I don’t know what’s worse, substituting Gary Lineker (in my clothes) for Viv, or a Tesla for a 10 tonne geode.

PS not a single LLM (I tried six of them) could correctly tell me what the world’s largest geode is. They all defer to the common usage of ‘geode’ which mixes up vugs and geodes.

The most isolated spot in mainland Australia is:

20°23’25.4″S 124°34’59.8″E

Otherwise known as stardust.shivering.crusaders

That’s in the Great Sandy Desert, roughly 156 kilometres from the nearest road, track, settlement, mine, bore, airstrip, fence or other visible sign of current human activity.

Of course the black fellas used to wander all over this area, some still do. So they wouldn’t perceived it as isolated, but possibly a bit light on bilbys and red kangaroos.

A couple of Australian second hand booksellers have accused the large AI companies of buying rare books, cutting off the spines for easy scanning, then pulping them after scanning.

So this is a double whammy bad, bad thing: copyright theft followed by cultural desecration.

The article on the subject states that “AI companies are not the first to destroy books for profit. Some vendors source rare books in order to slice them up and sell the illustration plates individually.”

The Nazis did it too in 1933, if you think about it.

The article offered up these examples of books destroyed by this horrendous new scheme:

a 1970s manual on soil mechanics;

a 2010 book called Born to Thunder: Champions of New Zealand Cycling;

a collection of Early Australian Poetry (1982), and;

a local history of the Melbourne suburb of Hawthorn.

I’m personally outraged that society has lost these priceless books forever.

I’m even more outraged that they’re using these books to train the next generation of AI.

I guess they’re really scraping the bottom of the written barrel, which from my experience is pretty rank.

Therefore I’ve started a crowd sourced fund to buy all the old second hand books so we can burn them before the AI companies get their hands on them.

Twenty years ago I loved the place.

But it’s changed and I’ve changed.

I don’t hate it but I don’t envy it or its people.

I see two two cohorts:

Young, poor and serving

Older, wealthy and being served

I can’t be the first and I’m not the second, so, pfffff to you Byron.

It’s a new word that describes the condition of being aesthetically dyslexic.

From Greek kakos meaning bad or ugly, plus agnosia, the inability to recognise.