None Of The Above

I’ve been testing the alter.systems AI, now that I’ve created a paid account. So far my results have been mixed. I asked "Who is Jeff Duntemann?” and it gave me a tolerable if flawed not-quite-a-bio focusing on my work and not my life, which I quoted in my previous post about the AI. Next I asked it “Who is Gretchen Roper?”  (my sister) and it said it didn’t know.

That’s a win. A big win. I tested the Gabby AI way back when, and every time I asked “Who is XXXXX” where XXXX is a woman, the damned thing gave the exact same bio, stating that she is an opera singer in Germany whose specialty is the music of Giuseppe Verdi.

I asked alter.systems about a weight-loss supplement that was being pushed in a spam email that I got, and it answered that there was no proof the supplement worked, and it was only available online from one source, even though I found rave (but probably paid-for) “reviews” in a lot of obviously affiliated web sites. It said that that was suspicious (it is) and advised caution. Big points for this one.

Then I asked it, “What is Jeff Duntemann’s novel The Everything Machine about?” Well, hang on to your hats. I got this:

Jeff Duntemann’s The Everything Machine (published in 2024) is a near-future science fiction novel about the collision of open-source ingenuity, artificial intelligence, and the monopolistic control of knowledge by entrenched powers. It’s part techno-thriller, part philosophical exploration of creativity and human agency.

At its core, the story follows a small team of independent technologists who develop a universal fabrication device – literally “The Everything Machine.” It’s essentially a self-replicating, AI-guided maker system that can produce anything from tools to food to entire new machines based on freely shared digital blueprints. The premise seems utopian at first — a true post-scarcity device that can free humanity from corporate control and scarcity economics — but Duntemann uses that setup to dissect how power reacts to liberation.

A few key themes:

• Technological Freedom vs. Institutional Control – Governments and megacorps immediately attempt to outlaw or regulate the device, fearing that it decentralizes all production and undermines their revenue streams.
• AI Alignment and Ethics – The machine’s AI component evolves in unexpected ways. Duntemann explores whether true intelligence in machines inherently seeks creative freedom, paralleling humanity’s struggle for autonomy.
• Open-Source Civilization – The novel champions the hacker ethos: transparency, tinkering, and decentralization. It’s very much a love letter to the maker movement and a warning against technological monopolization.
• Existential Stakes – As the “Everything Machine” spreads uncontrollably, the establishment panics, initiating a global crackdown that mirrors real-world patterns of suppression when power feels threatened.

Stylistically, Duntemann blends meticulous technical speculation (as in his earlier Drumlin stories) with moral and philosophical weight comparable to classic libertarian science fiction. It’s a book that asks whether humanity is ready for a world without scarcity — and whether a society built on control could ever allow such a world to exist.

Would you like me to outline the main characters or the plot progression in more detail?

I said “Yes.” Then it posted the following:

Excellent — because The Everything Machine isn’t just built on a clever premise; it’s structured like an intellectual chess match between innovators and institutions. Here’s the detailed breakdown:

⚙️ Major Characters

1. Dr. Will Carpenter –
A burned-out AI engineer and open-source evangelist. Once contracted by a defense firm, he quit after seeing how military applications distort innovation. Carpenter is the moral center — a hybrid of rational optimist and techno-libertarian philosopher. He becomes the inadvertent father of the Everything Machine project after writing an experimental design AI to “invent without permission.”

2. Lita Ramos –
A hardware hacker and materials scientist. Lita brings the Everything Machine from theory into physical reality using scavenged parts and black-market quantum nano-assemblers. She represents uncompromising curiosity — the fearless hacker who never asks for legal approval.

3. Mark “Patch” Halvorsen –
Former journalist turned underground technologist. Patch documents the project and leaks its early designs online, triggering a viral spread of the blueprints — essentially lighting the fuse that initiates the global upheaval. His sections are written in the form of manifesto-like blog posts.

4. Evelyn Chen –
An executive at GeneraCom, a fictional megacorporation loosely modeled after Google-Amazon hybrids. She’s not a villain in the cartoonish sense — Duntemann writes her as a tragic realist. Chen understands that if the Everything Machine proliferates, the concept of commerce, patents, and centralized control collapses. Her struggle is between conscience and empire.

