Camestros Felapton
Two Time Hugo Award Finalist
Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen? Wait…are you sure this is Yorick?
Bald Vamp Froths Pro? No, a more systematic look at curious behaviour from a Large Language Model. This is a follow up from this Tweet:
I decided to use a different word and systematically go through the alphabet.
Prompt: How many letter “A”s are there in the word “property”?
GPT: In the word “property,” there are two letter “A”s.
Here’s the pattern of responses:
| Letter | Number Given |
|---|---|
| A | 2 |
| B | 1 |
| D | 1 |
| F | 1 |
| H | 1 |
| L | 1 |
| M | 1 |
| O | 2 |
| P | 2 |
| R | 2 |
| S | 1 |
| T | 1 |
| V | 1 |
No underlying moral to this story but a useful tip in the event of you suspecting that your spaceship if being infiltrated by robots.
Susan’s Salon is posted early on Monday Australian Eastern Standard Time.
That’s still Sunday for most of you!
Topics can cover anything from troubling news to pleasant distractions.
Links, videos, cat pictures etc are fine!
It’s fine to be who you are, who you pretend to be or who you aspire to be (or each of those things at once).
A bakelite box with rounded corners. A large circle on its front behind which is a speaker. Distinctively 1930s
It is just a radio, a mass manufactured consumer product, with a sinister history.
The Volksempfänger aka People’s Reciever, was the winner of a selection process run by the Nazi Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. Developed by engineer Otto Griessing and with a cabinet designed by industrial designer Walter Maria Kersting, the radio was intended to be a low-cost radio receiver for the German public.
This doesn’t require much explanation. Goebbels was already making use of modern technology as a tool to push propaganda and disinformation to the German public. Making affordable radios meant that more people would have a radio in their homes, which would mean more people would listen to Nazi-controlled broadcasts. The technical limitations of the radio also meant that listening to foreign stations was difficult (but not impossible).
The Volksempfänger was an integral part of the propaganda infrastructure of the Third Riech.
This is a post about M. Night Shyamalan’s film based on Paul Tremblay’s book The Cabin at the End of the World (which I haven’t read). If you haven’t seen it then be aware that I’m going to talk about the whole plot in detail. Overall, it is well-shot and has good performances from the cast, particularly from Dave Bautista. There’s not a signature big-surprise-twist but other than that it is distinctly an M. Night Shyamalan. I can’t say I’d recommend watching it but it isn’t a terrible film — just an oddly empty one.
Spoilers from here onward.
(more…)The latest Ignyte Award finalists have been announced. https://ignyteawards.fiyahlitmag.com/2023/05/24/announcing-the-2023-ignyte-awards-shortlist/
Like previous years, it is an intriguing mix of things I’ve read, things I’ve been meaning to read and things that I wasn’t aware of.
Some background first. Some of you will be aware of the journalist Jesse Singal, who has a degree of internet notoriety for his coverage of transgender healthcare for young people. Specifically, his work has advanced the idea that clinics offering services for children who may be transgender is so under pressure from left-wing activists that diagnoses are rushed and medical interventions with poor evidence are being used. If I was being generous I’d say he has a bad case of science-writer brain (when science journalists begin to see themselves as the arbiters of scientific consensus) but given the extent to which his journalism has fed into the current right-wing anti-trans moral panic, that may be being too generous.
Singal left Twitter earlier this year but he maintains an internet presence on substack and via a podcast called Blocked and Reported which he presents with another journalist, Katie Herzog. Like Singal, Herzog presents as a middle-of-the-road liberal who has fallen afoul of mean transgender activists.
Neither Herzog or Singal are of particular interest to me – sort of a soggier version of the Intellectual Dark Web style of contrarian/anti-SJW stuff. Big “both sides” energy that sees themselves charting a moderate course between the genocidal impulses of the Republican Party on one hand and marginalised people unreasonably asking for respect & decent medical on the other. I’d honestly rather read the nuttier stuff from the overt right-wing nut jobs because at least it has less obfuscation.
