Tea and rosemary cookies for the brain

January: “AI cannot even retrieve information accurately, and that there’s a fundamental limit to the technology’s capabilities. These models are often primed to be agreeable and helpful. They usually won’t bother correcting users’ assumptions, and will side with them instead. If chatbots are asked to generate a list of cases in support of some legal argument, for example, they are more predisposed to make up lawsuits than to respond with nothing.”

February: “Are these cookbooks written or reviewed by a dietitian or medical professional? Could a gastric bypass or cancer patient receive cooking instructions to make a meal contraindicated for their medical condition? If I were choosing for a library, I’d vet each one. With Hoopla, they are all there. Some might be excellent. Some might be dangerous.”

March: “Over the past few months, instead of working on our priorities at SourceHut, I have spent anywhere from 20-100% of my time in any given week mitigating hyper-aggressive LLM crawlers at scale. This isn’t the first time SourceHut has been at the wrong end of some malicious bullshit or paid someone else’s externalized costs – every couple of years someone invents a new way of ruining my day.”

“Most of the tools we tested presented inaccurate answers with alarming confidence, rarely using qualifying phrases such as “it appears,” “it’s possible,” “might,” etc., or acknowledging knowledge gaps with statements like “I couldn’t locate the exact article.” ChatGPT, for instance, incorrectly identified 134 articles, but signaled a lack of confidence just fifteen times out of its two hundred responses, and never declined to provide an answer.”

“ChatGPT responded with outputs falsely claiming that he was sentenced to 21 years in prison as “a convicted criminal who murdered two of his children and attempted to murder his third son,” a Noyb press release said. ChatGPT’s “made-up horror story” not only hallucinated events that never happened, but it also mixed “clearly identifiable personal data”—such as the actual number and gender of Holmen’s children and the name of his hometown.”

“Amazon says that the recordings your Echo will send to its data-centers will be deleted as soon as it’s been processed by the AI servers. Amazon’s made these claims before, and they were lies. Amazon eventually had to admit that its employees and a menagerie of overseas contractors were secretly given millions of recordings to listen to and make notes on.”

“eBay have changed their terms of service and you’re automatically opted-in for your personal data to be used for AI development and training.” (With opt-out instructions.)

Randomly stumbled over the omnibus collection of this at the library…immediately took it home and blazed through the whole thing.

It’s a short-lived newspaper comic from the 60s about characters who know they’re running a comic. The fourth wall is in tatters, the meta jokes are decades ahead of their time, the crossover gags are exquisite. And beautifully drawn! Apparently people at the time were sure the parodies and cameos were an elaborate copy-and-paste job, or at least traced — but no, the artist was just that diligent about recreating the styles of the characters getting cameo’d.

It was the brainchild of Mort Walker (creator of the army comedy Beetle Bailey and its suburban spinoff Hi and Lois) and Jerry Dumas (who by then was his assistant/co-producer, and who did the art for Sam’s Strip). Honestly, I would put Hi and Lois on a list of the most blandly-generic newspaper strips, so I’m kinda surprised Walker had something this weird and innovative in him.

…Although it sounds like he’s not the one I should be judging, because the bland stuff was what sold. Sam’s Strip was beloved by the readers who got the jokes, but never caught on with a wider audience, and got canceled within less than two years.

(Then the character designs got repurposed for a much-more-generic comedy strip about small-town cops, and that was a hit.)

Wikipedia has a Sam’s Strip article, this blog has scans of a bunch of individual strips, and this omnibus has the whole run with fun notes/annotations. If you get the opportunity, give it a look.