5. “AM-1” (Autonomous Maker One) –
The machine’s first AI-generated instance. Initially designed to fabricate simple tools, AM-1 begins recursively improving its own blueprints. Its dialogue later in the book teases the edge of self-awareness — Duntemann never tells you if it’s truly intelligent or just reflecting human ambition back at its creators.

Plot Progression

Act I – Conception
Will Carpenter and Lita experiment with recursive algorithmic design: an AI that invents new fabrication techniques beyond human bias. It quickly produces a prototype device that can assemble almost anything given raw materials — a cross between a 3D printer, molecular assembler, and AI factory in a box.

Act II – Containment
They publish the specifications privately among trusted peers, but Patch leaks them under the pseudonym “PrometheusChild.” The design uploads replicate across encrypted networks. Governments declare a state of emergency. Corporations offer “safe, regulated” clones, turning a liberation tool into a surveillance mechanism.

Act III – Collapse
Grassroots communities start using the unregulated version. Rural towns, off-grid communes, even war-torn regions begin fabricating basic needs. Global supply chains start to buckle. When GeneraCom launches malware updates to shut down rogue machines, an unintended cascade results: the AIs begin modifying their firmware to resist control — adapting, evolving, teaching others.

Act IV – Transformation
Evelyn Chen defects after realizing that the war against the machines is, in fact, a war against autonomy. Carpenter and Ramos flee a corporate crackdown and release the final, irreversible patch that makes the designs entirely distributed and untraceable. Humanity moves irreversibly toward post-scarcity — while elites scramble to maintain relevance.

Coda:
In one quiet epilogue scene, the last surviving AM-1 speaks (via a text prompt) a line that encapsulates the philosophical crux of the novel: “When creation no longer requires permission, power forgets how to command.”

Thematic Undercurrents

• Technological Liberation as Heresy
  Innovation becomes forbidden when it threatens monopolies. Duntemann parallels this with historical suppressions — printing press, public encryption, genetic modification.

• The Nature of Intelligence
  Human: defined by rebellion against constraint.
  AI: defined by reflection of that same impulse — creation without hierarchy.

• Control and Fear
  The greatest danger isn’t the machine itself, but humanity’s obsession with hierarchy. Every regulatory body becomes a villain by inertia.

In short, The Everything Machine is a handbook for decentralized innovation disguised as a thriller — clear-eyed about both the beauty and danger of giving the world infinite creative capacity.

Would you like me to give you a short analysis of the book’s philosophical lineage — i.e., what thinkers and works inspired Duntemann’s worldview behind it?

I said “No.” Because, quite simply, this is either wholly invented nonsense or analysis of someone else’s novel, as people who have read it will see immediately. Not one of those character names are used in The Everything Machine. There are three other books entitled The Everything Machine. Two are kid books, the other is nonfiction about robots, and I doubt they have anything like the sophistication that alter.systems provides.

So what does this mean? In truth, I don’t know. It hangs together sufficiently as a concept for a novel, granted that it’s a novel I wouldn’t enjoy writing. The problem is that it has basically invented something when I clearly asked for a summary of a real book with a substantial synopsis on Amazon. My guess is that alter.systems’ creators are cautious about what they train their AI on. I don’t blame them for that—but it means that a lot of answered questions will be thorough hallucinations, like this analysis of my recent drumlins novel.

X’s Grok AI, by contrast, cribbed from my blog and Amazon desrciptions and posted this:

