Bob's blog - the realm of threalm

The volume of chatter in recent online musings about the hydra headed peril of AI dominance, is becoming ear piercing. These piercings will likely support even more garish burbles of thought to dangle decoratively in front of both the curious and accidental victims. A brief diversion - it seems one of the more remarked upon "tells" of the presence of AI in a piece of writing at the moment, is what I now know to call the " Em Dash " (_). Thank you NYT of 18 Sept 2025.  I'll keep an eye out for them. And I'll need to, if I'm to live up to the pleas of the balance of this post. The main subject of this post has been prompted by yet another article that Arts & Letters Daily has pointed me to recently. It's entitled " Large Language Muddle "  and is an editors article from an online magazine called "n+1" published in the Fall of 2025. The central proposition of this muddle piece seems to be that we human authors need to fight back...

According to an article in the Washington Post on 20 August 2025 by Adam Aleksic " people are starting to talk like ChatGTP ".  The previous post here on the Realm pointed to some words that have been nominated as indicators that a Large Language Model (LLM) is the likely author of the piece. According to Mr Aleksic's article we can now add to our list of" delve ", " adept ", " realm " and " meticulous ", the words " intricate " and " commendable ".  As he says elsewhere, it is becoming hard to keep up. But his more telling point is that as LLMs become more and more prevalent contributors in our discourse, it's not just the bots that are using these words, we've all started using them more too; in our own speech.  It seems that the feedback loop from the LLMs gulping up so much of their own outputs when scraping content from the web, is intensifying this linguistic shift.   Aleksic says:  ...  In the two...

Arts & Letters Daily has again pointed me in the direction of some salient commentary on current iterations of the vast universes of the online world. An article on a site called The Verge entitled " You sound like ChatGTP " has more than a few intriguing observations about the way our language is changing in response to the onslaught of Large Language Models like ChatGTP on online and offline content.  So let's briefly try to "adeptly" "delve" here on the "Realm" into some of this article's insights, even if we may not be overly"meticulous". Apparently in the 18 months since ChatGPT was first released, the use of the above four words in"quotation marks" has increased in usage by up to 51% more than 3 years ago. These words seem to align with those that the ChatGTP model favours, according to the Max Planck Institute for Human Development . What's this all about and what might be the consequences and potentia...

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...

ALDaily has again wormholed me into another world. So I have belatedly recently discovered the calque  and a breathtaking array of other fresh linguistic neologisms and concepts from the clashes, enjambments and entanglements of English living with other languages.  The source is an engaging article in European Review of Books called Beamer, Dressman, Bodybag  by Alexander Wells .  If you love words please read it. I fancy you too will enjoy it and be as enchanted as I. Unexpectedly, Wells turns out to be an Australian, which may be one of the reasons I immediately felt comfortable with his tone, self deprecatory yet probing, but his piece sings a many layered and complex song that rises above its locality, Berlin, and its subject, English and Deutsche.  It seems that the global conquest of English as a linqua franca has now moved well beyond the realm of "globish", the pidgeon in which business people who are non native English speakers from different nation...

Gender, Race and Climate. These are the big ideas that matter in the 21st century. So get with the Zeitgeist folks.  You gotta go woke. As I understand the current, constantly changing, received progressive position on these big 3 topics, here's what we're supposed to think and believe: Gender : A person can be whatever gender they want to be. Anyone who thinks or says otherwise commits a crime against humanity. Race : Only blacks, the indigenous and people of colour can have and express legitimate views on blacks, people of colour and indigenous issues. Any white person doing so is a racist, wrongly appropriating the exclusive privilege of disadvantaged victims. Accordingly it is wrong for a non-BIPOC person to believe or, worse, say that all races are equal and that we should never discriminate against any person on the basis of race. This is because a non-BIPOC person cannot understand racial prejudice because they have not experienced negative racial discrimination and beca...

The Turing Test: if you can speak to a computer and not know that you weren't speaking to a human, the computer can be said to be artificially intelligent...  ChatGPT passes this test.  Thank you techradar for pointing this out to me recently. And now Elon " AI stresses me out " Musk and a thousand others have signed a public letter calling for a " pause " in AI's headlong development due to " risks to society " . " Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable ," said the letter issued by the Future of Life Institute . Just how such a "pause" could be implemented and what king of regulatory framework could be created to realistically enforce it is not at all clear. The US congress? The European AI Act? The UN general assembly? A voluntary industry code? These all sound rather speculatively ineffectual against such a rampant  unleashed j...

