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AI Headlines and Other Nonsense
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Blog
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Increasingly the news is taken over with ridiculous clickbait headlines.
One, recently, I would post a photo but at the moment my website needs some tinkering, some sort of behind-the-scenes PHP update has broken it and I need a few hours to undertake the repair, but you can take my word for it, scroll through your own news feed and you'll probably find a dozen such.
Lead for the article, followed by "$1,500,000,000,000,000 worth of Lithium found...". Which is of course a staggering large deposit of Lithium. I'm not making this up, I counted 14 "Zeros" in the improbably large number quoted. The news article - by "Unilad", I don't know why I get this nonsense in my feed, my typical news sources include CBC, BBC, CNN, ApNews, Reuters, AlJazeera, why the algorithm thinks that I credit "People" and "Unilad" and "Yahoo News" as credible news sources rather shakes the tree of "AI Is Out to Get You...."
Only this doesn't make sense. What number is this? Past a billion, past a trillion, jillion, quajillion? It doesn't matter, this is such an improbably large number that it devalues the very product itself, no longer is it worth 1.5 quajillion, this is more money than exists in the world itself at this very moment, it's absurd, garbage, clickbait nonsense.
The next article assures me that Elon Musk is the owner of said resource..., but this time with only 11 zeros.
Bullshit, bullshit, keep them confused and run for the finish line.
This is like those articles that assure you that near-earth astroids contain X Kabillion Quatrillion $$ worth of Platinum, precious metals, etc, etc, until you realize that possession of said asteroid naturally devalues the commodity itself. And given the clusterfuck of governance we're currently undergoing to even attempt to haul it into orbit so it could be comfortably mined is to risk another hole in the earth the size of the Yucatan Extinction Event.
Not that anyone would care, the prospect of profit makes this a justifiable risk...
Fanny Hill - Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure - John Cleland
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
- Hits: 270
This was inspiring. Written in epistolary form - 2 long letters to an unnamed recipient, it deals with case of an unfortunate young maid of 15 whose parents are carried off by Smallpox, and must find her way in London.
Naturally, she soon falls in with a bawd and bad company, and is found lodgings in a brothel.
Thus follow her adventures as a "Woman of Pleasure", and she is by and large by no means an unwilling or unhappy participant. The first bawd, to break her into the spirit of things, sends one of her more experienced ladies to tuck in with a few nights and stoke the fire....
Things continue, and while there is never an obscene word - or even phrase, verily you can't read a sentence or paragraph without getting the vulgar, though tenderly written, gist of what she's saying...
Now - this is amazing, for an "erotic novel", in that it describes the same act, on rare occasion of 2 positions, in a hundred different ways. The same act. There's no "French Style" or "Italian Style" or "Greek Style", and for the French, was it simply the hygiene of the era was so bad? But she describes frequent hot baths in oils, etc, etc, perfumes, so - maybe simply not to the authors taste. Although the speculation as to his homosexuality may have prejudiced any inside knowledges as to the practices thereof.
And an interesting point, our narrator has a couple of stories of homosexual men, of whom she accuses of being depraved and despicable beyond measure (despite finding them attractive) - and this - I found funny, she judges not her own initiations at the same weight.
You can read it here online: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/25305/25305-h/25305-h.htm
Contrast this with Gilbert Gottfried's reading of "50 Shades of Grey".
Clearly - there's no blaming Gottfried given the source, but the difference in prose stylings shows a very clear winner and loser.
In the end, from her meagre triflings with vice she comes to a fuller appreciation of Virtue, which, in it's summary at the end, reads about as sincerely as De Sade's final lines in "Justine".
But - of the time, the genre, indeed a masterpiece.
1,500 Roman Coin Hoard uncovered in Romania
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Found
- Hits: 210
An amateur detectorist finds the haul of a lifetime outside of Bucharest, Romania.
Link: https://themunicheye.com/amateur-treasure-hunter-discovers-1500-roman-coins-20949
Warfare (2025, Alex Garland)
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Film
- Hits: 213
Watched this last night. Meh, based on real life events in Iraq (I'm guessing) - it's set in real time over 90 minutes while soldiers deal with shit going down.
A slow start, and then it takes off and - for a war film, it's still pretty slow. Probably points for realism, but I'd still give this a miss, I'm pretty "warred" out.
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