Category: Uncategorized

I am going to warn you right up front that this is a rant. It’s gotten to the point where I just can’t stand it any more and if I don’t vent about this I’m going to have to get the dosage on my blood pressure meds increased.

What sparked this was that I recently had the misfortune of listening to a radio interview of some AI utopian nutjob evangelist waxing poetic about how AI is going to benefit the human race, free the human race from the drudgery of working, freeing us to indulge our creative impulses and engage with activities that actually interest us instead of slaving away at work. He was so excited about the “AI revolution” as he called it that I expected him to have to take a break to change is trousers after wetting himself. That the host of the show let him get away with all of that BS was downright embarrassing.

And yes, it was BS. It was, in fact, 100% pure, USDA Choice bullshit from start to finish. Every single thing he said during the five minutes or so he was on the air was utter and total garbage that only served to illustrate that he, like most of these AI evangelists, have no idea of what AIs are or how they work.

Fortunately people are beginning to discover the inconvenient truths about “artificial intelligence”. Independent research is starting to pull back the veils of hype that have hidden away the great, steaming pile of manure that is “artificial intelligence”.

A recent study by MIT showed that the implementation of AIs by corporations has largely been an utter failure. While the data set they used was admittedly limited, it tended to support what I’ve been hearing through reliable sources, and that is that AIs don’t actually work very well when implemented in large scale commercial settings. In the MIT study it was found that 95% of the AI projects implemented by businesses resulted in zero measurable returns. That’s right, zero. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. In some cases implementing AI actually cost the company more money than relying on traditional business methods. The CEO of IBM recently admitted that instead of AI allowing them to reduce the number of employees, they’ve actually had to hire more people than they had before AI was introduced. One company had started to replace its customer support people with AI. That went so badly that they had to scramble to hire back the people they’d just fired, offering abject apologies and bonuses to get them back.

And it doesn’t stop there. A study by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism Review, found that more than 60% of the responses it got to news related questions contained erroneous information, referred to non existent sources, or were just flat out wrong. The best of the lot was Perplexity with a 36% failure rate, to a worst of all Grok 3 with a failure rate of a whopping 94%.

And speaking of Grok… My, how quickly we forget. It’s not all that long ago when Grok went 100% full Nazi, declaring itself to be the “Mecha-Hitler”. And after they “fixed” that, it started offering up unsolicited fake nudes of Taylor Swift.

(Oh, there are some areas where they have been successful. Some types of programming, especially lower level “grunt” work, so to speak, seems ideally suited to be done by AI. Remember how the Silicon Valley oligarchs and the sycophant politicians sucking up to them looking for bribes (uh, excuse me) “campaign contributions” went all gung ho about teaching children “coding”? It was coding this and coding that and coding camps and coding schools and coding requirements to “prepare” kids for jobs that largely don’t exist any more.)

These things have also proven themselves to be downright dangerous, especially to people who are facing mental health challenges. There are reliable reports that AIs have allegedly driven vulnerable people to suicide.

The dirty little secret about AI is that it is not intelligent. It does not think. It does not reason. It does not create. The only thing AI can do is regurgitate information that has already been fed into it. There is nothing new there, nothing creative, nothing thoughtful. The only thing these AIs do is spew back information that it has been literally stolen “harvested” from other sources.

And what is the source of most of that information it’s harvested? The internet, of course. The internet, a place where people literally believe Elvis was kidnapped by aliens, that Bigfoot is an interdimensional being from another universe, where pedophiles are kidnapping children and shipping them to Mars, where President Trump is really a lizard creature from the Andromeda Galaxy wearing a skin suit, where….

Well you get the idea.

And here is another thing to consider. What if that utopian wet-dream of that nutjob AI evangelist in that interview I heard is correct and AI and robotics takes over all of the mundane, dull jobs we all have to perform now to keep the world going?

If that comes to pass, you just ended civilization as we know it. Seriously.

Think about it for a moment. Our economy, our whole civilization, is based on the fact that human physical and mental labor has value. We exchange our labor for a token, money, which has value because it is tied to the labor we perform. We use those tokens to trade for products and services provided by others that we cannot provide for ourselves.

If this utopian wet-dream comes to pass, that whole system collapses, totally. Human labor, both physical and mental, no longer has any value at all. None. Now what? How are you going to obtain food, shelter, clothing…

Don’t be silly, the evangelist will say. All those things will be free!!!

Yeah, sure they will.

Yeah, I know. This one is bad even for me. Feel free to throw things at your computer screen.

Artemis Delayed Again:

Once again NASA has delayed the next launch of Artemis, the space agency’s program that is supposed to take astronauts back to the moon using what is one of the most complicated and, frankly, bizarre schemes that even NASA has ever come up with. Artemis, and the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket are billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule.

