Items of interest, April 11 - April 20,,2024: The Fall Of the Robots Edition
The text file that runs the internet - David Pierce, The Verge. A good explainer on what may be the demise of robots.txt, the simple text file that website owners can use to prohibit bots and crawlers from scraping their website, in the age of AI. As with many such explainers, it paints a slightly too rosy picture of the before times: it was perfectly common before 2022 for crawlers to ignore robots.txt, or to fake-comply with it (“It may take up to two weeks for changes to your robots.txt file to be reflected in our bot’s behavior”, with two weeks being just long enough for the site owner to forget about the whole issue unless it continuously demands their attention), and indeed, my old web hosting setup was wrecked by misbehaving bots (and an opportunistic hosting company) during that time. But for a general understanding of how robots.txt used to work and how it may be fully, openly ignored in the near future, it’s a good explanation.
I have greatly enjoyed Aard Labour, Tom Ewing’s book-by-book critical review of Cerebus. Its final chapter links to a number of other critical resources, including Tegan O’Neil’s How We Will Read Cerebus from 2011. The latter has an interesting quote on Roald Dahl in the light of the mostly trumped-up controversy over edits to new editions of Dahl’s children’s books from a year or two ago:
Roald Dahl was very lucky to be blessed with a series of extremely courageous and patient editors who were able to excise most examples of his corrosive racism, sexism, and pervasive anti-semitism. It is possible, thanks to these men and women, to be able to enjoy Dahl’s essential and strangely heart-warming cynicism without also being exposed in the process to his vituperative rants against international Jewry. The world is better for having Dahl’s books, even if the world was perhaps not so blessed to have had Dahl himself.
Remember, this is from 2011, a decade before these new editions. Dahl’s work has always come to us in edited form, with the most noxious parts removed - and then they found more noxious parts.
I regret that I have to keep banging this drum, but in addition to everything else, LLMs make us less safe. Phil vs. LLMs - Phil B, Funranium Labs:
As it was topical at the time, I fed “how to respond to a vinyl chloride fire” into ChatGPT and it told responders to use a water fog on the water reactive chemical. This would have changed a train derailment/hazmat spill/fire emergency into a detonation/mass casualty/hazmat emergency. A+ performance, ChatGPT, you would have obliterated a town.
I regret that I have to keep banging this drum, but in addition to everything else, AI-generated fakes are already polluting the historical record. Netflix Doc ‘What Jennifer Did’ Uses AI Images to Create False Historical Record - Emmanuel Maiberg, 404 Media, whom I should send money to reward them for their hard work when I have some more money on hand again.
I regret that I have to keep banging the drum but Here lies the internet, murdered by generative AI (Eric Hoel, The Intrinsic Perspective) and The Heat Death Of The Internet has occured (Gregory Bennet, Takahē magazine). The latter is particularly horrific reading; lately I’ve seen people use the boiled frog metaphor to describe how the developments of the past two or three years have made them feel but honestly it’s rather bold of everyone to presume that the boiling process didn’t start about a decade before that.
This week’s new old The Hooded Crow track is No Time, from our second demo from 1994. Originally written by Michel Bouma; demixed and remixed by Johan Dijkhuis in 2024, this one boasts a strong melody and an imaginative arrangement, but is a bit on the short side. I don’t know if I’m actually on it, but I am credited with rhythm guitar. As usual, the video background illustration is by me, but the thumbnail, sadly, is AI generated. I really need to have a word with my brother about that.
This completes the YouTube archive of our second demo. The full playlist is here: The Hooded Crow - Second demo (1994)
I wanna leave you with a different video, though: a year ago, singer Happy Rhodes performed a rare solo concert for her friend and fan Vickie Williams, who was dying of cancer. Video from that show is now being released on YouTube one song at a time, and these recordings show her voice in amazing shape, undimmed by age with her four-octave range intact:
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