A good use for AI

You can use AI to spy out AI!

GPTZero, the startup behind an artificial intelligence (AI) detector that checks for large language model (LLM)-generated content, has found that 50 peer-reviewed submissions to the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) contain at least one obvious hallucinated citation—meaning a citation that was dreamed up by AI. ICLR is the leading academic conference that focuses on the deep-learning branch of AI.

The three authors behind the investigation, all based in Toronto, used their Hallucination Check tool on 300 papers submitted to the conference. According to the report, they found that 50 submissions included at least one “obvious” hallucination. Each submission had been reviewed by three to five peer experts, “most of whom missed the fake citations.” Some of these citations were written by non-existent authors, incorrectly attributed to journals, or had no equivalent match at all.

The report notes that without intervention, the papers were rated highly enough that they “would almost certainly have been published.”

It’s worse than it may sound at first. One sixth of the papers in this sample had citations invented by an AI…but the citations are the foundation of the work described in those papers. The authors of those papers apparently didn’t do the background reading for their research, and just slapped on a list of invented work to make it look like they were serious scholars. They clearly aren’t.

The good news is that GPTZero got a legitimate citation out of it!

Famine fears allayed

I’ve got all these spiders getting to a size where fruit flies don’t cut it anymore, and unfortunately, my mealworm colony crashed, I tried buying live critters online but they’re expensive and half of them died en route thanks to the bitter cold, so I was panicking that this new generation of black widows might go hungry. This is not good. I was planning to start breeding in the next week or so, and hungry females are more likely to feed than to…ummm, mate.

Ice fishing season to the rescue, just in the nick of time! This time of year a popular bait is the lowly wax worm, so I was able to get a few dozen quite cheaply at the local bait shoppe.

Spiders love these things, but I can only get them during ice-fishing season. Fortunately, that lasts until April/May, so by then my mealworms should be back on track.

Good to know the administration has its priorities straight

Little Marco Rubio has taken decisive action and ended an oppressive policy.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Tuesday ordered diplomats to return to using Times New Roman font in official communications, calling his predecessor Antony Blinken’s decision to adopt Calibri a “wasteful” diversity move, according to an internal department cable seen by Reuters.
The department under Blinken in early January 2023 had switched to Calibri, a modern sans-serif font, saying this was a more accessible font for people with disabilities because it did not have the decorative angular features and was the default in Microsoft products.
…
“To restore decorum and professionalism to the Department’s written work products and abolish yet another wasteful DEIA program, the Department is returning to Times New Roman as its standard typeface,” the cable said.

Yay! I feel lighter and freer already — Calibri is a woke font, after all.

Unfortunately, Calibri is a Microsoft font that isn’t automatically installed on Mac systems, so I guess I won’t be sending any diplomatic messages in the near future.

‘Tis the season for office holiday parties

The science and math party is on Monday, and I had to figure out what to bring. I don’t want to be the lazy drone who brings a six-pack or beer or some cookies from the store (there’s nothing wrong with my peers who do that, I’m aiming for just one step higher), but I also don’t want to spend a lot of time on something more challenging, so I googled for a traditional, simple, healthy, vegetarian food associated with the holidays. My search returned something called a green bean casserole — it’s common enough that I’ve heard of that as a typical midwestern food, and it really is pretty basic.

One catch: although it’s supposedly traditional, I’ve never had it, let alone made it. I’m a bit like an alien trying to fit in, but I decided to try it out. It’s just green beans in a matrix of canned mushroom soup, with a few little extras. So I whipped up a concoction from a recipe this afternoon to see if I could produce something edible…a test run. Then I put it before my guinea pig test animal wife to see if it was OK.

This is the end result.

She’s never had it before either, but she and I managed to consume it. I have no idea if it tastes like an authentic green bean casserole, but I guess I’ll try it on Monday. Maybe all the native born midwesterners will recoil in horror, but my midwestern ancestors didn’t rise from the graveyard to curse me. Yet.

Krampus lives here

It’s Krampusnacht!

This is appropriate in my household, for a couple of reasons. OK, one reason.

  • We are having our new fancy adjustable bed moved in!
  • This meant that we had to clear a path from the driveway door to our bedroom. Our house is a bit twisty on the inside, so I had to wonder how we got our current bed in here, almost 25 years ago, when I was the mover.
  • We are a little concerned about our very own Krampus, the evil cat. She’s going to be locked in the basement all morning, because with strangers going in and out, we don’t know what wicked chaos she will unleash.
  • I got a bit distracted, because when we lifted the mattress off our box frame — which was genuinely a box, the interior walled off top, bottom, and on three sides, I discovered the most amazingly elaborate cobweb filling the interior space. I’m impressed. It could not have been a rich hunting ground, but somehow this pholcid, or generations of pholcids, made it a comfortable and fancy home.

