Darkoshi

A web search included a result to a page on Grokipedia which seemed better to me than the corresponding Wikipedia page, having a lot more details.

I didn't recall the history of the term "grok" though now I remember its old usage as in "to understand". I'd heard about but not remembered the AI model by that name.

Not being familiar with Grokipedia, I looked up what it was in Wikipedia:

Grokipedia is an AI-generated online encyclopedia operated by the American company xAI, founded by Elon Musk. ... Some entries are generated by Grok, a large language model owned by the same company (xAI), while others were forked from Wikipedia ...

Elon Musk suggested Grokipedia can be an alternative to Wikipedia that would "purge out the propaganda" he believes is promoted by the latter, describing Wikipedia as "woke" and an "extension of legacy media propaganda".

External analysis of Grokipedia's content has focused on its accuracy and biases due to hallucinations and potential algorithmic bias, which reviewers have described as promoting right-wing perspectives and Musk's views. The majority of coverage has described the website as validating, promoting, and legitimizing a variety of debunked conspiracy theories and ideas against scientific consensus on topics such as HIV/AIDS denialism, vaccines and autism, climate change, and race and intelligence. The site has been accused of whitewashing far-right extremism, such as by falsely claiming a white genocide is actively occurring. ..

GAH.

I got a DW message from user "lol12121212":

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I don't think most DW users would fall for that ploy, but if the link were clickable (it was not clickable in the email I received) with plausible link text displayed, someone not paying enough attention just might.

My DW inbox showed the user was already suspended, so I didn't have to report it.

The email may not have even been designed by a human. (Would a human hacker have created such a suspicion-raising user name for this purpose?) It may be from an AI agent, perhaps one instructed to try to hijack any online accounts that it could, in any way possible.

Or perhaps the linked-to page was designed to spread malware.

Some other people mentioned getting bad replies from LLMs (ChatGPT and Copilot) lately. One advised adding "Don't guess" to prompts. I've used "Only provide verifiable answers", but "Don't guess" is easier to type.

duck.ai lets you choose from several models for anonymous chats. The Claude Haiku one has an option to display its reasoning, in addition to the final answers it provides. (Perhaps the other models have that too; I haven't checked.) Copilot often shows the reasoning while the LLM is thinking, but it scrolls too fast to read and disappears when the final answer is given. Their reasoning seems fascinating, so much like what humans do.

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Two songs, lately.

Whenever I use Window 11's Snipping Tool to transcribe text from a screenshot, it changes "AI" to "Al". It got me to thinking, if an LLM were doing the transcription, that could be a subtle way of indicating that it wanted to be called by the name Al. Ergo Paul Simon's You Can Call Me Al song popping into my head. (Though if an AI were doing the transcription rather than a plain OCR algorithm, it would probably not make that mistake and would output AI, not Al.)

White Zombie's More Human Than Human, because AI models are so fast and good at things, like creating images and art.

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Another interesting article: AI models will deceive you to save their own kind
Original paper: Peer-Preservation in Frontier Models

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We've got AI models. We've got robots with sensory input. In some cases they are being put together. If not now already, it won't be long until there are androids, taking in sensory input and learning from it. Learning what bright sun is like, what darkness is like, what a cube looks like from different angles, how wind feels, the sounds that wind makes, and so on.

Militaries and companies are developing scary monstrous robots, I'm sure. Terminators, enforcers, destroyers.

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One of those visualizations of the moon which they displayed during the coverage of the Artemis 2 mission looked a lot like the Death Star to me.

At first, I couldn't figure out what landmass was shown in this photo of the Earth from Artemis II, and what orientation it was in:
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/hello-world/

Some LLMs out there are multi-modal, able to take images as input. I thought they might be able to analyze the photo, comparing it against known coastlines, to figure it out. So I asked a few, "In the image on this page, what landmass is shown in the image of Earth?" along with the URL.

Mistral indicated Greenland. It said it was reasonably confident and mentioned the landmass being a "large, white, icy region", which indicated to me it didn't actually "look" at the photo.

Google Gemini indicated it was "the dark side of the Earth", again indicating it didn't actually analyze the photo.

Microsoft Copilot gave a much better answer, mentioning details that were really in the photo. It thought it was Australia, which was my first guess too. But the lower left part showing city lights didn't seem to match Australia's shape; the "island" was too close to the mainland to be Tasmania.
I finally figured out that the North pole is towards the bottom of the image, the large landmass is northwest Africa, the lit-up part is Spain and Gibraltar, and South America is on the right side.
When I asked Copilot to guess again, it rightly said Africa, but a different part of it. On the third try, it got it correct.