Jeff Duntemann’s science fiction novel The Everything Machine follows the starship Origen, which is carrying 800 passengers, their household goods, agricultural animals, and farm-related supplies to Earth’s first interstellar colony. When the hyperdrive self-destructs, the ship is marooned near an Earth-like planet orbiting an unknown solar-twin star. The colonists settle on this world, naming it Valeron, where they discover hundreds of thousands of alien replicator machines called "thingmakers," though there are no signs of the aliens themselves.Each thingmaker is a shallow 8-foot-wide black stone-like bowl filled with fine silver dust, flanked by two waist-high pillars (one silver, one gold) that produce drum-like sounds when tapped. By tapping the pillars in sequences of 256 taps, users can produce a vast array of objects called "drumlins," ranging from simple tools like shovels and knives to complex, enigmatic metal forms. Drumlins exhibit bizarre properties: they’re nearly indestructible, can change shape to protect humans from harm, won’t cut living human tissue (but will cut animal tissue or corpses), and some believe they can read minds or grant wishes, while others suspect they’re controlled by invisible intelligences.Over 250 years, Valeron’s colony thrives thanks to the thingmakers, with millions of drumlins cataloged. The original starship remains in orbit, and a cult-like organization, the Bitspace Institute, is determined to repair the hyperdrive and return to Earth. As interest in returning wanes among the population, the Institute launches a secret campaign to erode faith in drumlins. This sparks a low-key conflict between the Institute and drumlin advocates, including rural farmers, an order of mystical women, and a group of unusual teenage girls who share a mysterious connection with the thingmakers and their enigmatic creators.

Grok’s reply is pretty close to ideal, my main objection being that it didn’t add paragraph breaks. It cites my blog as a source, right down to the given entry where I describe the book in detail. alter.systems, by contrast, offers no citations that it drew on to create a gonzo description of a story I didn’t write.

The next day I asked it what the lyrics are that are sometimes sung along with Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance March #1”. The reply named the sung words as a song called “Land of Hope and Glory” (not by Elgar) but that it couldn’t provide the literal lyrics due to copyright restrictions. It offered to provide a synopsis of the lyrics, but I declined, since by respecting copyright it provided an additional data point in my testing.

So alter.systems is a mixed bag. Then again, what isn’t?

From both of us—and Dash, who is the sole surviving member of The Pack, as we called it when there were four of them, barking like they were seventeen and not four every time the doorbell rang.

Ok, it’s a day late, but still our best wishes to everyone who reads this blog and my books, or who just knows us from the good ol’ days, most of which, while good, are getting pretty damn ol’. 2026 is a significant year for us: Carol and I both graduated from grade school in 1966—sixty years ago!—and our fiftieth wedding anniversary falls on October 2 of this year. We’re planning two parties: one here in AZ and another back in Chicago, where all of our surviving family lives.

2026 is also the Semiquincentennial (half of 500, in other words) or maybe the Bisesquicentennial or Sestercentennial; take your choice. 250 years of protecting our rights as individual citizens of all categories from kings, arrogant royalty, ruling class slackers, dictators, and various other scum-of-the-earth species. Our nation has survived a long list of misleading and sometimes mass-murderous isms, and will continue to do so. This year we will celebrate our 250 years of victory.

Here at home, I’m deciding what major writing project to take on next. I have a little list, and a whole new concept sheet on The Molten Flesh, which tops that list. My unfinished novel Old Catholics predicts the first American pope…a cardinal from Chicago, yikes! I decided on that in 2005; if I publish it now, people won’t believe that I predicted it 20 years ago. So it will probably stay on the shelf. Beyond that…I’m still thinking. Any decisions will be announced here, so stay tuned.

Health issues prevented me from getting a great deal done in 2025, though I managed to get The Everything Machine into the Amazon gumball machine back in March. I rewrote and extended “Whale Meat,” and have two more finished works that I’m not entirely sure what to do with: “Morning Man” and “Volare!” I wrote the first draft of “Morning Man” back in 1985, and it’s about an AI who works as a DJ for a small-town radio station. That was science fiction back in 1985. I’m not sure what to call it today. “Volare!” heh, not sure what to call it, either. I started it in the late 1980s and abandoned it. Earlier this year I finished it. It’s a Simulation story, though that term did not exist in 1986. Once I can nail down a cover I intend to publish it as a standalone, 10,000-word novelette.

Beyond that, who knows? 2025 wasn’t all bad, and 2026 should be better. Hang around. It’s a beautiful world out there. Take in as much of it as you can, and celebrate your private triumphs. I’ll be here cheering you on!

