Four Random Roundups
Friday, October 31, 2025
A Friday Hodgepodge
1. As I noted last week an Ask a Manager post generated lots of feedback about problems with AI.
There turned out to be enough examples of "AI gone wrong" that Green created a post of her favorites, including:
Ours once transcribed a side conversation about my water bottle we had while waiting for someone to arrive, and then assumed the entire meeting, which was actually about software design, was about the water bottle.Bonus: That post asks readers to contribute other examples so Green can follow up with yet another post of favorites.
2. Science fiction fans might enjoy this list of cult sci-fi and fantasy books by author John Triptych, who kicks off the list with the following blurb about his own book, Visitor:
Currently my best-selling book, it's a character-driven novel that deals with the exploration of the unknown. Years after Oumuamua passes near earth, a new interstellar object is found, and it follows the exact same course as its predecessor. What follows is a determined scramble to build a spacecraft and attempt a manned landing. It's got a lot of hard sci-fi elements, which means scientifically plausible theories and technology are used to create a realistic scenario.Bonus: I heard about the list through Hacker News, whose comment thread includes other recommendations as well as a link to the Fantasy Masterworks book series list at Wikipedia.
3. I recently told my daughter about a time in my childhood when my middle brother and I picked wild berries in the lot behind our house with some of the other neighborhood kids. When we were done, we had enough blackberries that my mother was able to bake a pie.
This gave me an idea for a fun thing to do with the kids one weekend, and I found a table of things available for picking at local farms here in Louisiana.
Bonus: The Pick Your Own website covers the entire country, and includes other related useful information, like recipes and preservation tips, in a very Web 1.0 format, which you might find nostalgic or quaint.
4. No roundup here would be complete without me nerding out.
A programmer shares a list of shell scripts he uses all the time, and which I plan to look through for ideas.
I like the fact that Evan Hahn categorizes the scripts, and includes the following information each time: a link to the script, a brief description, and how often he uses the script.
Bonus: The scripts seem to be written with an eye for portability between Linux and macOS.
-- CAV
2 comments:
In re #2: All are good, most are weird, except for Voyage to Arcturus, which is just weird. Did make for a nice joke in one of my satires though. Glad to see The Worm Ourobouros on the list. When I was little, my father let me read lots of his classic fantasy books; both those and The Night Land were ones I read. (As well as The Last Unicorn, Earthsea Trilogy, Red Moon and Black Mountain, and Hodgson's even weirder House on the Borderland, then later loads of Thorne Smith; I also read about half of The Well at World's End, which was a few chapters more than enough. The ones he had that I didn't read included Jurgen, Islandia, The Sundered Realm, and Lud-in-the-Mist. Some of those I wish I had read, others I'm not sad I didn't.) However, the other two on the list are my favorites of that bunch; Van Vogt is a high-speed car ride (he stated once that a good SF story has to have a new idea every 800 words), while Vance is just great--and that's not even his best book (I gifted you my favorite a few years ago).
In re #1: She includes the story, "The problem was, the AI was transcribing in English – and the people were speaking in French. It was just making whatever it could out of sounds that had nothing to do with the language it expected." https://specgram.com/CLXXVII.1/11.claremont.nostradamus1.html.
Snedcat,
Thanks for your opinion on the SF roundup, and I look forward to the SpecGram post.
Gus
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