Michael Bates: May 2024 Archives
What happened to Google?! Google AI being hilariously awful
Fran, a blogger from Reading, England, writes: "The people in charge of the Google Search Engine have decided to prioritise Google-owned websites (Reddit, Youtube, Quora etc) over any others when deciding what it will show you in answer to a search query. Loads of bloggers and website owners, who previously made a living providing informative and useful content on the internet... have found their traffic absolutely destroyed overnight by the latest updates.... [Google] is now pushing AI answers to people on its search engine, rather than directing them to the websites of people who have created the content it has used to train its AI bots, or whose content has been stolen wholesale and parroted out by the Google AI Bots.... With AI content giving people an instant answer to their query right there on the Google homepage there is now zero motivation from people to go any further and visit any other website." Bottom line: Use an alternative to Google search and ignore any AI replies that your search provider offers. Reward real content providers with visits to their websites.
RELATED: Fran writes about how she and other bloggers make money from their blogs. Note that most of these work for influencer blogs about things like parenting and homemaking, but not for hyperlocal blogs like BatesLine. I used to have managed blog ads (from BlogAds), but that's been over 10 years ago since that vanished. I've never wanted to have Google ads on my site. I've gotten offers for paid posts and link insertions, but that's not for me.
Kate Forbes has still won a significant victory - for religion in public life -- Daily Telegraph
Fraser Nelson on the deputy leader of the Scottish National Party:
"It's not just that she was born into the Free Church of Scotland: she converted into it, leaving the more liberal Presbyterian church. She disagrees with gay marriage, sex outside of marriage and even women ministers. She'd uphold everyone's rights, she says - but her faith is real. And far more important to her than politics....
"A Cambridge graduate, appointed Nicola Sturgeon's finance minister at the age of 29, Forbes has long stood out. Brought up in India to missionary parents, she first followed the normal pattern of dodging questions about her faith.
"Three years ago, she changed tack. 'To be straight, I believe in the person of Jesus Christ,' she told an astonished Nick Robinson. 'I believe that he died for me, he saved me. And that my calling is to serve and to love him and to serve and love my neighbours with all my heart and soul and mind and strength.'"
"'If the tales told by the old-timers are correct, Oklahoma may once have contained dozens of runestones. Five of these have been found,' Farley wrote on her website not long after the internet became widely available in America. 'The study of epigraphy, which has dominated my adult life, was to have as its seed a childhood visit to a local site... it would take thirty-five years of research to determine that the Heavener Runestone on Poteau Mountain in eastern Oklahoma is most likely a boundary marker.'"
Fort Gibson: A Brief History, by Grant and Carolyn Thomas Foreman
Fort Gibson, Oklahoma, marked its bicentennial last month.
"It was on the twenty-first day of April 1824, that two long flatboats were to be seen ascending Grand River, manned by bearded young men in the uniform of the United States Army. As they worked the boats up the river they scanned the shore for a landing place, and about three miles from the river's mouth they were successful in discovering a wide ledge of shelving rock on the east bank, which made a natural boat landing. They tied up their boats at this ledge, and unloaded axes, adzes, froes, saws, food supplies, tents, baggage, and a miscellaneous assortment of camp equipment. On the bank they met other uniformed young men, unshaved and long of hair, who had come by land to the place from 5 Fort Smith with their horses and oxen. They were, in all, 122 officers and privates of companies B, C, G, and K of the Seventh Infantry.
"The river bottom land near their landing place was low and fertile, and covered by an immense canebrake, great forest trees, and a jungle of vines and undergrowth. The soldiers were soon engaged in clearing sufficient space in which to set up their tents. Then began the weeks and months of labor necessary to remove the cane, vines, and brambles from an area large enough for an army post; the ring of the ax and the crash of the huge falling trees were heard, and roaring fires consumed the prodigality of nature. Logs were fashioned by axes and cross-cut saws into lengths and shapes suitable to form the walls of houses; other logs were split into puncheons for floors, or rived into clapboards to roof the structures to be built."
Digital Equipment Corp. RL-02 disk drive
In February 1989, I flew to the UK for the first time, bringing with me a disk cartridge the size of a large deep-dish pizza (15" diameter, 2.25" height) with a capacity of 10MB. It had to fly as a checked bag in a shipping box. The cartridge, an RL-02K, would fit into a DEC RL-02 disk drive connected to a PDP-11/70, and it contained the software to manage a DR-11W interface to a VMEbus chassis, which provided the ARINC 429 interface to communicate with a Flight Management System being added to a British Airways Boeing 737 Ground Maintenance Simulator at the airline's Viscount House training center.
Bitsavers has tons of documentation on the RL-01/RL-02 drives. The wealth of detailed drawings and protocol documentation (the sort of thing that modern manufacturers don't release any more) enabled Christopher Parish to convert an RL-02 into the world's largest thumb drive, as he explains in a Hackaday video. Parish designed a controller card using an FPGA to interface to the drive and expose the data as a USB mass storage device. He can connect it to modern OSes but also to emulators running DEC's RT-11 OS.