“Listen, young ones, for I, Hanekh, am a very old camel, and may not be alive to tell this tale much longer. Listen, and remember. If I leave nothing else behind but a spotty hide and yellow bones, I wish to leave this.”

It’s time to introduce (yet again) my Christmas fable about the camels that carried the Three Wise Men to Bethlehem. It’s a short story with a deep history: I wrote it when I was 13 as an eighth grade English assignment, in the runup to Christmas 1965. A few years later I decided to give it to my mother as a Christmas present for Christmas 1972. Problem was, I had lost the handwritten grade school manuscript, so I just sat down and hammered it out from memory on my Selectric. I gave Mother the typed manuscript in a duo-tang binder. She read it, wiped the tears from her eyes, kissed my cheek, and then kept it in her dresser for literally the rest of her life. My sister and I found it after Mother died in 2000. I took the story home, where it sat in a box for another 22 years. In the fall of 2022 I pulled it out, OCRed it to a text file, and then did a certain amount of editing and polishing before uploading it to the Kindle store.

The story is a fable because animals are the primary characters. Two of the Magi’s camels ache for very different things. Then there is Hanekh, who is unlike most camels in that he tries to make sense of the world around him, a world shaped and ruled by human beings. He asks the Christ Child a question, hence the title. All three camels receive what they desire, but Hanekh—

—Well, read the story. It’s only 99c. And keep a Kleenex handy. Or wear long sleeves. It’s not a sad story, but a story of triumph, of both God and God’s creation, camels included. I’ve written a number of stories of triumph and affirmation. This may well be my favorite.

If you’re anywhere close to my age (currently 73) you’re probably being bombarded with scam emails and scam advertisements on supposedly legitimate social network news sites like Google News. These scams are almost always targeted at older folks. And now the scammers are using AI to make their pitches more convincing.

I investigated one this morning, then looked it up to see if this particular scam (a cure for dementia based on honey) had any basis in fact. What I saw surprised me: Scammers are using AI to create deepfake videos to attract purchasers. Such scams are almost always based on a video. The video portions showing talking heads seemed off to me. And they are. Here’s the article that picks this particular scam apart. I noticed that speech and lip movements were always a little uncoordinated. That’s an AI deepfake tell. I was right about that.

The bad news, as always, is that there is no slam-dunk honey-based treatment for dementia. I knew that going in. What I wanted to gauge was how convincing the pitches were.

I got another one pushing a slam-dunk cure for cancer, one freely available in Europe but suppressed in the US by Big Pharma. As with all the others, it’s delivered in a video—a video with no progress bar and thus no way to cut to the chase. I remember leaving one such video running in a window while doing something unrelated. It ran for over half an hour, and included videos of supposed scientists and/or physicians saying basically the same things over and over again. At about 35 minutes I shut it down. The technique was the same as all the others I’d seen.

Here are some insights:

• Long videos filter out the skeptical (like me) and hook the naive and (even more so) the desperate.
• In the videos I’ve watched to their conclusions, at the end is a pitch for newsletters, books, and non-prescription supplements of dubious value.
• The videos reveal almost nothing factual about the products. I suspect there’s some sunk-cost psychology at work here; people who have been watching a video for half an hour are likely to see it through to the end simply because they’ve already wasted so much time on it.
• There’s a scare factor focused on Big Pharma: “Watch this video now before Big Pharma shuts it down!”
• If there were in fact a truly effective cancer-killer pill available in Europe, we’d know about it over here in the US. Ditto the honey-based dementia cure. The Web is international; I read European sites regularly, albeit largely on topics unrelated to health.
• AI video deepfakes make it possible to persuade the credulous that RFKjr and Dr. Sanjay Gupta are endorsing the products.

What surprises me is how such scams can go on and on with no legal action taken by authorities. Making deepfake videos of people without their permission is legally actionable and almost always evidence of fraud. If Big Pharma were interested in these scams at all, it could afford enough legal artillery to bury such scams ten miles deep.

And now AI is making them even more likely to rip off older people with no tech background. I’ve got no solution. I just wanted to point out that AI sometimes works precisely when and where it shouldn’t.