The Orion space craft that is supposed to carry astronauts is riddled with problems that include gas leaks and heat shield failures. (Nice job there, Boeing) It’s attempt to use it to send astronauts to the ISS ended in failure and when seirious leaks and other problems were discovered after it docked at the ISS and the astronauts were stranded had to wait for a flight from SpaceX to get back home. And the rest of the moon program is even worse. NASA still doesn’t have a lunar spacesuit, doesn’t have a lunar lander, doesn’t have the “mini” space station that will orbit the moon that it says it needs, doesn’t have… Well, it doesn’t have anything it needs to make this work, really. According to NASA’s original time table, the agency should already have astronauts on the moon or be nearly ready to land them there. In reality, we’re looking at mid-2026 before the Artemis is even ready to fly again thanks to numerous problems that have including gas leaks and issues with the heat shield, and it’s going to be years beyond that before anyone actually gets to the moon

And as for the SLS itself, it is so much over budget and will cost so much to launch, that no one knows how the program can even continue. I’ve seen estimates of as much as $2.5 billion per launch. Rumor has it that there’s about a 50/50 chance the whole program will be scrapped. Considering the progress SpaceX has made with its Starship program, it’s going to have similar heavy launch capabilities for a fraction of the cost, so why is NASA even dumping all that money into that black hole in the first place?

Apple AirPods Pro

I love music of all kinds and probably have spent way too much on speakers, turntables, albums, etc. in my life. I’ve had Apple’s basic AirPod headphones, one of the first versions, for a long time but didn’t use them all that often because I found them awkward to use, they fell out of my ears frequently, and while the sound quality was surprisingly good, it wasn’t anywhere near as good as what came out of my stereo system speakers. But along came Black Friday and there was a huge discount on the AirPod Pro. So I got a set for a Christmas present for one of my sons and at that price I couldn’t resist getting some for myself as well.

I’m no expert on headphones. As I said my only experience with these things were the original AirPods. So when I plugged these things into my ears it was quite a shock.

First I thought I’d gone deaf because suddenly I couldn’t hear anything. Not the kitchen exhaust fan, not the furnace fan, not the air filter, not the cat’s water fountain, nothing. There was almost utter, total silence. I hadn’t bothered to read the blurbs for the things because if I had I’d have realized that the Pro model comes with noise canceling technology. And it works so well it’s almost scary. Noise canceling can be turned off, or it can be set to let in some ambient sound and things like that. But at first I couldn’t believe how quiet it suddenly got.

Then I fired up Amazon Prime Music and started going through my playlists. Holy sh*t… I’d never heard anything quite like it before. How the hell do they get something that small to sound that good?

Then there the other goodies, like being able to take phone calls with the things (paired with my phone), interact with Apple’s Siri, and other goodies I haven’t had a chance to explore yet. There are built in microphones for phone calls. There are accelerometers that can sense when I nod yes or shake my head no to respond to Siri, pressure sensitive switch in one of the stems to switch modes or to pause music or switch to the next track.

Like I said, I’m no expert on headphones. Far from it. But damn, these things are good. I might write about them later after I’ve had a chance to use them more.

Pi5 SSD

If you’ve been reading grouchyfarmer for a while you probably know I love the Raspberry Pi computers. Basically the Pi 4 and 5 models are full blown computers costing less than $100, running a version of Linux. Just plug in a keyboard, mouse, monitor, and you have yourself a pretty darn nice little Linux computer that can do just about anything you need to do with a computer, except for things like hard core gaming, video editing, etc. that requires a huge amount of processing power and/or memory. Plus it’s easy to connect to the outside world to work as a controller for robotics and other goodies.

One of the biggest pains in the butt when it comes to the Pi computers has been its reliance on micro SD cards for booting/data storage. Micro SD cards are a serious bottleneck. They have a limited lifespan and for modern computing needs they’re woefully slow. But the new Pi5 can handle modern SSD drives with the addition of a simple plug in board, making it much, much more reliable and much faster. You can roll your own, or you can get one complete with a 250 gig SSD and the add on card, with Rasberian (the Pi’s version of Linux) already installed and ready to go from Canakit for about $200. And I got my hot little hands on one.

I only just started playing with it, so this is something I’ll probably bring up in the future once I have a chance to put it through its paces. But my early impression is that wow, this thing is neat. I wouldn’t have though it would be that much fast than the Pi5s I have that run off the SD card, but yeah, it is. Much, much faster. Using a real SSD instead of that micro SD card makes a huge difference.

Fake Milk

I’m not a big fan of things like almond “milk” and all that stuff. Most of it is, frankly, crap. Horrible taste, non-milk like textures, and the only reason they can claim it’s “healthy” is because the manufacturers shovel in vitamins and minerals from external sources because the tiny, tiny amount of actual real nuts in that “milk” have very little nutritional value.

But over the years I’ve become increasingly sensitive to dairy for some reason. I can’t eat ice cream any more, for example, without experiencing a great deal of gastrointestinal distress. Nor can I eat cold cereal with milk. A bit of cream in my coffee doesn’t bother me. Much. Cheese isn’t a problem. But drinking milk? No way in hell. My eldest son is even worse than I am.

I don’t normally make product recommendations like this, but I have to bring this one up.

So I’ve kind of been keeping an eye out for some kind of fake milk that is reasonably close to the same texture as real dairy milk, and I think I’ve found one. That’s it over there on the left. I picked it up as an impulse buy when I was at Walmart the other day.

