WordPress writing prompt thingamabob.

Daily writing prompt
If you could erase one event from history, what would it be?

For this prompt the erase from history button here is ambiguous so I don’t know if this is an everyone has or just me, I will assume everyone.

Honestly, I do not think I would erase any event, because as much as erasing that one event would help in the moment you never know what you would unleash by it. If I were stop say some event, Say hitler from being born, what is to say that by doing that the people that influenced hitler would influence someone else and make a super hitler.

I live by the mantra of it is what it is. The idea that one event being erased just does not have appeal to me because I while I cant wonder how much worse of better it would be, It has the same appeal of “bad genie” wishes. Even the show family guy touches on this when Brian stops 9/11 and things turn out much worse. What is to say by stopping one event that you are making another event better, in the philosophical context if one stopped the Titanic from sinking what is to say you save the ship but, but someone from that ship becomes an event 10x worse than the original event. Say by stopping the Titanic sinking, one of the survivors drives Alexander Fleming on a different career route – that alone would make a tragedy that makes the original incident minor in comparison. I feel like if we all had a delete button for the one moment of hindsight for a personal thing vs the history eraser that is limited to short term the implications would be much more limited.

But if I were forced to change a singular event, I guess that would be a card I would hold on to for a singular moment. The prompt is not particular to anything and history is what we make it. I mean my end point still has all the danger of the original theory , but here’s the thing if we had a short term eraser , Even if i hit delete on an event someone could countermend me. Ironically, with the prompt the way it is, Everything would just happen the way it was meant to happen. Schrodinger’s cat would still be alive and dead in the box, and the scientist trying to figure out quantum supposition is still trying to figure it out. Funnier is the factor something like this would confirm the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics.

AI in education – The Sloppening.. The Sequel.

I’ve written a lot about how AI in education is a bad idea. Well just like an AI coffeepot, The proof came fast! A school district put out their agenda for the year 2026-27 and boy, did they screw up! this shows exactly why cognitive offloading is bad because of how many levels of failure happened here.

How did this agenda pass so many levels without being noticed? At the very least this had to pass from a designer, to a school, to a book printer, to a Copy checker, back to the school, to the school board, to the school budget board, to the principal, to teachers and to final print. This map is like living an alternate timeline, there is no Florida, Other states are horribly misspelled. Did a map from the Fallout universe get printed here? This here is the proof of why AI does not work as a creator and why that there should always be a human in the loop. The school … Farnsley Middle School actually had parents pay for this hot slop garbage. $10 for this very very sad example of why not to drink and make books here while using AI. Whoever made this hit the bottle hard when they woke up and said “Shit! 3 weeks to school!”.

It gets even worse on the inside, I for one am sad we lost Pluto, But I welcome the new planet that would be adored at starbucks because it’s Marc with a C..

Our moon is not even spared embarrassment here. But, apparently Darth Vader had a look at it. This is all fucking nonsense here, the RUTATIONAL PERIOD. wow just what the fuck. All of the math is batshit crazy , 98,000,000 mi does not equal what they have there. Its 157,715,712 KM.

Even the math is wrong. Some poor kid is going to have a stroke in math class when the math doesn’t even line up. 304400km = 189145.391mi. After all of the crap about adding AI to schools would be the best thing since sliced bread.

Also I’m sorry to inform you that the basic elements have been changed in to the new Zodiac Killer cipher.

Good luck with your new elements and planets.. Frankly this is a huge embarrassment, this document traveled through multiple people and everyone was checked out and said to themselves “yeah that looks good”, I have warned about cognitive offloading and this is the perfect case to show what happens when zero fucks are given and Cut and paste is done. I knew that schools in the south were lacking but holy fuck, George Carlin would be having a stroke over this.

This school should be enraged with what was made here, the company that printed this slop should offer new agendas to all of the kids at this school, the administration should apologize for letting this slop salad even get into students hands… What did they do instead, They had teachers tear out all of the bad pages. I guess broken agenda broken school fits here.