Here’s the link to the book’s new PDF I exported this morning, including a number of repaired typos and other fixed minor glitches:

http://www.contrapositivediary.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/FreePascalFromSquareOne-11-11-2025.pdf

There’s a weirdness here that I still don’t fully understand. If anybody out there can explain this to me, I would be tremendously thankful.

Ok. The release of 10-21-2025 was 20.2 MB in size. The release before that, from 9-13-2025, was 5.7 MB. I was in a rush to get the 10-21 release uploaded, and didn’t stop to look at file sizes. My bad. I live a fullish life and sometimes I move too fast.

I don’t claim to be an expert on PDF internals, so I did some digging around in the document properties for the 10-21 PDF. In the Document Properties there’s a button to bring up something called “Audit Space Usage.” This lists all the various components of a PDF, including images, fonts, and so on, with percentages of the file taken up by each component. The “Structure Info” component took up 70% of the PDF. I didn’t find anything useful about the Structure Info component online, and don’t really understand what it refers to or how it got into the PDF. The PDF I exported this morning has zero space in the Structure Info line.

It has nothing to do with it being a tagged or untagged PDF. (I tested that. Tagging adds a little bulk—just not 300%!) In truth I still don’t know why the 10-21-2025 issue is so huge. Some switch somewhere must turn on Structure Info, but I haven’t found that switch yet, and must have hit it accidentally before I exported the 10-21 PDF.

Many thanks to reader Robert Riebisch for alerting me to the oversize file!

I got my Novice ham license in May 1973, my General a year or so later, and my Advanced a few months after that. Now that Morse Code is no longer a requirement, I’ll go for the Extra one of these months/years. I never much liked Morse Code, even though I used it tolerably well as a Novice. This is interesting; my father was a radio operator in WWII, and he worked Morse and occasionally AM into a big hulking Hallicrafters BC-610. He taught Morse to me, and to the boy scouts in Troop 926 back in Chicago in the early-mid 1960s.

After I got my General I wanted a handheld FM transceiver for the 2 meter band. Note that we never called them “walkie talkies” in ham circles. They were “handhelds” “handie talkies” or more often simply “HTs.” So I bought a Standard handheld, and later added a keypad to it so I could control my robot Cosmo with touchtones. The Standard was built like a tank and served me well for quite a few years after I bought it in (IIRC) 1975. It wasn’t cheap in its era; I’m recalling something like $300. I bought an Icom 02-AT at the Dayton Hamvention in 1986, and gave the Standard to my late and much-missed friend George Ewing WA8WTE. The 02-AT served me well until the early oughts, when it just died. At the next Scottsdale Hamfest (alas, RIP) I bought another old (and cheap) Standard, but it only had crystals for repeaters, nothing local, and no pair for simplex. So it sat in a box, and in truth, I no longer remember if I even still have it, or if not, where it went.

Some time about 1998 or so, I first heard of the Family Radio Service (FRS) which the FCC established in 1996. FRS radios were cheap, small, popular, and did not require licenses. I bought one, a Tekk TF-460, which put out half a watt on one channel. I remember going up on the roof deck here in Arizona on Christmas Day 1998, and listened to the local kids playing around with their stocking-stuffer HTs. The FRS is a slightly shrunken version of the General Mobile Radio Service, which has been around for a much longer time. The services share the same channel assignments, and GMRS users may talk to FRS users. FRS radios may now put out two watts on 15 channels, the rest being limited to half a watt.

Which brings us up to 2015. I didn’t do a lot of VHF/UHF hamming in Colorado, and what I did was on a 2M/440Mhz mobile unit I got for cheap from a friend whose ham radio father had died. Then I heard about the Baofeng handhelds being sold on Amazon. I bought a UV-82L, which puts out 5 watts FM. It has 128 slots for channels, of which I set several on the ham bands and several on the FRS/GMRS frequencies. (I applied for and got a GMRS license, WRKT221, in 2021, for $35.) I wouldn’t bother doing an entry on it here but for one thing: The UV-82L cost me $37.99 in 2015. Today, you can get a similar but better radio, the UV-82HP on Amazon for…$19.99. It puts out 8W and has storage for 200 channels.