The texture, mouthfeel and all of that is pretty similar to a rather rich whole milk. And while it doesn’t taste anything at all like dairy milk, the flavor is pleasant. And even more impressive, it’s a reasonably good substitute for the half and half I normally put in my coffee. And it’s good enough that I might even be able to start eating cold cereal once more. I told my son about it and he picked some up and he loves the stuff.

If you absolutely need to have some kind of milk-like substance for your cereal or coffee or cerealor whatever and can’t handle dairy milk, you might want to give this a try.

Weird Weather

It’s no secret that the weather has been weird for some time now. After the warmest winter we ever had last year, one of the warmest summers we’ve had, and one of the warmest autumns we ever had, temperatures abruptly dropped to well below zero for a few days with some light snow, then abruptly jumped up to 40° with rain… Then we had dense fog for a couple of days.

The brief period of cold resulted in a lot of lakes in the area developing a very thin layer of ice, and people being people, the DNR and the sheriff’s department has had to issue warnings to people to stay the hell off the ice. I’ve heard news stories almost every day of idiots venturing out onto ice that’s still way, way too thin, falling through and having to be rescued.

So, it’s October 29. Deep into fall. Frost on the pumpkin and all that.

About that frost thing…

It’s sunny, blustery, and about 78° and on its way to 82° the weather guy said and I’m tempted to turn the air conditioning back on. Wisconsin is known for it’s odd weather but this?

I have cilantro and tiny onions sprouting from seed out in the raised beds.

I have dill sprouting

And my parsley looks like this:

Oh, and the rose bush out front was starting to go dormant but has now decided it’s going to start flowering again.

This is just ain’t right.

I know, I know… It’s been a long, long time since I wrote anything here. Here it is mid September already? Where the heck did the summer go?

It was an incredibly busy summer here. Busy in a good way, though. The gardens were spectacular this year, but everything except the tomatoes and squash are finished up for the season and we’ve been working on cleaning out the beds.

We processed the last of the beets and carrots this past week. We have enough carrots, beets, peppers and beans in the freezer to last us for at least a whole year, I think.

The tomatoes just don’t want to stop, though. The darned things are still producing like crazy and we’ve already put up something like 30 or 40 pints of spaghetti sauce, pizza sauce, marinara sauce, bloody mary mix, etc. More than enough to last us an entire year. But the darned things are still going.

We can’t use them any more so whatever we’re getting from now on is going to the local food pantry and St. Vincent de Paul. They said they’ll take whatever extra we have.

We put in a whole bed full of celery more or less as an experiment and even that was wildly successful. And the flavor was amazing. We used a lot of it ourselves in sauces, froze some, and gave the rest away.

One thing I am really going to miss is smelling the sauces simmering away all day. There were days when walking into the house was like walking into an Italian restaurant with the whole place filled with the aroma of basil, thyme, garlic, onions and tomatoes simmering away.

Now that the canning season is finally over things aren’t quite as hectic here.

MrsGF and I both got in to get our flu shots and the new Covid vaccine. Covid is rearing its ugly head once again. Hospitalizations are skyrocketing. Local hospitals and clinics are requiring people to wear masks when coming in their buildings again, etc. It’s getting nasty out there.

This was going to be a dishwasher review. But I’m turning it into a rant instead because I hate this thing so much I can barely bring myself to use it at all.

So here’s what happened. Our 5 year old LG dishwasher took a dump. The pump went out. Cost of a new pump plus labor was going to be around $500. So screw that. I can get a decent new dishwasher for that, I told the service dude. He said I don’t blame you at all. I wouldn’t pay that either.

Let’s get a Bosch, a certain person who shall remain nameless because, well, they’re family and I don’t want to get them mad at me, told me. Excellent machines, they told me. Eldest son and his wife have one. They had to wait almost an entire year to get theirs but it was worth it, they told me. And it’s on sale for only $1000!

$1000? For a dishwasher? Pay me $1,000 and I’ll wash dishes by hand for the next two years.

No, we need to get this, I was told.

So we got it.

I hate it.

No, that is not a strong enough word. I loathe it. The 3rd shelf is utterly useless. The racks are laid out so badly that it’s almost impossible to load the thing up. It’s like the racks were designed specifically to make it as difficult as possible to efficiently put dishes in it. The controls are on the top of the inside of the door. Why? What’s the point in that? To make me have to open the damned door up just to see if I remembered to set the right cycle? And if you open the door for more than about 2 seconds and close it again, guess what? It shuts itself off if you forget to hit the “start” button again.

It doesn’t come with an owner’s manual. Instead you’re supposed to scan one of those stupid codes and it takes you to a video they had to make specifically to show you how to load the damned thing. I’m sorry, you shouldn’t meed an effing video to show you how to load a dish washer. Scanning another code takes you to another video that shows you how to clean the filter.

Ooo, how thrilling!

Supposedly this is the best dishwasher made in its price range according to the New York Times. It isn’t. I suspect money changed hands in order to get that recommendation. It’s not even close.

When MrsGF isn’t around I don’t use it at all. I wash dishes by hand because I hate that bloody thing so much.

There. I feel better now.