Honestly, This is why AI sucks, because people just print out slop and totally offload cognitively and think AI is some majestic magic device. It’s not, it is just a more convoluted search engine when you really think about it with the ability to mad scientist things it knows together. The problem with AI is everyone thinks AI is smart, it is actually very stupid.. Until humans tell it how to deal with the massive amount of information the AI sees nothing but zeros and ones, Humans program the patterns and use patterns to spit out meaningful shit. Right now if you take an off the shelf LLM and ask it to make you a coffee, You will have the most average coffee you have ever had. That is AI’s best guess at the moment, I’ll keep making my own coffee. Otherwise if I ask AI to make me a coffee it might have me add plutonium because it saw it on a reddit post because I screwed the prompt up.

If Mr Conductor (George) were alive today , the man would have content till the end of time with AI slop.

Attributions:
wdrb.com – ‘Venecky’ instead of Kentucky: JCPS middle school parents suspect school agendas are AI-generated
Me – AI in education.
Me – News of the stupid: Robotic AI teachers….
Me – How do we Fix AI from being used by bad actors?

Well now… Site Maintenance. Time for a change.. Part II

I changed hosts a while back… I have sat on my opinion for a bit. I think now is a good time to say something about it. So far my new host has had some downtime but only a few minutes. I’m not worried about a few minutes here and there because this site is not an up to the minute thing.

As far as KnownHost, it was an unknown host to me, as it has only been a month the positives far exceed my expectations. The site is overall faster visually, Before the site would have a hang on a white screen before loading. Editing is not a quest in figuring out if the site is up to date enough to handle code updates. Support works with you rather than to upsell you shit every time you contact them.

Hostgator has only reached out with one message since I quit them. “Your auto renew is off, Please pay or lose your website” talk about being blind, they let their auto emailer spam me when the lights are on, the bill is not being paid, and the user moved out. they have my domain, it would take them 0.0002 seconds to realize I’ve left hostgator. It shows that their owners are just in it for the cash and not providing a service.

I’ve given hostgator my money, and 16 years of my time. basically, they did not even fight. when I said I’m leaving they did not even flinch, I have the entire interaction saved from the chat and they kept trying to upsell. My honest opinion about hostgator is “don’t shit where you eat!” and hostgator has not only shit where they ate, they shit all over the customers and they are starting to revolt.. charging for emails and acting like they are gold is bullshit.

Anyways. for the one month in on KnownHost, I would recommend it, The amount of spam they catch before it even hits the site is good, The speed is great, aside from a tiny downtime occasionally. If KnownHost’s biggest fault to me is losing a minute I can’t say anything bad.

So, this ends the Hostgator journey and now is the new odyssey with KnownHost. The spirit of this website lives in a new body to which will hopefully last more than 16 years. I’ve been editing and drinking coffee on this site since 2005 where i’ve shared my opinions on coffee to crazy tech.

In editing I noticed I did not capitalize company names, I’m leaving the wonky missed capitalizations with hostgator . they don’t take the effort to retain customers so why should I take the time to formalize them..

Attributions:
KnownHost – A reasonable webhost
hostgator – Not going to link that shit.

Sony: first they came for the discs, Now they come for your sanity.

I was reading today, Sony has a new patent for a buttonless controller. Everyone is already making the joke about it, But I think people are missing the factors on this one.

This thing at face value is going to make some gamers go oh look futuristic , Me I am looking at this thing and saying to myself – they are using this for an AD space. There is so much wrong with this controller. With no buttons it is an outright disaster for the disabled. Being capacitive is nothing new, the HTC touch had it and if that outs my age, I don’t care.

It uses a built in display to display the layout, while sony is not saying it out loud, Your EA game is now going to have Nike Advertising while you are trying to pick your next play in madden. Call of Duty will have a button for loot boxes just in range of an accidental purchase range. While this display looks to be a simple matrix display, it would not preclude the fact that they will give the player text advertisements just on the very edge of their visual range and would likely fall into the regulatory issues of subliminal advertising.

Here’s a test: put your hands on your controller right now, now look at your hand and tell me what your hand is doing. Its sitting at the ready position sitting lightly on those buttons, With sony’s patent controller you will now have to float your fingers because any twitch at all you are changing the resistance around that button and you are hitting a button without even trying to.