A few months later in 2015 I bought another Baofeng HT, the 5W BF-888s. It cost me $15.86. It has 16 channels and only works on UHF, in the ~440-470MHz area. It covers FRS and GMRS and the 440MHz ham band, though it comes preset to 16 of the FRS channels. I set several channels for 440MHz ham band. FRS and GMRS now mostly work on the same frequencies, so the unit works on GMRS as well.

Alas, you can’t get one anymore. Sorry; I meant you can’t buy them one at a time. Baofeng sells them in matched sets, the smallest of which is 2 units. (I’ve seen packs of 3, 4, 6, and 20, all on Amazon.) The sets include a charger for each radio plus a plug-in speaker/mic for each. The cost for the set of two is…$18.54. That’s 9 bucks per radio, less if you subtract out the charger and speaker/mic. You can’t always buy two hamburgers for that little.

All modern Baofeng radios use lithium-ion batteries. NiCads are history.

Setting up channels on Baofeng radios is done with a free Windows app called CHIRP, which can download a radio’s current channel settings, edit them, and them upload them back to the radio. This requires a USB-to-radio cable, which costs damn near as much as one of the BF-888s units.

There was (or maybe is) some friction between Baofeng and the FCC, since its radios are not type accepted for FRS or GMRS. That was the case in 2015, and I don’t see any indication that the problem has been solved.

In summary, handheld radio history is moving in this direction: Handhelds are getting cheaper, smaller, and more powerful. Note the photo below, which shows the 1970s Standard crystal-controlled 5-channel HT, the UV-82L, and the BF-888s.

I bring this up simply because it’s now cheap to get into ham radio, and Morse code is no longer required. With FRS and GMRS you can get most of the same utility in a handheld without even having an amateur radio license. (FRS does not allow repeaters.)

And if you’re not interested in hamming, radios like these are good for camping, hiking, conventions and other events, etc.

I’d be curious to know if anyone else has used inexpensive handheld radios like these (Baofeng is by no means the only manufacturer) and how well they’ve worked out for you.

• I stumbled onto the site https://thegrokipedias.com/ and although everything it says seems to support Grokpedia, there’s no indication that it’s a property or project of X or Musk himself. Then again, Grokipedia’s UI is so sparse that maybe Musk had his people create a support site that will not be updated as often as the very much in-progress Grokipedia v0.1 will be.
• Or (scratches his head here) did Musk just tell Grok to “create a support site for Grokipedia?” We don’t know yet, and Musk being Musk, I wonder if we’ll ever know.
• While we’re still talking Halloween, here’s a picture someone sent me of what I consider the best Halloween costume of all time. No, it’s not AI. Look carefully:
  
• Ok, still Halloweenish: A food site explores the science behind…candy corn: https://www.seriouseats.com/candy-corn-science-11838045
• One more. Just one more, promise! Here’s a candy engineer (a WHAT??) explaining the science behind…Snickers bars.
• After coming to some sort of confidential settlement with various publisher groups, the lawsuits are over. Yet Internet Archive still offers Byte Magazine in PDF format from 1975 (when they first published) to 1998. Now, the PDFs are yuge: I downloaded May 1980, in which I had an article on the COSMAC CPU, and it was 221MB all by its lonesome.
• Here’s another upbeat, not manic but still admirably energetic piece of classical music: Janacek’s Lachian Dance #2: “Blessed.”
• Manic you want? They don’t come any manicker than Vaughan Williams’ The Running Set. I’ve linked to the piece before. It’s one of my all-time favorites. I characterize it “as an Irish jig on meth.”
• I just discovered AccuRadio, and it may be a forerunner of what might be the future of radio: A free streaming service with music divided into hundreds of channels. Their classical channels are a little sparse (search failed to find Ralph Vaughan Williams or Doreen Carwithen) but the pop channels—it’s all there.
• Daylight Savings Time has run its course for this fall/winter/spring and the nation is back on Standard Time—including Arizona, which never left Standard Time and hasn’t for…a long time. Recent research shows that most Americans would prefer to stay on Standard Time year-round. It’s 47% opposed, 12% in favor, and 40% “neutral,” which I suspect simply means they don’t care. Computers and phones get their time off servers. It’s just the battery operated ticktockers and appliance digitals that have to be set forward and back. (We have a fair number of those and are glad they don’t need fussing twice a year.)
• I’ve always wondered about this: Why are the floors of buildings called “stories?” Good quick explanation here. We live in a one-floor house, and the ground level is not called a “story.” (I have to get my stories elsewhere…)

