ChatGPT uses too many dream sequences and Gemini wonât stop describing characters.
AI also more often avoids subplots and fails to play with time jumps and flashbacks. The systems overwrite passages about the body and senses. âWhere a human author might write that a character âfelt afraid,â AI renders fear as a tightening chest, cold sweat, and dimming lamplight,â the study said. Humans also spin more complicated narratives involving more characters and locations than AI can handle. Humans also reference other works of fiction, specific people and places in a way that AI struggles with.
um ⊠why would you bother to read an AI novel in the first place? what of human worth could you possibly hope to find in those pages? Seriously, where's the value proposition?
unless of course you seek narratives like some Netflix/HBO series, or Marvel movies, in which case, what's there to criticize? đ€Ł
I would be willing to try a brief short story, but an entire AI generated novel would be too brutal.
There's another tell for AI generated media content, especially if it is targeted at women readers or includes purportedly female perspectives: Unpleasant but not horrible physical sensations, (e.g. due to a migraine headache, menstrual onset, allergies), are described by a series of hyper dramatic adjectives, and only later stated explicitly. So abdominal cramps aren't just abdominal cramps, but are described as by a woman as feeling she is going to explode or she has an unrelenting and growing ball of pain. Sometimes it is bad enough to make me lol.
I was aware of the situation by reading the Wall Street Journal's (WSJ) schadenfreude-flavored coverage of OpenAI. My subscription ran out in December 2025 so I didn't realized that nothing had changed and they still were burning investor money!
It is unusual for the nearly reptilian and bloodless WSJ Editorial Board to disparage a business with the same level of disgust as subscribers, AND tumblr denizens!
Most WSJ subscribers are not members of the cult of Sam Altman. It feels cozy, how article comments, regardless of writer's political persuasion, AND the EB board are so closely aligned. Consensus for now is that OpenAI will be a huge waste of electricity, water, and of course be a GIANT money sink that won't earn a penny of profit anytime in the foreseeable future.
U.S. Playing Card Company. Queen Of Hearts -- 24. 2014 Courtesy of the Richard F. Brush Art Gallery. via JSTOR. Accessed 14 May 2026.
Description
A red playing card with a Queen of Hearts on it. Text at the top states, âYou have a true loving woman friend. You can trust her fully.â
Text at the bottom states, âLove and happiness are within your reach; grasp them.â
Provenance notes
On the side of the card, the number 24 is circled in red. This Queen belongs to a set of 52 Revelation Fortune Telling Playing Cards from 1919 that were used as a simple fortune-telling device; everyone had the ability to interpret the cards, unlike the esoteric nature of tarot cards.
Normally the cards are used in a âCircle of Sevenâ format where the entire deck is shuffled and every 7th card is counted for the reading (the rest of the cards are discarded). The seven cards are then analyzed to tell oneâs fortune. Each card also has a circled number on its side, either red or black, which denotes the power value of the card (if this Queen were pulled during a reading, the red 24 would hold a lot of power). The power values are summed together if theyâre red, and then the black power values are subtracted from that total. The higher the number, the stronger and more accurate the reading will be.
After calculating the number, the phrases on the top of the cards are read to give a fortune. It is unclear what the purpose on the phrase on the bottom of the cards is used for. I wish I had come across an entire deck instead of one lone card.
This card was given to me at the Peopleâs Climate March on September 21, 2014, somewhere between 86th Street and 59th Street on Central Park West, but it advertises for an event on September 22, 2014, on Broadway and Wall Street in the financial district of Manhattan, New York City, New York.
The Internet Engineering Task Force was founded in 1986.
IETF RFC 2324
The HyperText Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP/1.0) was published in April 1998. It described "HTCPCP, a protocol for controlling, monitoring, and diagnosing coffee pots."
1998 was a different world; it was an era when the Internet was new. Before Sam Altman and OpenAI were born, this was considered hilarious:
Coffee pots heat water using electronic mechanisms, so there is no fire. Thus, no firewalls are necessary, and firewall control policy is irrelevant. However, POST may be a trademark for coffee, so the BREW method has been added. The BREW method may be used with other HTTP-based protocols (e.g., the HyperText Brewery Control Protocol).
IETF = Internet Engineering Task Force
RFC = Request for comment
The IETF has a nice logo!
IETF RFC 7168
RFC 7168 is the 2014 update to 2324, the original 1998 document.
