A Geek Goes Flying

I was just trying to remember the Firefly”s designation (03-K64) and thought that would be an easy one for ChatGPT. It ... was not. Holy hallucinations Batman! https://chatgpt.com/share/69b4c31d-bde0-8009-9699-705ea61f74ca?fbclid=IwY2xjawQhorNleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeQzequ6FSCHRDE5dphZb6MDq7dXtkQQfRU2qmiL__916oXWd6x8te-HSCMF0_aem_3aWMMASN7cfL3-qJFFeY_Q Serenity’s design includes:  Two large rotating engine nacelles  (“Firefly” glow effect) Uh, yes on the rotating engine nacelles (but they're more like typical jet engines today), but those aren't the engines that have the “‘Firefly’ glow effect,” that would be the main ____. In Firefly, when Shepherd Book says “Not an aught-three,” he is referring to a rifle chambered in .30-03 Springfield (often written “.30-03” and pronounced “thirty-aught-three”). [] In the episode War Stories, Book examines a rifle and identifies it by caliber. His comment shows that he has unexpected familiarity with fi...

Over the weekend, I had the occasion to search Google for so much information, trying to troubleshoot and bring back online my main server . Not only were all of the AI answers just  wrong  (often subtly, but still, wrong), Safari on the iPad does not play well with the AI responses (the Google page would refresh a few times before the browser gave up). I had to append -AI to all of my queries, to suppress the AI output . Sigh. I did a plain language search on Google again today and the AI response was ... Humorous, if the implications weren’t so dire. The MH-100 QMNT has a  quilted  maple top (hence the “QM”) (nothing “quantum” about it), and the NT stands for “no tremolo” – it’s a hard tail with a Tune-o-Matic bridge. But that’s not the biggest issue. The MH-100 definitely does  not  have a 3+3 tuner configuration (the Les Paul-style EC series does); it has a pretty standard inline 6 angled headstock:   MH-100QMNT Headstock I have more to write on t...

This has been bugging me for a minute. I remembered a site, 'raging.com,' that was a de-bloated AltaVista service, that took a page from the early Google playbook and offered fast, powerful, text-only searching. Trying to find it circa the 1990s via archive.org found captures of Raging Bull (“Leading the Investor Revolution”), located at www.raging.com , through at least May 11, 2000. And since I also remember visiting that site a lot during those heady dot-com bubble days, I was convinced I was mis-remembering the name of the AltaVista search offering. But, nope, my memory is (at least in this respect) intact, and it wasn’t a fever dream, confirmed when I found this Slashdot comment . As early as May 19, 2000, raging.com brought you to raging search from altavista : raging.com search engine home page By August 15, 2000, it was a redirect to ragingsearch.altavista.com , but still branded “raging.” Looks like that survived until at least early 2005 , but by February 5th of that ...

A cassette futurism AI (kinda) ... But you knew that. Well, you should have known that. If you didn’t, here’s a few articles that underscore why you shouldn’t: AI chatbots fail at accurate news, major study reveals AI assistants make widespread errors about the news, new research shows AI Not A Reliable Source Of News, EU Media Study Says ... and of course the study itself:  News Integrity in AI Assistants  That said, I’ve been playing with my cheap AF AI workstation  (and low key coveting the $4,000 Nvidia Spark ), and I do see places, narrow places, where LLM type maths can be a boon. But, like, the other day I got a wall of text from a friend (who described it as “a synthesis based on a mass of affirmative data” 🤣) that just got things ... wrong. And a few days before that I’d asked some AI tools to summarize some expedited procedural stuff in a very niche practice area, and each one gave me the same – very wrong – information. When I rolled up my sleeves and manuall...