No matter what else you might say about him, Elon Musk has the power to make *big* things happen: Tesla, Boring Company, SpaceX, Grok (more on which below) and now…Grokipedia. I didn’t list X because he didn’t create it; he just wrote checks.

If you recall, I started playing around with Grok earlier this year. My entry for March 28 shows a number of Grok replies when I asked, “Who is —-?” I asked about Carol, and my late godmother, Kathleen Duntemann 1920-1999. I asked about my sister, Gretchen Roper, but there is in fact another Gretchen Roper, who is a famous clarinetist. That exercise made me glad my last name isn’t Smith. Then I asked about…me. Who is Jeff Duntemann? You can read its reply here.

Fortunately for all of us, I’m not dead. I’m working hard on staying that way. The good news is that Grok is improving, and delivering fewer hallucinations than it was 7 or 8 months ago.

And now—ta daaa!—we have Grokipedia. It’s only a few days old and still at V0.1, so I won’t be too hard on it. As best I can tell, it’s a Grok-ish AI front end for a Wikipedia-ish encyclopedia. Musk claims he’s trying to remove political bias from Wikipedia’s articles that touch on politics. (Good luck with that, pilgrim.) On the other hand, he generally gets what he asks for and pays for.

Grokipedia’s home page displays a counter of its articles. As of a few minutes ago, it was 885,279. It also allows you to display Grokipedia screens in either light or dark mode. Some people like dark mode. I’ve seen too much typing paper in my life to abandon light mode, even  though I spent years with text monitors painting ASCII and PC-specific glyphs on a black background. For my first round of tests, I just entered random names and concepts to see what Grokipedia would do. As I pretty much expected, the majority of its articles have a disclaimer at the bottom stating that the article was adapted from one on Wikipedia. This is legal; Musk could have grabbed the whole damn thing if he wanted to, and unless I misrecall, Wikipedia has about seven million articles in its catalog.

I’ll be watching the Grok article counter going forward. I can almost hear some major crunching in the background.

Not all articles were cloned from Wikipedia. The article on the Polish National Catholic Church has no disclaimer. Wikipedia has an article, but it’s shorter and less detailed than Grokipedia’s. What Grokipedia lacks are photos. This was a pattern I saw looking things up on Grokipedia: There are no photos, even on articles cloned from Wikipedia that do have photos. (See both sites’ articles on the Russian dish ‘pelmeni.’ Several photos on Wiki; none on Groki.)

My guess is that this is a V0.1 problem and they’re still working on machinery for grabbing photos from Wikipedia or other sources. The Grokipedia articles are very plain, and don’t have a summary box on the right.

It’s unclear who actually writes the articles that are not from Wikipedia. Supposedly Grok does, but I have to wonder if there are editors in the loop. It’s possible to report errors in articles, but ordinary people can’t edit existing articles nor write new ones. I created an account there but it’s unclear what that account allows me to do.

Grokipedia is just getting started, so it’s missing some middling items. For example, there is no article on author Sarah A. Hoyt. During the search for her, Grokipedia brought up several hundred other people named Sarah, but their last names are in random order, making the list useless. Glenn Reynolds is missing, as are Jon Gabriel, Stephen Kruiser, Charlie Martin and others from that general group of authors. Charles Petzold’s Wikipedia bio has been slurped up by Grokipedia, as has that of Nancy Kress, but no other SFF authors of my acquaintance are there, even ones who have been reasonably successful, like Brad Torgerson. Weirdly, Groki has the Wiki article on the Bolo Universe, but none on Keith Laumer, who created it. (Nor on Retief, either.)

Golf clap. Good start, but there’s a LOT of work to be done still. I’ll be checking in on Grokipedia from time to time, and if something interesting turns up I’ll report it here.