The movers are at the door! I’d better show them the way.

Streaming series belong in the upside-down

I tried, despite my misgivings. I tried watching this new season of Stranger Things.

I made it a half hour before giving up.

I have noticed that inevitably these expensive streaming series that suck up your time for 8 or 10 or 12 episodes in their first season decline precipitously if the powers that be decide to give them another year. They’ve already had over 8 hours to tell their story, and they couldn’t do it? So now you give them 40 or 50 hours to stretch out the story? If they couldn’t do it the first time, they’re going to definitely fail the fifth time. If I’m going to watch something, I prefer to search in the movies section, where we have directors and producers who comprehend the economies of narratives. The blight of the streaming series has produced a generation of storytellers who only know how to dither and babble and stretch out profits for as long as possible.

I know I’m old, but that’s how I felt about Stranger Things even before I took a taste. Lowest possible expectations.

But even setting that aside, the show was terrible to a degree that you can only get with a massive budget ($480 million!!!) and the confidence that comes from building on a foundation that has churned out 4 previous years of incoherence. This one has another handicap: a massive, tangled cast of bad actors. They started out as child actors who got by with innocence and fresh approaches, but now they’re all gawky young adults who never had to take their craft seriously, and it shows. They’re in this to milk one more payday out of the franchise before they age out totally.

That’s what killed the first episode for me. I couldn’t stand watching these actors trying to awkwardly reprise a children’s dark fantasy story. It wasn’t much of a story, either: evil monster Vecna is scheming to turn our world into a hellscape, and somehow the same gang of kids have to frustrate him, probably by splitting up and doing magical psychic things.

No thanks. Nope. I’m outta here.

I was already predisposed to mistrust dollar stores

The town I live in has a spreading plague of dollar stores — we’ve got two (in a town of 5000 people!) and a third one is under construction. I’m not keen on them — they seem to be sloppily managed and underpay their workers — so they’re a sign of a crumbling economy and are just jumbles of cheap plastic junk. But OK, they do serve a growing population of the poor, so I’m not going to lobby to have them shut down.

Except, maybe, they’re lying about providing lower cost goods.

The dollar-store industry, including Family Dollar and its larger rival, Dollar General, promises everyday low prices for household essentials. But an investigation by the Guardian found that the prices listed on the shelves at these two chains often don’t materialize at checkout – in North Carolina and around the country. As the cost of living soars across America, the customers bearing the burden are those who can least afford it – customers who often don’t even notice they’re overpaying.

These overcharges are widespread.

Dollar General stores have failed more than 4,300 government price-accuracy inspections in 23 states since January 2022, a Guardian review found. Family Dollar stores have failed more than 2,100 price inspections in 20 states over the same time span, the review found.

That we have 3 of these bottom-of-the-barrel stores in progress here in Morris, Minnesota suggests that they are extremely profitable, and one way they become profitable is by gouging the customers who can least afford it.

xkcd doesn’t cover all the possibilities

This came out with poor timing.

You see, yesterday afternoon was spent trying to use a company’s website. I was sent a bunch of stuff from a company, complaining about my mother’s failure to respond to their entreaties — she died in 2024. I’m still dealing with random bureaucratic nonsense, because apparently they didn’t get the public announcement my lawyer published. So I called them.

What followed was steps similar to what you see above.

Except that I managed to get through to a human representative. Unfortunately, it was someone with a thick Indian accent, so we struggled for a while, but eventually we distilled everything down to a request for documentation, etc., and she was sort of helpful, and told me what to do to maybe clear all this up.

By faxing all these documents to a number. Faxing. Who uses a fax anymore?

I found a site that lets me email them stuff that then gets faxed, for a price.

I am now waiting to see if all that worked.

I also contacted Boeing, which went much more smoothly. I think I’ll miss the monthly copy of The Aerospace Mechanic that they’ve been sending me.

Heart attack snow

It may not look like much, but this is a deadly hazard.

We tried clearing our driveway, but this stuff is wet, thick, and slushy, and it totally choked our snow blower. We could push forward maybe 2 meters before the snow blower froze up solid with ice and slush that it didn’t have enough power to push out. We ended up doing it old school, with snow shovels, but even that was impractical — the snow was so dense and sticky that it stuck to the snow shovel blade, and the shovel would just get heavier and heavier. We finally gave up, with the driveway incompletely clear, but it’s all we could do.

My wife was told last night to call the sheriff’s department in the morning, and make arrangements to have our car towed home, but unsurprisingly, we can’t get through. I suspect the town is dealing with real emergencies today, so I’m not going to push. We’ll get it back when we get it back.

Right now I’m sitting back with a hot cup of tea and watching my wife trying to scrape away a little more ice and snow. Get back in here, Mary, this is dangerous slop!