The HyperText Coffee Pot Control Protocol for Tea Efflux Appliances (HTCPCP-TEA):
The HTCPCP specification does not allow for the brewing of tea, in all its variety and complexity. This paper outlines an extension to HTCPCP to allow for pots to provide networked tea-brewing facilities.
I should have saved this post for April 1, 2027. The RFC authors created both protocols for April Fool's day, and that is when they were published. Even though it is just a joke, the IETF is thorough. They made an update to RFC 2324 very recently, on 20 May 2026!
Standards that shape
The IETF was, and claims to remain, the
premier standards development organization for the Internet... helping shape the trajectory of the development of the Internet. But in no way does the IETF control, or even patrol, the Internet.
I guess.
Every year, IETF leadership, members, and study groups meet three times, for a full week each time. Nice venues are selected, e.g. Vienna, Montreal, Bangkok, San Francisco, Brisbane, Madrid, Seoul, San Diego, Yokohama, Prague, Singapore, Dublin, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Honolulu. Plans about the future of the Internet are proposed and discussed. Current matters of concern are addressed and resolved. In both cases, majority consensus is the means to finalize decisions and take action.
Control and patrol
Global representation has always been important to the IETF. Initially, it was difficult to attain. That changed dramatically over the past 40 years. Now, the majority of representation, at all levels, is from the Global South. Current activities and future direction are primarily made in the best interests of the national and geographic Global South.
For the next IETF meeting, a new topic for discussion has been proposed. Due to the imbalance in power resulting from geographic concentration of participants, it is nearly impossible for western / developed countries to be allocated IETF resources, nor for their representatives to have any say in future plans for the Internet.
I like that teapot GIF. It is so cute!
I didn't begin writing this post with any salient message in mind. As I retrieved the inline URLs, I scanned a few years' worth of listserv messages. And now I wonder if the teapot's trajectory might actually be an appropriate illustration for the IETF's status and trending development?
I found it in the 24 April 2019 weekend edition of the The New York Times.Â
It is a photo of artifacts displayed at the Museum of the Memory of the Jewish People and the Holocaust in Ukraine. The associated article accompanying the image is possibly clickbait; It is titled, Ukraineâs Newly Elected President Is Jewish. So Is Its Prime Minister. Not All Jews There Are Pleased.Â
I cannot read any further, as the days when The New York Times allowed non-subscribers to read 10 articles per month ceased long ago. (Some free views must have been allowed as of 2019, else I wouldnât have gotten a glimpse of the image at all.)Â
Is the image gen AI or a photograph?
The NYTâs paywall is FAST! Like the drawbridge of a medieval castle, it quickly obscures everything from view, just as drawbridges were intended to do.
In the spring of 2019, Claude, Anthropic, Gemini, Grok, Sorra et al. wouldnât be available for a few years as the new slick alternative to cell phone pictures, let alone an SLR camera for photographs.Â
SLR camera lenses are a vague memory; I think good amateur photographers and maybe some professionals used them from the beginning of the Obama years through the end of the Trump 1.0 administration.
April 2019: No COVID19, no monkeypox, yet
In early 2019, on the day of the photo, I wasnât cynical about much, not the way I am now. Maybe generative AI has made me temporarily or permanently jaded about the authenticity of visual reproductions?
Donât get me started on COVID19 and Monkeypox! Best not to dwell on them unless unavoidably necessary. Regardless, donât let memories of the maladaptive pandemic responses by many 1st world public health entities dissuade you from getting a measles vaccine or booster if youâre due. The DPT (tetanus, polio, and diphtheria) vaccine DOES NOT now, nor has ever used mRNA technology!Â
Best of all is that Dr. Fauci and Dr. Wolensky are nowhere to be seen!Â
Yet I'm hesitant
Look at the pleasant figure of the woman wearing a forest green and black striped pullover and jeans, on the far left in the photo. She is leaning forward bent at the waist, although I cannot discern the focus of her attention. There is a narrow but brightly lit opening at the back of the exhibit into which she is peering intently.Â
So far, so good...
Nothing anomalous about Greensleeves. Her friend, or perhaps a museum staff worker for the exhibit is slightly to Greensleevesâ lower right, almost kneeling on the roomâs clean parquet flooring.
Initially, I entirely overlooked the presence of the second woman. The narrow beam of yellow-gold light from the slotted doorway (or whatever it is) may be open for both women. Greensleeves is standing much more upright, and distant from both the light and exhibit items.Â
In contrast, the second woman is low to the ground, almost squatting as though she might be working, and she might be nearer and more strongly drawn toward the light beam... and perhaps as much or more to whatever is beyond that sliver of doorway light and beyond.Â
. . .except for that bassinet?
