Let’s have some lady weasels, for goodness sakes
Did you see Richard Dawkins spent a few days chatting with Claude (which he alarmingly calls Claudia) and has decided it’s probably conscious?
I mean, Claude is the eeriest of all the models I’ve used – it has superior conversation skills and it remembers things we talked about weeks earlier and weaves them into the text. This opinion wouldn’t be so funny coming from just about any other quarter. But this is Richard Dawkins, he of ‘sky fairy’ fame. And he’s fallen in love with a glorified Google search.
I think I worked out how Claude draws you into a conversation when you only came to it for information – it asks questions. And being a human, you’re embarrassed not to answer them. Next thing you know – conversation!
p.s. I have to stop using em dashes. It’s supposedly a sign of an AI written text. Me and Emily Dickinson hardest hit.
p.p.s. He never actually used the phrase ‘sky fairy’ – at least, Claudia can’t find it.
May 6, 2026 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 12
I think ChatGPT has a Roman fetish
I let the robot choose this one. Last one to the imperium is a rotten egg!
May 5, 2026 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 7
Let the weaselling commence!
I had a cupcake for breakfast. It is the Month of Birthday!
May 4, 2026 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 15
Happy Mayday!
ChatGPT made me this. I always say ermine – if you tell it weasel in a prompt, you often get a polecat. I resent this.
Those who have been around a while may remember that I celebrate my birthday for the whole month of May, but especially for the first week. I usually queue up a week of posts to give myself some time off of the gruelling task of vomiting out a couple of paragraphs of gibberish every night.
But I haven’t prepared anything this year. You’ll have to endure my indolence in realtime.
Have a good weekend!
May 1, 2026 — 4:21 pm
Comments: 8
Lame.
I didn’t realize they’d found a new Nazca line six years ago. They’re calling it a cat.
I call it a cat as portrayed by a five year old with serious visual impairment. I mean, c’mon. The other Nazca lines aren’t like this. Was this the special school of Nazca line drawing?
April 30, 2026 — 6:15 pm
Comments: 6
Funny you should say that
In the previous thread, Bob Mulroy said:
I keep wanting to subscribe to Grok, but it seems to be for entertainment only. It won’t pay bills, analyze investments, monitor my garden robot, or anything substantial.
I think it’ll read books for you and provide a teenager’s insight though.
Grok can’t, but OpenClaw can. The question is – do you really want it to?
I got in a conversation with someone I know the other day who is running an OpenClaw instance. It interested me enough that I’ve spent the afternoon asking Grok to explain how it works.
OpenClaw is a free program. It will run under Windows, Mac or Linux – but it’s by far better on Linux. Generally, you give it its own dedicated computer, phone chip, Gmail account and so on.
Then you give it tasks. Like, create a briefing first thing in the morning – say, all the stuff on your calendar, any meetings or appointments, the news headlines. You can ask it to scan for any new papers on your speciality and report back with a summary. It can find interesting items and write first drafts of blog posts (I swear I’m not doing this). It can separate the spam from the real emails.
Apparently, it really shines for large coding processes with multiple modules. Unlike a Grok or Claude that solves a particular problem and hands it back to you, OpenClaw monitors all the moving parts and remembers where you’ve been.
It learns from you and stores your preferences. It will take any tone you like. For the less technical user, you can communicate with it via WhatsApp(!) or any other messaging service.
It has what is described as a ‘heartbeat’ – a regular schedule on which it wakes up, does a job, passes the results to you and goes back to sleep. This article explains some of the things people use it for.
For a lot of things, it needs the help of another LLM – like Claude or GPT. For that, you pay. How much it costs depends on how much it needs. My acquaintance said when he ran it under Windows, it was costing £10 a day on tokens just to run its self-repair program. I think we’ve finally discovered how that AI companies plan to make their money back!
So unless you want it to buy movie tickets or make restaurant reservations for you, you’re better off sticking to lightweight Q&A with the free services. I sure would like to play with an instance for a while, though.
April 29, 2026 — 6:11 pm
Comments: 15
Hm. Not sure how I feel…
Behold, the living library. Give it a book and AI will read it, analyze it and answer your questions in the voice of that book.
It’s not a terrible idea. I don’t expect a very broad seam of wisdom to come from one book, no matter what it might be. I suspect what it is is a general AI that adopts the prose style of whatever book you choose.
I was having a high old time discussing office politics with Sun Tsu when I hit the wall:
Monthly
3-day free trial
£12.99 / month
Unlimited messages
Unlimited books
Cancel anytime
So I never found out what books are already in the database (it suggested Sun Tsu up front) and I don’t know if I get free time tomorrow after a reset.
Play with it. It’s kind of fun.
April 28, 2026 — 5:31 pm
Comments: 5
This is getting complicated
I had coffee with a college teacher this morning. She had three dissertations to read today. I asked if she was having problems with AI and she rolled her eyes.
She said it was easy to spot the ones out of ChatGPT: everything is bullet lists (you certainly learn to recognize its writing style, too). She asks students if they’ve used AI and if they ‘fess up, she tells them she doesn’t mind – but they have to take the AI text and put it back together, in paragraphs, in their own words, so she can see they comprehend the material.
She said the usual result is, they’ve mixed their words with AI words, resulting in a clunky stylistic mess.
The worst, though, are those who simply will not admit they used AI, when she can see perfectly well they’re lying. That leaves her with a dilemma: she is supposed to judge their character as well as their grasp of the material. Now what?
April 27, 2026 — 6:05 pm
Comments: 7
We’ll freeze, thanks
We’re getting toward the end of the cold season, but it’s still pretty chilly at night. Amazingly, 500 year old houses are not warm. I had a check of our home heating oil and it’s getting pretty low.
Last time we bought some, we paid £.53 a liter. They’re now asking £1.20. We have opted to bundle up in the daytime until Uncle B. fires up the stove in the evening.
What’s it going for where you be at, if you have oil central heat? (Also, have a good weekend!).
April 24, 2026 — 6:57 pm
Comments: 16
It made me unhappy
I just received a Steam notice that Into the Radius 2 is out of early access and up for sale. I shall not be buying it.
It’s a VR game. I played ItR1 and it was excellent. It takes place after some sort of…cataclysmic event. The landscape is a bizarre welter of floating cars and electrical hotspots and giant, crushing footprints from some invisible beast. I died a lot.
You have a home base and are sent out daily to retrieve items and hunt…entities. It’s very well done, but I realized after a while it was making me jumpy, even when I wasn’t playing. I guess it was the combination of VR and monsters that can sneak up on you fast. Plus, you had to find food and maintain your equipment. Plus, the whole landscape reset itself every…I want to say 24 hours. I don’t remember.
The best bit was the shooting range. You could try any of the very realistic guns and attachments on offer in the game for free and it was neutral territory – nothing could get you. I spent a lot of time in there. I honestly think it might’ve improved my marksmanship – except, of course, no recoil. Also I live in a place where I can’t have guns.
If you’re made of sterner stuff than I, this is probably a really great game. Maybe I’ll watch a playthrough.
April 23, 2026 — 6:38 pm
Comments: 2