For people with nerve damage, you now have zero feedback to what you are doing. They should of taken a page from Nintendo’s playbook and had a split controller which takes the weight off your hands and improved on it, Hell if you wanted they could of stuck a screen on the thing that plays Noo-Noo from teletubbies and it still would of been an improvement over this buttonless design.

People with prosthetic fingers and hands.. good luck , suddenly either the servos in your prosthetic or changes in your magnetic field will suddenly have buttons inputs you never made. People with tremors will suddenly be all over the place and while the controller claims to be “accurate” you are now going through a translation layer which adds ms to button hits , so all old games with precise QTE will fail.

Further thinking, if they move forward with this controller, sony will move into dangerous territory , the first dev that decides to put an accessibility layout behind a microtransaction will run very fast into the wall of the ADA considering that prior hardware did not have this layer.

They also may be taking a page out of BMW’s playbook, “UNLOCK THE PRO LAYOUT NOW 0.99 Cents!” meaning with zero hardware changes they are increasing your cost per button touch. In the last 10 years Xbox has taken their controllers and have gone from 40$ to almost 65$ , Nintendo jacked up the cost of the joycons, and while the price has gone up functionality has not increased, sony sees a niche here and goes hey we are going to make this “futuristic” controller and its “Fully Changeable” but under the hood you are going to have some CFO who has never played a game in their life go “how can we monetize this?”

There is another layer that is interesting. What happens when a scammy 3rd party indie dev that is not above board finds a way to use the controllers and steals and streams all of the button presses back to a server. Now they have every button press you hit for the last 6 hours in your gaming experience and matches it out to a screen. They just stole your logins, every little thing you said, they found out your “gay” and are “afraid to out yourself to someone” its a security nightmare. your intercepted button presses on the controller to the onscreen keyboard just got mapped and days later you are trying to figure out a $399 charge to your credit card in some place you never visited.

But this controller feels like an april fools joke that is 4 months late. After sony’s disastrous announcement of they will not be moving forward with solid media you would think someone in marketing would be like “hey bob, this controller is just going to make the players mutiny”. In an irony, sony wants the innovation that nintendo hit with the Wii… and for what it is worth nintendo did it better, They did “how can we make this simple” Sony fails at this because “how can we make this AWESOME” with a bunch of interns jamming whatever the hell their cracked out monster energy high made them think in the moment.

This isn’t hardware innovation this is hardware subjugation. US Patent 12,533,573 B2 is written like 10 guys with ideas got bored with chatGPT and told it to make a patent. The capacitive button idea has a history, Creative labs you have anything to say about this?

My final word for this is , you are making a 3 camera , Glass device to last through the gaming experience. What parent is going to buy a controller that will last one game, not work right for a person who just came out of the swimming pool, an ADA nightmare , One controller throw and this thing is now glass bits on your floor and an injury hazard.

Attributions:
PS controller Patent.

Forbes:The Secret To AI Adoption? Make It Fun.. Shut up..

You know I started reading this and I thought to myself oh forbes fuck off.

Imagine you’re the head of an enterprise organization that just dropped hundreds of thousands of dollars on AI consultants. Racing to introduce artificial intelligence into your workflows, you also bought the latest pricey tools and invested in time-consuming workshops to get your people ready.

Really fun is not going to make workflows any faster you will have people fucking off in the prompts if you make it too fun. Also, if we take the title we can come up with an equal comparison. “Forbes:The Secret To drugs Adoption? Make It addictive.” There I changed to the quiet part out loud. The Factor here is as AI adaption take up and more cognitive offloading happens we are going to see individuality disappear and the LLM Borg consciousness take over. The problem with AI innovation is it removes human innovation as more people offload to an AI the idea someone had in the shower is shot down over the Borg AI saying do this not that it wont work.

Neither set out to become technologists. Instead, in 2022, when ChatGPT hit the mainstream, they felt compelled to understand it. As a professional magician and mentalist who performs for corporate events, Mike was used to acting out his thoughts and ideas. So was Sami, especially from all her creative and voice acting work. This led them to ask the question that corporate leaders reeling from staff resistance, should ponder, “What if learning this new tool could be … fun?”