William Fear has published an insightful piece in The Critic this week entitled " Orwell, Camus and truth " (Hat tip again to ALDaily). The article tells the story of a missed moment in history when two of the 20th century's great writers might have met. And the anecdote is full of irony, verisimilitude and pathos as we onlookers speculate on what might have been had these two great friends ever actually met.  Orwell sat and waited, and waited, for Camus to arrive. He never turned up: he was laid up with an exacerbation of tuberculosis. They would never get the chance to meet again, and Orwell would die five years later, having lost his own battle with the same disease For friends they were according to Camus, though they never did meet or correspond, as far as William Fear can determine. What they shared was a deep seated need to pursue the unknowable truth and the wisdom to know that the essence of truth was that it was unknowable. Both of these writers took the view th...

ALDaily , that inestimably worthy arts aggregator website, pointed me overnight to this fascinating article in Intelligencer, " You Are Not a Parrot " by Elizabeth Weil.  The article poured me down a rabbit hole into a whirlwind of speculation and intrigue about linguistics and computational learning. It enters and addresses areas of computer science well outside my comfort zone, as it explores with more rigor than I knew existed the growing conflict between Art and AI.   I have been sporadically pondering some of this stuff in the poetic shallows here from time to time .  It is slightly giddying to find out that this subject might have some real heft, depth and contemporary relevance. Even Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds is now expressing doubts about the benefits of technology Elizabeth Weil's article is largely about an impressive academic at the University of Washington, Emily M. Bender , and her actions in linguistics studies to attempt to challen...

This quote is from another intriguing piece entitled " On the Need to Touch Grass " in the City Journal on 3 March by Lee Siegel.  He says: Robots do not possess and will never possess sensory memory. Welcome to the age of robots. And in this assertion, he provides me with  one more piece of ammo, notwithstanding the current GPSchat tsunami, with which to press my claim that AI can't actually cut it in poetry.  One of the essences of poetry is the cut through of association from the abstractions of mere word jumbles in the moment when the poem touches chords of sensory meaning in a reader or listener. Sure a code can auto-write a passable word salad poem by borrowing from existing creations in its data set, given a few parameters, but to hit a common or contrasting sensory nerve in a human audience mostly requires actual experience of that feeling. I don't completely dismiss the possibility that such a nerve can still be touched by accident or by random generation, bu...

This observation has been variously attributed to Aristotle, Churchill and CS Lewis.  They all seem to have known a thing or two that's stood time's test, and this seems like one of those.

If you are brave, watch this You Tube  clip . The approach to climate change advocated in this clip is sure to ruffle more than a few feathers. To dismiss this bloke's point of view simply because you don't like him, his party or where he comes from, or because considering such an approach might diminish the certainty of your current political aspirations and world view, is to not take seriously the importance and difficulty of the global climate problem. We have recently had a wake up call seeing the energy problems that Germany is now confronted with after Russia's invasion of the Ukraine,  because of its self inflicted energy dependence on Russia.  It seems that by not properly considering that its increased vulnerability, created by its over reliance on renewables causing a necessity for dependence on Russian gas for warmth and power, Germany has exposed its people to unnecessary and preventable discomfort and even real peril. This   is a lesson that the rest of ...

.... old truths remain unchanged: The free world isn’t free because it is rich — it is rich because it is free . Freedom is not only a moral good but also a practical one: Because we have a system that enables us to fail quickly and fail cheaply , we can try many different approaches to social and material problems, throwing everything we have at them and seeing what works. Authoritarian societies, in contrast, have trouble adapting to fluid conditions, often discomfited by problems that cannot be solved with bayonets. One by one, Americans and Germans and Englishmen aren’t any more intelligent than Russians or Chinese or Saudis, but the institutions of free societies — from the free press to competitive elections — enable free people to rally and deploy their collective intelligence in a way that is difficult or impossible in unfree societies.     From National Review article " Autocracy's Fatal Flaws " 20 March 2022. Hat tip to Jonathan Pearce, Samizdata quote of the ...

“ I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. ” (Ecclesiastes 9:11, King James Version) Ain't that the truth. So we should all be thankful for those small mercies that are bestowed on us, even if we may not rightly know to whom or to what we might owe such thanks.  Reciprocally, it also seems churlish to begrudge those who are swift, strong, wise, rich or favoured, simply because we know that mere time and chance have contributed to these gifts.  All of us might be swift, strong, wise, rich or favoured, with application and luck.  We may just have to chance our arm a few times at achieving these elusive goals in the casino of life.  Kinda truthy...

"Not the Bee"  published a piece on 8 December about Amazon's cloud computing division having an outage earlier this week, leaving thousands of people with faulty fridges, front doors and thermostats etc.  Amazon's  Internet of Things "smart homes" stuff, designed to make the little things easier and life more convenient, went down. This made some small smart things quite big, dumb and less convenient. Being locked out of your home, shivering with cold at home or having spoilt food in the fridge, can cause you problems.  And that's just the easy to identify domestic stuff. Whole energy grids, traffic light networks, defence systems or hospitals could easily be included in such a list in only a slightly different scenario. There's a signal here, amidst the noise, if you're looking for it.