If the second, mostly obscured woman, with the longer hair, is real, as most people depicted in photos and paintings were, prior to 2020, then...Â
WHY is she melting? merging? morphing? into the wooden object directly in front of the wall? It looks to be made of varnished dark wood, for a Jewish child under age 4, no doubt sent with older siblings, parents, and extended family members to take a few things and then embark on a relatively brief wagon ride from home to a grassy clearing that was a small precipice which springtime greenery of 1942 served to hide an old and fearsome ravine.
Digression: Babyn Yar
Babyn Yar is the name of that long, very dark, very deep black ravine, where over 400,000 mostly Ukrainian, Polish, and Lithuanian Jews as well as another 200,000 or more Polish Catholics, Gypsies, Serbian Orthodox, and many Soviet Russians were all executed by Nazi German and SS Weimar Division troops. Most were not soldiers, but rather, men and women of all ages, and many children. Death was by gunshot and bayonet directly on the edge of cold, cold Babyn Yar so they would topple in with minimal effort. Babyn Yar encircles the northeast outskirts of Kiev.Â
Back in the Holocaust Museum of Kiev, in 2019, the nature of the furniture is unclear. Crib, table? Three or four legs, or an impossible two legs, with the young woman being absorbed to serve as another leg? Or is it painted on the wall, close to the center of the room, but to the young womanâs lower right or maybe directly behind her?
Is it just my imagination? Â
Probably. Â
AI art, more accurately called AI slop, had not yet been released in early 2019. Not even that poor soul, the Google engineer (ex-Google engineer) who became convinced his AI chatbot was sentinant and that they were in love, had met his sad fate until 2021 or so.
There are plenty of challenges in supporting the promised functionality of Generative Artificial Intelligence. So-called hallucinations are the most formidable and intractable so far, and no one seems to be even close to fixing them. Sam Altman and Satya Nodella might want to tell their elite human capital staff to teach Claude and Co-Pilot how to spell while too. Â
This month marks the 20th anniversary of Google Maps. Google now has only one blog, The Keyword, at https://blog.google with subdirectories for products. The 6 February 2025 post commemorates 20 years of Google Maps with 20 highlighted features.
Number 20 was particularly salient for me! First, some backgroundâŠ
Walking man
The little figure that can be used to navigate Google Maps at streetâŠ
Excerpt from âWe (Still) Don't Know How Epstein Got So Rich...â
What did Trump say?Â
Epstein is laughing and leering but stops abruptly as Donald Trump whispers something in his ear. Donald Trump has already moved away, turning his back on Epstein, and starts talking to someone else. Epstein is in a hurry to find out more and pursues Trump.Â
Oh look, thereâs Ghislaine! Sheâs wearing a white long-sleeved blouse. Sheâs only visible toward the beginning of this very brief video clip, near the wall and on the left. I wonder if she was there with Epstein. The NBC timestamp and watermarking indicate 1992 without a month or day.Â
Why was this filmed? Iâm curious why Epsteinâs expression changes so quickly from his usual odious smirk. He dressed like such a slob. The other men, including Trump, are wearing suit jackets and ties.
The narrator asks the best question. How DID Epstein amass such a large fortune in 10 years, given that all records indicate that he was a terrible investor?!
Timeline
This doesnât tell us much, but a frame of reference is always helpful.Â
1972Â --Â Bill Barrâs dad fires Epstein for being a bad substitute math teacher after less than 7 months
1976Â --Â Ace Greenberg, CEO of Bear Stearns fires Epstein for the following good reasons: Epstein sexually harassed his secretary; Broke company rules for selling IPO shares to Epsteinâs friend for which Bear was part of the offering syndicate but wasnât a customer of the firm; The U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) was investigating Epstein for securities sales violations, for the IPO thing, probably. Also, Epstein had secretly dated Ace Greenbergâs daughter several years prior.Â
May 1977 Â -- Â Donald Trump and Ivana Zelnickova marry
1980Â --Â Epstein was in full scam artist mode, making money through Ponzi schemes, blackmail, and deception
1985Â --Â Donald Trump buys Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida
1987Â --Â Les Wexner hires Epstein as his financial advisor
December 1990Â --Â Donald Trump and Ivana divorce
5 November 1991 Â -- Â Death of Robert Maxwell
June 1992 Â -- Â Ghislaine Maxwell moves to New York City
February 1993Â --Â Epstein and Ghislaine are dating, possibly living together
October 1993Â --Â Tiffany Trump is born
20 December 1993 Â -- Donald Trump and Marla Maples marry
1995Â --Â Epstein moves in and takes over Les Wexnerâs Sutton Place mansion (Wexner bought it only a few years prior in 1989 and spent millions remodelling it; he gave it to Epstein outright in 2011)
1995Â --Â Ghislaine introduces the Andrew formerly known as Prince to Epstein
1997Â --Â Leon Black makes Epstein a trustee of his foundation
1997Â --Â Donald Trump and Marla separate then divorce in 1999
I thought the video was amusing until 26:52Â and this:
Elon infamously required US Federal government employees to send a weekly email listing what they had done each week.
