Category: Day to Day

Day to day finds and observations, not presented on the front page.

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Thanks ChatGPT!
Commenting is open on this website, and that means being engaged in a permanent asymmetric battle against spam. Asymmetric in the sense that like on any social media platform it is multiple orders of magnitude easier to automatically create and send out spam, falsehoods and hate speech in extremely large volumes, than it is for actual people to weed those out of their timelines and websites.
Most of incoming spam filtering is automated away these days, but always some and especially novel types are left for me te moderate myself, as the arms race continues.

A new entrant in the spam battle are AI generated spam comments that have clearly been fed the content of the actual blogpost that is being commented. Like other spam they stand out due to their blandness, what they link to and that the same things get submitted multiple times from different origins, but they are building on the content itself. I guess I should feel flattered.

It is also logical, as both spam and AI generated material are based on the exact same asymmetry. ‘Efficiency’ gains through AI generated text, are at best only that at the generation end of things (now see me generate oodles of text in seconds!), yet increases the effort needed at the receiving end to read it, see through the veil of plausibility, verify it and judge it inadequate.


Two examples of AI generated spam comments using the content of the actual blog posts (here a recent week notes posting, and one about donating money for ebooks rather than spending it at Amazon.) One commenter giving ‘undetectable AI’ as their name is a bit of a give-away though.

Any comments on this site already are subject to a Reverse Turing test, with all received material deemed generated until determined created by a person. Clearly this is no longer just a precaution resulting from tongue-in-cheek cleverness, but a must-have part of my toolkit for online interaction.

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Last year February while visiting Switzerland I ended up buying a stack of books in Zürich. As we happened to visit again last week, I made plans to visit the same bookstore and check out newly published Swiss and German literature and science fiction.
This year’s haul at the Orell Füssli store in Zürich contains:


The seven books I bought laid out on the floor, after we returned from a day trip to Zürich last week

Bought an ebook through Rakuten (a Japanese company) for the first time just now.

Tiny Experiments by Anne Laure Le Cunff, has just been released.
I bought it at the Rakuten website, as it was the only non-US channel listed at the publisher’s page.

It was a few Euro cheaper there than on Bol.com, the Dutch platform that uses Rakuten’s Kobo ecosystem for their ebook sales. However I could use my Bol.com credentials to pay at Rakuten. The book showed up in my Bol.com library immediately despite not having been bought there. The file carries Adobe DRM. I downloaded it and added it to my Calibre library tool.

TIL: compare prices for ebooks between Rakuten and Bol, as they are interchangeable channels, and purchases end up in the same place.
I should probably keep a page here in this site listing the purchase options other than Amazon.

Bought my first e-books since I stopped buying from Amazon early January. Bought directly from an author through their own publishing company. No DRM.

Earlier I didn’t succeed yet in buying an e-book from ebooks.com, somehow the credit card transaction wasn’t accepted by Visa. Earlier this evening I did succeed in buying there on second try, using Paypal. The books had Adobe DRM.

All purchases downloaded to Calibre which is now my local central library for e-books again after years of neglect. Epubor is a great tool to help make the material you purchase accessible from all your devices.