For those who’ve never read either the previous entry in this series or any of its like-named predecessors, each “Mixed nuts” post allows me to bloviate — er, opine — regarding multiple and often unrelated subjects, rather than sticking mainly to one topic. Today’s latest in the line includes a follow-up to my recent post about this site and Cloudflare, then proceeds to what for me is an increasingly sore point where AI and text are concerned. Whether it gets better from there will be yours to decide.
It’s been a few weeks since I issued that post about how Cloudflare, having put its Pages site-hosting product into maintenance mode, is urging Pages users to switch their sites to the Cloudflare Workers platform. At the time, I noted that I’d made the transition on this simple site without too much pain. However, since then, a number of online conversations have made me feel I unnecessarily minimized the effort such changes might require. That goes double for my fellow Hugo users, since sites built on other, JavaScript-based tools have it considerably easier. The bottom line is that some should look into the free tiers of alternatives such as Netlify, Render, and Vercel. I already explained in 2023 how each such alternative has both upsides and downsides.
This is for those who insist they can easily spot AI-generated text. Many of us old farts were using bulleted lists and em dashes and en dashes long before artificial intelligence was no more than a (usually) reliable plot device for sci-fi, much less the fever dream of tech bros. So, for God’s sake, stop using those as “proofs” that some text is AI-generated. As for my own writing, I reiterate what I said over two years ago: “. . . although the stuff on this site . . . may not be any good, it always has been and will be written by a human, namely me.”
I wish I could cease noticing what seems to be the increasingly rampant mangling of past participles (e.g., “have ran” or “have went”). I see it and hear it online, multiple times, every day. What further irks me about it is that, more often than not, the people committing this linguistic butchery seem to be bright folks who should know better — especially when this happens in a scripted video or presentation, for which you’d think (hope?) that one or more people actually read through the text before its delivery. All that said, I’ve also had to accept that many “should-know-better” types, when writing online, apparently can’t be bothered with the difference between “you’re” and “your” or between “it’s” and “its,” so . . . unnggh.
The Fedora distribution of Linux may drop support for 32-bit packages next year, likely endangering the Steam-hosted gaming I’ve been enjoying on that distro for a while now. At least, this action will endanger it unless Flatpak-supplied Steam is immune to the problem, and I lack the knowledge to discern the accuracy of the various online opinions about this. (See also this GamingOnLinux link.) Of course, there are many other Linux distros, but I don’t know how soon they, too, may follow the same path. Eventually, they’ll all have to take similar actions to avoid the Year 2038 problem; but, even if I were to survive to that point, I’d be in my early eighties and, likely, well past caring. YMMV.
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