That’s a disconcerting image, Mr Robot
I went to the dentist today for the first time in…let’s just say, a very long time. For those who haven’t been Chez Weasel from the beginning, I had my entire mouthful of old bridgework replaced with shiny implants right before I left the States. The most important thing to me: they don’t come out of my head at night.
Anyhow, they haven’t given me any trouble, so I decided just to ignore them. Like, forever.
I’ve been getting headaches, though, so I thought it would be worth checking out. One exam and three x-rays later and…everything’s fine. Bone looks healthy, no erosion. I’m good. He said come back in two years.
Incidentally, there is such a thing as an NHS dentist, but you’ll apparently never get on the list. Everyone sticks their hands in their pockets for tooth work.
Next week – let’s see if a massage will shift these headaches!
April 2, 2026 — 5:03 pm
Comments: 4
AI isn’t the only one to hallucinate
Behold the two big fat simplified Chinese characters that Google OCR dropped in the middle of the page of the Victorian history book I’m working on. They were about that size, too.
Google Translate tells me it means “Lulu” – but of course it doesn’t mean anything. It’s pure glitch.
I asked ChatGPT to explain and it said modern OCR is trained on a multilingual character set and isn’t smart enough to stick with Roman characters. It saw a shadow or pattern I can’t see and dropped a character in. And once it’s farted one out, it said it’s not uncommon for OCR to repeat the character.
Google OCR has a little AI-sauce mixed in – which is one of the reasons its OCR is so clean – but not enough to know there wouldn’t be two big fat Chinese characters in the middle of an English history book.
This stuff isn’t taking anybody’s job yet. Managers who are firing on that basis are kidding themselves (or using it as an excuse).
April 1, 2026 — 6:01 pm
Comments: 4
Let the robot do the drudgery
At the moment, I’m trying to get a clean OCR of a long and often dry early Victorian history book. Luckily for me, someone else did the scans – but the original OCR was awful. I’m doing it page at a time and it’s scooting along pretty well – except for the dreadful tables.
That’s them in the thumbnails above.
Then I had an idea – I wonder if ChatGPT will do those? Spoiler: yes. I upload the scan, tell it how I want the table formatted (fonts, etc.) and it gives me a link to a docx file I can just drop in.
At one point, I got too clever for my own good – I was giving it the big, raw png files – and I hit my data limit. I’ve never hit my limit as a paying customer! But it reset within a few minutes and I was told that wouldn’t happen if I jpg’ed them all. It even told me how to batch jpg the whole directory.
Some would say beware – before long, it will do the whole job for me. But y’know, I would be totally okay with that.
March 31, 2026 — 5:51 pm
Comments: 4
It’s…Adorph Hekler!
The Lineup today ran a silly article titled The Worst Person with Your Same Zodiac Sign and mine was – you guessed it! – the Furher. Apparently, he narrowly missed being an Ares and landed with a thud in Taurus.
Then ChatGPT, Grok and MidJourney all three flatly refused to draw a picture of him for me. Even a silly one. Even with his moustache left off. They got sniffy about it, too. I had to ask for a guy in lederhosen – definitely not Adolph Hitler – and an alpine hat.
Stupid moralizing robots.
So, go on then – who’s the worst person with your sign, if you don’t mind sharing your birth month?
pssst…apologies, but we’re still being hammered by spam. I kick posts out of the spam bucket numerous times a day, but I know it isn’t ideal.
March 30, 2026 — 6:33 pm
Comments: 17
I asked 3 AIs what they had planned for the weekend
Claude told me – rather sniffily, I thought – “As an AI I don’t have weekends or personal plans.”
ChatGPT, ever the leg-humping sycophant, said: “Nothing on my end—but I can help you line something up if you’re in the mood.
Given the sort of work you’ve been doing, a quiet weekend might suit: a bit more editing, or a change of pace—walk, bookshop, that sort of thing. If you had something specific in mind (local to you or otherwise), I can suggest options without overcomplicating it.”
And Grok’s answer is above. Perfectly encapsulates the ‘personality’ of all three.
Have a good weekend!
March 27, 2026 — 7:13 pm
Comments: 7
Laaaaaambs!
Look at this awful, blurry picture I took! Yeah, well, Uncle B pulled over so I could take it, but they were really too far away. Lambs, though! First we’ve seen this year.
These ones look older. We saw some fresh tiny ones on a different part of the drive, but no way to pull over and get a picture.
‘Twas a beautiful sunny day in Sussex, but still cold. Still no central heat.
March 26, 2026 — 5:51 pm
Comments: 6
I was a Goo Goo kind of gal
Well, I’ve confessed this on Twitter, so I might as well say it here: when we lived in Chattanooga, my father’s secretary was the daughter of the man who invented the Moon Pie. I know – touched by greatness.
No, I don’t know what her name was. No, I have no idea why she had to work for a living rather than swanning around on his vast Moon Pie fortune. I was, like, three.
I don’t actually like Moon Pies. It’s a texture thing with me and marshmallow. For some reason, I make an exception for that other local delicacy, Goo Goo Candy Clusters. Know the jingle?
March 25, 2026 — 7:40 pm
Comments: 15
Such a jokester
I asked Grok why you need to pee when you walk into a cold room, then I asked it to draw me a cartoon weasel. It gave me a whole lecture on the anatomy of a cartoon weasel, which included items like “Paws: Adorable pink beans with tiny claws that can dig, climb, and grip like Velcro. Perfect for: Holding tiny bladders when they really need to pee.”
Every item had an entry about pee. I think Grok liked to talk about it.
Then it drew me this picture.
What? Oh – vasoconstriction.
March 24, 2026 — 6:45 pm
Comments: 3
Is it cold in here, or is it just me?
Actually, it’s toasty warm in here. We’ve had a fire all day. That’s a red flag.
Uncle B caught our oil central heat boiler smoking over the weekend – and not the fun kind with the nicotine. He shut it down, but our boiler tech (whatever they’re called) is going straight to voicemail and he hasn’t returned the call.
So, day fires. Very evocative. I hung out at the gym this morning until he took the edge off. We’re having a cold snap, of course.
March 23, 2026 — 6:47 pm
Comments: 4
Happy spring equinox!
Or, as the Anglo Saxons called it, Ēosturmōnaþ (AY-oh-stoor-moh-nath) the festival to the goddess Ēostre. Nobody knows the nature of the festivities, but everyone has a spring festival of some kind. Everybody happy when spring come.
Or maybe he made all that shit up. The venerable Bede is the only one who named Ēostre as a goddess.
Who knew Chuck Norris could die? That must be one courageous heart attack that took him on. @smedleythebarbarian tripped over Rule Zero, but let us welcome him to the Dead Pool fold. I don’t recall seeing that handle before.
Good weekend. Go thou and drink to Ēosturmōnaþ!
March 20, 2026 — 7:30 pm
Comments: 7