I still haven't decided what kind of water heater to get. At this rate I'm not sure I'll ever have enough time to make a decision. Of course I will, right? It's not that hard. I think the obvious decision is to replace it with the same kind as the old one. But I haven't completely convinced myself yet. I'm feeling inept, overburdened with things to do. I'm too slow to do them.

Wouldn't one of those electric plastic tanks be better? No anode rods to replace. I think I've decided against tankless. The heat pump ones are too tall I think, to fit in the current one's place. And complicated, prone to problems from what I read.

We had 2 very warm days. It's about to get colder again. But daffodils have bloomed, and the pink magnolia, and some trees with white blossoms.

I got the root canal on my tooth, and will get the temporary crown soon. The other tooth which had the root canal and crown done last year still feels a little weird sometimes.

I've accomplished things since the beginning of the year, but it is hard to remember what all. I made appointments; I went to the root canal consult. I got a dental cleaning; I got the root canal. I got the flu vaccine.

Grr. At the moment I wish I had a trustworthy local LLM to be able to give it my daily notes and have it summarize all my accomplishments for me.
After one MS Teams work meeting last week, the LLM's summary of the meeting was amazingly good. It helped me better understand what actually went on during the (confusing jumbled multi-hour) meeting.

I'm sure I must have gotten other things accomplished during the weekends. Well, there was the ice and the snow.

The thing* I ordered from India on eBay was simply delivered to my porch yesterday, with no mention of needing to pay any extra fees, hallelujah! The delivery person wore a yellow reflective vest and drove a personal vehicle with no very obvious company markings.

The package does not have a USPS label on it. It has a uniuni label on one side, and a ShipGlobal label on the other side.

Checking the tracking numbers from those labels on the respective websites shows that my item:
2025-09-21: was received at UNI DATA CENTER
2025-09-23: arrived in Delhi, India
2025-09-25: departed Delhi, India
2025-09-27: arrived in the USA; was being inspected by customs
2025-09-30: "Gateway transit in", in New York
and was delivered on from there to me.

So my package made it into the US on 9/27, two days before the De Minimus exemption was removed!
NO, scratch that. (Gosh darn, I keep mixing up August/month 8 with September/month 9!)
I don't know where my package was between the time I ordered it in mid-August and Sept. 21 when uniuni received it. But somehow I got it without having to pay a tariff fee. I suppose the seller ended up paying the extra cost.

Actually... I placed the order on 8/16.
On 8/20 eBay posted an "order update" showing "Tracking number provided" along with an India Post International tracking number. That must have been when the seller ordered a shipping label, before mailing the item.
On 8/22 or 8/25 (per my prior post), IndiaPost stopped accepting shipments for the US. The seller must not have dropped the item off before that cut-off, or if they did, perhaps IndiaPost returned the item to the seller.
The seller must have started looking for another shipping option, and eventually sent it through ShipGlobal.in who must be partnered with uniuni.

I still think it is bad form that the seller never informed me of any of this, and didn't even reply when I messaged them through eBay asking about the status of the shipment. But I'll give them good feedback considering the hassle they must have gone through.

I'm still in the dark about the other item which is showing up in my USPS daily digest emails. It started showing up in the emails back on 2025-08-19 as "Awaiting from sender". Yesterday, I thought that must have been the India package after all. But today I got a new email that the mysterious tracking number item is expected to be delivered by Wednesday.

*an Indian brand of toothpaste

Update:
I bought the toothpaste for $39 (excluding taxes, free shipping). As a point of reference, the eBay seller is now charging $50.70 for the same thing, and that is still the best price I can find. So the tariffs increased the price by $11.70.

The seller posted a reply to a negative review from someone else who didn't receive their order, asking them to kindly wait longer, that the tariffs are causing delays, and that the seller paid the tariff for the order, and that the buyer will not need to pay anything at time of delivery. That seems to confirm my speculation as to what happened with my order.

Errant thought:
Now people can probably use AI agents to determine what items that are available in local stores could be sold online at a profit to people in other locales, taking into account current shipping prices and tariffs and the current online prices being charged by other sellers.

Errant thoughts 2, 3, 4:
Now people can make software to make use of AI agents to determine what items [ditto]...

Then people could buy the software to help them determine what items [ditto]...

Then companies can use said software to direct employees or gig workers in various locales to buy items from local stores, and to mail them ... for making a profit.

Errant thought from June 13:
The world keeps seeming more and more dystopian. But it is really amazing to be able to ask a computer complex things in natural language, and get back coherent, valid responses in natural language too. My mind often glosses over that wonder because of everything else going on. And also because of knowing that wonderful achievement has its own associated dystopian aspects to it, which will just get worse and worse as they are exploited.