This stood out to me .. A magician? The fuck? This is like hiring a baker to market a nuclear power plant. The fact we are seeing resistance is people who see their jobs being automated out of existence with no checks and balances. Are you going to have fun with a device that if you teach it well enough it automates 70% of your job and they fire you thinking they can handle the other 30%. Or for the sake of things the dreaded 1% problems that nothing is written for? If AI takes over a nuclear power plant and its by the sea and takes in water to cool the reactor and the hundred year event of jellyfish comes and suddenly the reactor has no water. AI is not going to have an answer for that even if it has geographic data.

Their first slogan captured people’s emerging feelings about this tech: “Smart people. Dumb AI.” Building on their improvisational chops, they invited attendees to partake in what may have been the first AI-powered variety show. From the start, it unfolded with the kind of energy you might find at The Moth where people swap tales on stage or StorySLAM, open-mic nights at bars and small venues that encourage audience participation and speaker vulnerability.

AI is not dumb nor is it smart. How you use AI is completely up to the user. So a dumb user can screw up things faster with AI than without. I think a better introduction of AI to a user is better done with matching their abilities with the AI , so if a user knows code and they put it into the AI and the AI spits out some refinements that is fine. but the user needs to learn what the refinements did, otherwise its lost cognitive offload. In the simplest of forms if you want to introduce a user to AI park them in front of a computer have them type whatever bullshit they can think of into the AI. Than let them feel for what the AI can and can not do.

When you set up a “show” you are not showing off what an AI can do. You are showing off what AI has been forced to do. So yes you can turn a picture of your boss into a video of him farting on whatever product you have in the works. But to sit your user down and have the AI optional for use and let them feel out AI for when they can not fathom an answer to something is better than forcing it .

It’s no secret this type of experimentation is rare in corporate cultures where the lion’s share of personnel wants the AI craze to just blow over. All those executives who have spent so much time and resources to foster adoption would do well to promote an explorer mindset over an avoider one.

The secret here is too many top level CEOS and COOs think AI is some magic machine that can replace human innovation and human intuition which is completely wrong. if Boards and Ceos treated AI as an augment innovation would go up and failures would go down. Don’t force AI but have AI optional… That way when someone needs a bit of help they can do that without leaving their station but at the same time the same user can leave their station get a coffee and make a life changing innovation rather than let AI try to reason how to innovate.

Anyways… Back to my coffee from a non AI coffeepot because if i ask AI to make my coffee it will be the collective average of the universe.

Attributions from:
Forbes.com The Secret To AI Adoption? Make It Fun

Further Reading:
Futurism.com: The Effects of AI-Generated Code Tearing Through Corporations Is Actually Kind of Funny

Well now… Site Maintenance. Time for a change..

Editor’s Note: the AI Generation is still fucking funny. The AI made a backwards PC!

My prior host… Hostgator… I’d say pour out a coffee for, but no.. they in the last 3 years have double their prices, they started pulling the same shit like BMW for heated seats and tried to sell me a story of how much overhead email takes. So you know what, its time for change.

Honestly it’s been time for change for over 2 years with my last host, they kept increasing prices and expected the people who do not want to move or are lazy to keep paying. At the point of what i was paying they should of shown up to my house at least once a week and poured my coffee for me.

But when I got an email saying that the price of emails for me would go up if i send more than 200 emails an hour. I don’t think I send two hundred emails a year. Than another email saying you have 11 email addresses, the irony of that 3 are needed for the server itself , the rest were family emails that were used for family and 2 of them were preserved emails of dead relatives, if my dead relative is sending emails call the ghostbusters.

The thing is, Companies need to stop this act. Take a product… sell it , than raise the price. bullshit the customer saying its so expensive. we’ve all heard bandwidth costs more than printer ink since the first websites. but now we are getting back into the early mobile territory where hosts are micromanaging every part of what they originally sold. My host included unlimited emails. Now they want you to pay per so many email addresses and how many you send, What in the fucking BMW heated seat is that. The funny thing is my prior host if they wanted to reduce the overhead and save money.. Cut off the top 0.05% because that small number there likely is 50% of the email bandwidth on there servers.

But honestly… Companies need to stop micromanaging every part of the whole. They say “its cheaper” no its bullshit.. you create 5 different billing systems . you send out 4 more invoices, you no spam the regular users and push people who have legitimate uses to send more than 200 emails an hour. the factor is that 200 emails doesn’t even account for the first 0.25 seconds of a 1080p youtube video.