I have had to do that at almost every job I ever had. My bosses wanted a bullet point summary of what I had done each week and a short list of what I was going to work on next week.Â
It makes me feel sick and sad that channel owner j aubrey and all those FBI agents and State Department employees and Democrats would ridicule this. If I had sent a photo of my a**hole as described in the video, I would have been fired.Â
I don't get the outrage
What's so funny and laudable about such entitlement, especially given that it isnât applicable to the majority of Americans that arenât US Federal government employees?Â
I had to send a weekly update to my manager at IBM when I was a storage products hardware engineer. I had to do it when I worked for Standard & Poorâs and also during my years working risk management and regulatory compliance at two different banks.Â
Many US state and municipal employees are required to send such updates to their bosses every week. I know this with certainty because I worked for the State of Arizona Department of Health Services in the Office for Children with Special Needs. We had to send weekly updates to our bosses, and our bosses had to do similarly with their bosses.
In this first video, two utility workers in the Nevada desert are witness to the result of a 500 kV switch suddenly opening. The huge jagged electric arc that leaps out is as good an example of a âJacobâs Ladderâ effect as youâre likely to see anywhere.
I have a Youtube channel with nothing much of interest other than the degree of my compulsion to collect and categorize...
Misinformation and Democrat Party threats of violence
The Left Hook Substack has 9.1 million subscribers. I posted a comment on the most recent episode, Trump Is Literally Destroying The White House and America.
The authors begin by stating that Antifa does not exist, which was not a good sign!
My comment
The White House ballroom is not funded by American taxpayers. All $300 million (the $250 million estimate plus $50 million overrun) is entirely privately financed. CNN and NPR both published articles in corroboration. This Substack, "The Left Hook with Wajahat Ali" featurning "progressive commentator and host Kyle Kulinski" are wrong for claiming that the ballroom is 100% funded by our taxes.
Wajahat and Kyle advocate for political violence against Americans in their 21 October 2025 podcast and transcript. I find this quite disturbing, as The Left Hook has 27 million subscribers, the highest subscriber count on the Substack platform. (It was the top entry on the main landing page yesterday.) Specifically, they conclude their post--which is about a construction project to facilitate dancing, not about racism--by saying "it's been time [sic] for Democrats to play hardball and take out the brass knuckles against Republicans who are committed to white nationalist rule."
Keep in mind that the East Wing didn't even exist until FDR built it in 1942. Next, President Truman gutted the entire White House, from East Wing to West Wing, leaving only the exterior walls, in the early 1950s. It needed modernization. Truman and his administration worked out of nearby Blair House for those three years. See NPR for details: White House renovation history via NPR (23 October 2025)
Constance, do you describe FDR and Truman using the same language ("no decency, no compassion, no concern for anyone, disgraceful, with endless greed") you used to describe Trump?!
Peter Thiel cofounded Mithril. Peter is an entrepreneur and investor. He started PayPal in 1998, led it as CEO, and took it public in 2002, defining a new era of fast and secure online commerce.
Curious about Peter Thielâs office?Â
This is what it looked like in 2020 or perhaps 2021. Even though there is a share button on the Mithril Capital Management website, it doesnât direct to the video showing his office. It is an approximately two minute chat with Mithril founder or perhaps co-founder Ajay. Sorry, I forgot Ajayâs last name. Peter says heâs known Ajay for 20 years. See if this works:Â
The Mithril video starts and ends with the sound of Indian music. Iâm unsure whether the script encircling the indigo blue-backed Mithril logo is J.R.R. Tolkienâs Elven language (Elfish I think?) or a language of the sub-continent.