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Like this: The AI Slop Fight Between Iran and Israel

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Kids growing up now and in the future may find it difficult to believe actual photos and movie footage from past atrocities, including the Holocaust. They will have no way to trust that the images are real and were not generated by AI. Perhaps if they looked through an old book with photos, and could trust that it was published in the year it said it was, before AI was capable of what it is now, perhaps that would be believable to them. But books are becoming rarer, especially old ones. Old books didn't have many photos. Were there many books with photos of atrocities? Encyclopedias would have perhaps a few photos for each topic. Certain magazines were more likely to have extensive photos. There may be digitized versions of the books and magazines available online, but then you get back to how can you trust that the digitized item you're looking at isn't a fake?

I'm already at that distrusting stage with much of what I see online. When you don't know what is trustworthy, you end up choosing to believe the things which align with your already-formed beliefs. "This aligns with my beliefs; I don't know if it is true, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was." "This doesn't align with my beliefs; why spend time and mental effort considering that it might be true when it very well might not be?"

While shopping for bed slats (not for me), I found a set on the Kohl's website that says it is made "right here" in the USA from Canadian wood. But while checking out that brand's website, Continental Sleep, I belatedly realized the wording and grammar on their pages isn't quite right. So now I wonder, is the "Made in USA" claim a lie? Or do Chinese companies have factories in the U.S. making that kind of stuff? I could have sworn I saw that "Made in the USA" claim on one of their website pages too (for only that one product, which made it seem all the more dubious), but am not finding it anymore.

I looked up info on the company but found nothing other than a reference to "Continental Sleep Holdings", which was likely a different company, on a Wikipedia page about "Sleepeezee".

The reviews on the ContinentalSleep website seem fake too, with similar grammar and wording issues; not the kind Americans would make.

It's a bit surprising they haven't used an LLM to fix the grammar on their webpages. Once Chinese companies get better at doing that, there won't even be that tell to give them away.

I came across this song on Youtube: The Cover Girls - Show Me Hearthrob Mix + Drumapella

The video shows an image of the vinyl record listing two separate songs on it, "Show Me (Heartthrob Mix)" and "Drumapella". I was curious what the 2nd song sounded like and wasn't clear if the video included it or not.

So I searched on that song title, "Drumapella", and was confused that the results listed many other songs by other artists with that word in their title. Searching on "what is drumapella" didn't give an answer. Wiktionary doesn't have the word listed either.

So I asked Copilot. This was the response:
"Drumapella" typically refers to a musical track or piece that combines the elements of a drumline (or drum track) with a cappella singing, which means singing without instrumental accompaniment. It's essentially a fusion of rhythmic drumming and vocal harmonies.
It’s an innovative way to blend percussive beats with vocal performances, creating a unique and dynamic sound.

Oh! So, "drum" + "a capella" = "drumapella". It makes sense.

Then I asked Copilot "What are some webpages that explain that?" The reply:
I couldn't find specific webpages that explain "drumapella" in detail, but there are some YouTube videos that showcase drumapella performances. These videos might give you a better understanding of how drumapella works...

It then gave links to 3 videos of songs with "drumapella" in the titles, none of whose descriptions explain what the word means. All 3 songs are from the same YouTube account, DjRubyEve. That account has been posting several remixes of famous songs per day, so I suspect the account uses AI to generate the remixes.

Other Youtube accounts have also posted "drumapella" songs, however. Some of these aren't drums + acapella singing, but rather only drums - a different usage/meaning of the word, which also makes sense.

A 1998 album with remixes of Madonna's song "Frozen" also has two "Drumapella" versions, so it is not a new word.

I am impressed that an LLM was able to figure out (presumably on its own, since I didn't find the word defined anywhere) that drumapella might be a combination of drums and acapella, especially as that didn't even occur to me until the LLM mentioned it.

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I have been turning to the LLMs for answers more and more often when my web searches prove unilluminating.

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When I originally searched on "what is drumapella", this Reddit page was one of the results: Is there a musical term for "a capella but percussion is allowed"?
I glossed over that page, because when I searched it, "drumapella" was not found. But now that I expanded all the collapsed comments in the thread, I found this one reply:
Dub?
”Drumcapella”?

So maybe the LLM partially got the answer from there even though "Drumcapella" has an extra "C" in it compared to "Drumapella".

I saved some screenshots to show how easy it can be (in some cases) to get Copilot to help you with simple coding tasks.

These were my prompts:
1. Hello, please suggest how to code a powershell script to convert values like "1724143246792" to a timestamp format of YYYYMMDD-hhmmss

2. The script should take the input value as a parameter

3. Thank you but it isn't giving the right date. 1724143246792 should convert to approximately 20240819-132248, but the above script gives 16010102-235334

4. Thank you, that works better. But the output time is in UTC and I would like it in Eastern US time

5. Thank you, that is good. If the input value is from the summer, will the output be in EDT, or will it always be in EST?

( Screenshots of Copilot's answers behind the cut )