Give or take , in an email , The images are hosted elsewhere, the body of the text is the only part that is really an issue with sending an email. yet my prior host is making noise about email and thinks no one is going to look under the hood. They wanted 6$ to send emails a month. I could send The bill of rights, the constitution , the magna carta, the UN charter and They would not even feel the bandwidth.

So as I said pouring one out for hostgator who should know better.. If I posted the absolute braindead support I got tonight trying to say emails cost so much and worse me calling them out on the crappy server they had me on . You all would not of been surprised…

Hallucinated History:Are we on the losing side of history to AI? A historical debate.

I was thinking, and normally I would be debating some article that comes out and this time this was organic thought… Are we losing our history to AI?

I think we will, with all the generative content out there some infection of false material will become fact unfortunately. There are channels out there that are making battle reenactment and they may not pay attention to a small piece of information that gets slipped in. Down the road researchers take that small piece of information as fact. we live in a world that allows history to become transformative in the moment

Anyone can go on to wikipedia and change an article to change history in a moment.. We don’t have the hardbound check points in history anymore like the big encyclopedias anymore. We do not have the ominous set of books on our home bookshelves anymore that was the mainstay of book reports, Papers on subjects anymore. We just google…. and that is a can of worms. We can look at politics and how random things become “fact” and stick with humans no matter how many times its disproven.

The factor is that our last point in Recorded history will come down to the DVD sets of encyclopedias that were a frozen point in time. Rather this snapshot will tell us exactly what was going on to that point. Rather than the liquid historical platforms that can change in a moments notice.

Today’s AI slop might become tomorrow’s history, and that is a dangerous thing. A person wanting to profit releases tons of videos on youtube about history and does not check the content and now General Okafor of the battleship quantum now is a part of history. (if you pick up on this one give yourself a point!) So the real Aris Thorne and Lena Petrova’s of history will be blended out by fictional people that never existed.

LLM’s love injecting random names that are not really random into generative content. So at this point when these names come up we have to now question their reality. This is why some small change can infect the real history of the past and in the future change the context of the whole history. I think wikipedia should release a text version by year that is a frozen point of history, than a year later show changes to the history rather than finding the history of the document and doing a compair from there. That way at the end of the year review the many editors can research and make sure the historical value of the document stays correct.

To which end… at this point it might be a point to go to a thrift store and buy a set of encyclopedias or order yourself a 2010 DVD of Encyclopedia Britannica. Otherwise the history you thought you knew in 5 or 10 years might be changed to a degree you never knew or the thing you did was now a falsehood even though you were there at that exact spot in history.

WordPress and weird new whatever..

Daily writing prompt
Are you a lifelong learner?

So I was looking at the dashboard and saw this… I’ll bite..

I can’t say if I am a lifelong learner or a lifelong experiencer. When a problem comes up I view at as a problem and a learning experience. But, in a way I guess it would make me a lifelong learner, I view life and look for its patterns or how something works. To understand how something works gives me a greater understanding of that around me.

When I’ve made my post criticising AI, I view AI as machine that knows all the words and guesses how to use it. I look at things and want to know how they work. We look at the world around us and pretty much guess that magic makes the world work. Unfortunately it can be much darker than that. Things we’ve taken for granted makes being a lifelong learner a curse to see the word being broken down into small parts and financially sold off.

We base out culture on companies that take away the learning as an art and they present it as a convenience. We can not avoid having a personal learning experience removed from us by Cognitively offloaded to some AI and make some dramatic post that in the end we learn nothing from.

I’d rather learn something every day, some days we don’t, Some days we do. But otherwise the convenience of offloading everything we do into the magic black portal of a screen or a delve into doom-scrolling is a loss. We are losing our creativity day by day , we can type into a prompt and say “make me a beautiful song with violins and kazoos” and some stupid AI prompt spits out a file. Rather than take the route of figuring out how music works. You can start simple, On screen keyboard, piano done simply by the 1 through = keys on your keyboard. than Move up to a small keyboard from alesis or like keyboard.

