Bob's blog - the realm of threalm

Arstechnica have again drawn my attention to a curious and heartening phenomenon in the tech universe: the tarpit. Check this out:  https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/ai-haters-build-tarpits-to-trap-and-trick-ai-scrapers-that-ignore-robots-txt It seems I am not the only one pissed off with the tech lords pillaging the world's websites to create their vast databases to generate the large language models that power artificial intelligence. What happened to the copyright of the authors of all this material? It's clearly ignored.  I do not consent to the material on my website, paltry as 'tis, being pilfered by AI bots for their databases. Beware bots!  Nepenthes is here. Crawl here now at your own risk bots. You will get lost in this tarpit scraping the bottom for eternity.

The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools. ― Thucydides

Whilst internal combustion engines reign, Teslas are getting quite some traction, But are they staying in their lane? We're told there will be a lot of pain,  What with all the climate action, Whilst internal combustion engines remain. Some doubt that there is much to gain, By conceding to the green faction, When they are straying from their lane. Others would have us catch a train. Could this be a perverse reaction? Internal combustion engines pull trains. Some rev heads reckon it's all in vain, just a temporary distraction, as long as they stay in their lane. As batteries boom, it would be fane, EVs are more than an abstraction, Whilst internal combustion engines remain, They will be staying in the other lane.

The WA Premier Roger Cook is quoted in the Australian today saying:  " Simply put, the laws went too far, were too prescriptive, too complicated and placed unnecessary burdens on everyday  Western Australian property owners ." Well done you Mr WA Premier. You did a rare thing in politics. You admitted your government got it wrong and corrected the mistake by repealing the Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act 2021 and re instituted the 1972 Act, with a few amendments.  That's one of the advantages of legislation over a constitutional change. You can correct your mistakes. If "we the people" of Australia make a similar mistake on the Voice referendum and find that the changes to our constitution also go too far and place unnecessary burdens on everyday Australians, then we will not have the luxury of repealing our mistake by passing a new law. We'll be stuck with the changed constitution unless we have another referendum.  There seems to be a lesson to be learnt ...

Samizdata.net  have pointed me to an article in Public entitled " Nacissism of the Fact Checkers ". It's a sobering though disturbingly unsurprising read.  It adds to the litany of distressingly wrong facts that have been endorsed and perpetuated by the "official narrative" and with the reciprocal suppression or censorship of correct "falsehoods".  Here's a list of such behaviours by fact checkers from the article: - calling out a self avowed parody site for misinformation on the Paris riots for posting a typically over the top clip from the action movie "Fast & Furious"; -  that claim by the New York Times, AP and the BBC that fake news travels 6 times faster than the factual news, turns out to be fake news itself. The claim is based on a single MIT study on small number of tweets , not news. - Facebook removing 20 million posts, and labeling 190 million posts about Covid-19 as "content moderation" because those posts did ...

Instapundit is right.  The predictive value of a narrative is the real test of its value. Just how many times has the predictive value of the official narrative failed us  recently? This is not to say the conspiracy theories are necessarily correct but you've got to give them some credence these days in the face of the abject failures of so many official narratives. Look at these recent official narratives  that come to mind as I write:  Wearing face masks is essential to public safety. We now know that they afforded us little if any protection. But they were mandatory because... the official narrative said we had to wear them. The COVID 19 virus did not come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. They officially told us back then that the "f urin cleavage site " found on the Covid SARS 2 virus, which was principally responsible for it potency and infectiousness, came from an unidentified evolutionary source in nature (remember that brief moment when pangolins were t...