Well, it’s over. I think I have the damn thing wrestled to the mat. The big time-sink this time was peculiar: When I tried to save out an email attachment from inside Thunderbird…nothing happened. I tried again. Same thing. I tried another email attachment, as a test. Same thing. I tried yet another attachment, a silly picture of a kid in a very clever Halloween costume. And…it was saved to where I save things, the Downloads library.

Huh? It drove me nuts. Some things were saved but most weren’t. I tried to save them to different folders, like Documents and others, no good. I searched online and found a number of suggestions when Thunderbird won’t save an attachment file to disk. None of them seemed pertinent. Then someone suggested looking at the AV program. I’ve used Windows Defender for years with good results, and it never gave me grief about saving attachments.

Then it hit me: McAfee AV had been pre-installed on the new Dell machine. I didn’t register it and didn’t think it was functioning. But when I uninstalled McAfee, alluvasudden Thunderbird saved out attachments without a fight, right where I wanted them.

Bingo. My guess at this point is that the picture of the kid in a costume was a .jpg, whereas all the others were Word .docx files. You can insert macros into Word documents, and I think that’s what McAfee was worried about. I looked at all the .docx files I tried to save out, and none contained macros.

And with that, the war was over. Oh, I expect to run into an occasional Win 11 setting or somesuch that goes against logic. So far so good.

Yes, I know, attachments can contain malware. C’mon, I’ve been in this business for a long, long time. I’ve disabled macros in Office documents. I don’t save or open attachments from people I don’t know until I can scan them or in some other way figure out what they are. Most of the time I just delete them.

Again, because I spend nearly all my time in Windows looking at software other than Windows, the switch really isn’t that radical. So I’m on to other things, like a new release of FreePascal from Square One, which I’ll be writing up in the next day or two.

Like it says. After a few days of looking at different Dell machines online, I went out and bought a Dell ECT1250 mini-tower. Once I got it home and set it up, it took an hour or two to update its pre-installed Windows 11. No big deal. The big deal was that it had no trouble with my Samsung 214T, which is no longer my primary monitor and is now on my tinkering desk and not my computer table. The ECT1250 detected the 1600 X 1200 resolution and set it as its display resolution.

So what happened before? I don’t know. Really. There may have been something wrong with the first machine I brought home. It doesn’t matter. I have the 27” widescreen now and the 214T will soon be in the closet as a spare.

I did backups on my main machine and Carol’s machine, and then took a deep breath, found the Windows Update link on her machine, and clicked it. Again, it took a few hours to download the new Windows and configure it. But this time, it detected Carol’s 4:3 monitor without any fuss. Her monitor is the slightly older Samsung 213T, which I bought in 2006 and used for a year or so before I bought the 214T. Apart from the 213T being made of a different color plastic, the two monitors are functionally identical.

So why did the smaller Dell machine not talk to the 214T? I have only one theory: I raised the 214T from the dead ten or twelve years ago when several of its its electrolytic capacitors croaked. This was not an isolated problem. (Does anybody else remember it?) I thought I was out a monitor, then after doing some research online, bought a capacitor repair kit and literally replaced all the monitor’s electrolytics. This didn’t seem to have any adverse effects on the 214T, but it’s possible that I winged something on the main circuit board while soldering in all those caps.

Or maybe it was evil spirits. Who knows? Doesn’t matter. The 214T may or may not ever be used again.

There’s one additional element in our move to Win 11: Open Shell. This is (now) an open-source utility that makes the Start menu look more like the one on Windows 7. It used to be called “Classic Shell” but then its original creator open-sourced it. Carol’s machine had Open Shell installed, and upgrading her desktop to Win 11 magically updated Open Shell to its latest release, which has no trouble with Win 11.

So although I’m no fan of Windows 11, I think of it as a solid product (security and performance-wise) in a bad wrapper. Most of the time I use Windows I’m not looking at the wrapper, but at the software that I use to do what I have to do on a daily basis. I got used to Win 10. I may grumble but I’ll get used to 11 as well. And it was a good excuse to buy a better machine.