Even with picking up the basics of a keyboard you will still fail at first but through repetition you learn. Even in the end if your output sounds like banging the side of a trashcan for 10 minutes you have accomplished something. But with the corporate end of things they want you to just spit that file out and pass it on. You have cognitivally learned nothing.

So in the end am I saying offloading is bad? … No… but, you have to use it to learn. Use it to see why something was made the way it was. Find out how it came together and try it yourself, If you don’t nothing is learned nothing is gained.

The Price of Convenience can be the death of lifelong learning or it can be a branch of new life long experiences you otherwise would not of thought of… use the tools to learn not make the tool learn for you.

META enshitification alert- Paywalling tech with the Meta Glasses.

I swear every time I turn around, Meta is doing something stupid because they think it will make them money. But this time they are taking an off the shelf tech and paywalling it. Passthrough or active audio.

Owners of Meta’s AI glasses have been told they must pay a monthly fee if they want full access to a feature that was previously free. Users will have to shell out $19.99 every month to use “Conversation Focus”, which uses the microphones on the glasses to make it easier to hear people you’re talking to, for more than three hours a month.

The fact they are attempting this is just a cash grab like charging monthly for heated power seats.

Meta says those who hit the “free monthly usage limit” will have to wait for their free hours to refresh each calendar month unless they subscribe.

As humans we are making steps back in technological advances, We are headed back to the days were we only make calls after 6pm to use “Free Minutes” and it’s fucking stupid. Meta is seeing how much they can deconstruct tech to see how many parts we will pay for and how many parts they can profit from.

Meta’s plans to test “premium” subscription experiments across Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp were first revealed in January. The firm later confirmed its tests would include trialling paid access to expanded AI features, including those on its smart glasses.

The fact that Meta has fired tens of thousands for their AI experiment and AI engagement features is a dumpster fire everyone saw coming. But on the meta glasses they have the chip built in to handle all of the audio, they just installed a meter on it so they could charge for it. Bose, Beats, Sony, Sennheiser and Apple all have the same damn thing, its called Transparency mode, Aware, active mode!

Meta is just trying to get your hard earned money for an already established technology. If Bose, Beats, Sony, Sennheiser and Apple Paywalled this tech, there would be digital lynch mobs. Even worse is…

The company says subscribers to its Meta One Premium tier will be able to use Conversation Focus for up to 15 hours each month.

What.. the.. fuck.. this is truly back to the old mobile days where you paid through the ass and waited for nighttime to make calls. 15 hours?? Good luck if you depend on these if you are deaf, or autistic. What fucking morons. The fact that this feature started as free than went to Fee could be seen as a violation of the ADA… This is a massive greed maneuver, first put the tech out .. Then pull it away. The people that need this tech will pay up in a moment.

It reminds me of netflix, When they first started they chirped up and down “no ads” , “no ads Ever!” than they started injecting small ads in the beginning of shows, Than the tile ads started, Then they jumped the shark with a paid NO AD tier and the price has been skyrocketing since.

Meta here is doing the same thing except with a piece of tech that lives on your body, and moreover they are messing with people who maybe for the first time in their lives have been able to go into a public environment with this. The neurodivergent folks need someone to speak up for them. The deaf should be enraged over this.

Meta’s Glasses have been problematic enough with people finding video of themselves online without their permission and worse.

Women have complained of being filmed without their knowledge or consent – with some only discovering they have been covertly filmed after seeing videos of themselves online.

The sad thing is META’s ai could be used for good and if a person has found their videos online they could make META AI delete the persons face as soon as its recorded using AI , but they won’t do that they would rather make money off engagement and keep doing stupid shit.

I think of it this way, If these glasses worked for an autistic child at school, than, you rip away a child’s focus after 3 hours meaning less than one day of school a month is covered. You have just destroyed that child. The glasses are noninvasive compared to earbuds… If you try to force someone who is neurodivergent to wear Earbuds, most neurodivergent kids will remove your finger before you shove something directly in their ear. 

My final thoughts here is while META is using AI to do stupid things like making fake engagement should not be removing engagement from the disabled from the world at large. They should focus to make the world a better place and not use the SaaS to enshitify day to day living.

Attributions from:
BBC- Meta glasses wearers hit with paywall to use built-in feature