to be from subscribers or RSS fed. No referrer traffic, so not from search engines. Gotta be AI scraping the content. All the past week it was mostly China. Today, it’s the USA.
Last spring, I resurrected my https://www.inoreader.com/ account to get RSS feed subscriptions for news sources. My email accounts are so over run that I’m not likely to track what’s happening local through them. So, I made a change. Today, looking through, I noticed an article about a suspicious death and police soliciting for more information.…
NOTE: I put this into the schedule, so don’t read too much into the post’s date in determining who inspired me to write it. Facebook has that “happy birthday” feature which I think is pretty neat because it encourages connection. Where it gets weird for me is people who are dead. I don’t feel comfortable…
I don’t get it. A few people shared posts claiming the same photo of a child from different cities was missing. It got me looking into the phenomenon. Law enforcement agencies are calling it a bait-and-switch scam. After the post gets widely shared, the creator will change it to the real purpose: malicious website, deceptive…
Someone copying the name of another person on social media is annoying, but I don’t think of it as hacking. Anyone can make an account. Social media companies made verification methods precisely because clones are easy to make and when do so about someone famous, it could lead to a devaluation of a brand. For…
Portable Document Format is a useful tool for creating printer consistent documents. In a print-centric world, they made a ton of sense. The output should match the designer vision. The assumption was the Internet was just the vehicle to get instructions to the printer. The world has changed. After my printer died 5 years ago,…
Reading an email about C3 AI being developed to locate extremists. This nugget to start put me off. Siebel: This is the first time we’ve done things in computer science that weren’t a mathematical certainty, other than random number generators. Everything else we’ve done in computer science, up until this day, has been deterministic. Every…
About 6 months ago, I played a bit with large language models. It was interesting. The responses were like a middle school kid didn’t read the book, but tried to summarize the Cliff Notes. The past couple days, there has a been a problem in another IT area affecting my ability to do my work.…
A prior habit saved so many possibly interesting things that I mostly never returned to. Think of it like instead of hundreds of open tabs, I collected thousands of items. Most recently the tool to collect them was Pocket, but I’ve abandoned huge troves of items in other bookmarking sites or apps. Evernote, Diigo, Instapaper,…