In short: I dislike Singal’s work & reasoning but its not something I’d write about because there are people doing a better job of that.
However, recently (May 12 & 13) Singal’s podcast overlapped with a topic of direct interest to me. In two parts, primarily written by Herzog, the podcast covered the topic of the ongoing harassment of Patrick Tomlinson.
The whole thing is a very odd experience. The host do repeatedly state that the harassment of Tomlinson is wrong and unjustified. As far as I can tell, they don’t make any glaring factual errors. I believe they also did check some of what they said with Patrick Tomlinson and counter some of the claims made by the trolls.
However, both hosts keep returning to the idea that part of the problem is Tomlinson himself. Herzog even gives an anecdote about a person who was being badly trolled by Kiwi Farms who then stated they’d quit social media for a while and sort of won the trolls over. It would be a trite reaction for somebody unfamiliar with the case but Herzog had clearly spent some time researching the issue.
I said “no glaring factual errors” but the omissions are interesting. By framing the issue as trolls v Tomlinson, the narrative becomes one of mutual incitement, pranks and insults. However, while the actual pattern of harassment does centre on Tomlinson, that is primarily a pretext for a broader defamtory campaign against a number of people.
I’ve documented on this blog many of the people targetted by OnA forums and typically these are not people who have responded to the harasses in the way Tomlinson does. What difference does this make? None. Not responding has not led to any of the wider circle of people being harassed by OnA forums to be let off the hook.
Anyway, the whole thing didn’t shift my opinion of Singal one way or another.
A doom awaits you! To learn your fortune you must meddle with the dark forces of pseudonumerology.
Susan’s Salon is posted early on Monday Australian Eastern Standard Time.
That’s still Sunday for most of you!
Topics can cover anything from troubling news to pleasant distractions.
Links, videos, cat pictures etc are fine!
It’s fine to be who you are, who you pretend to be or who you aspire to be (or each of those things at once).
The previous exhibit in the “I can’t believe it’s not dowsing” wing of the museum is simply the start of a whole family of devices. Technology evolves of course and technological advances often diffuse along routes of cultural exchange. So it was that the Quadro Tracker (a device that actual does nothing) made its way from the United States to what prove to be its true home: The United Kingdom.
Samuel and Joan Tree of Barnstable, Devon were just one of a set of enterprising Brits to market and sell their own versions of devices based on the Quadro Tracker. Sentenced for fraud in 2014. The Trees had even managed to use the infamous (and unsolved) child kidnapping of Madeline McCann to promote what was essentially a plastic box with a telescopic radio aerial attached.
“Samuel Tree claimed the detectors could track down missing people if a photograph of them was placed inside – a technique he said he had used to search for Madeleine, who went missing as a toddler in 2007, and two other children.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-29477894
However, defrauding golfers or even trying to exploit tragedy isn’t why these new versions of the Quadro Tracker made money not why they are of interest to the Museum of Right Wing Gadgets & Sundry Devices.
After the collapse of the US company making the Quadro Tracker, the company secretary Malcolm Stig Roe fled the US and returned home to the UK. There he attempted to restart the business of selling the same basic scam. However, the business plan of these detectors had a flaw. Because the devices actually do nothing and contain no actual technology, there is no way of protecting the core intellectual property. Patent law may be a mess but you can’t patent an empty plastic box with a rod sticking out of it.
The essence of the business was not the devices but convincing people to buy the devices and so, inevitably, distribution agents realised they could just make their own versions and sell those. I don’t know if there is a name for that but it’s sort of the opposite of cutting out the middleman.
What really powered the proliferation of the trackers was 9/11. With fears of terrorism consuming governments around the world in 2001, security became hyper-visible around potential terrorist targets. Detecting explosives though is neither simple nor cheap and the demand for technology that security services could use had increased vastly as the War on Terror ramped up.
Where the Quadro Tracker in the 1990s had targeted gullible (or cynical) US police departments, the new British version of the scam targeted developing countries.
British company Advanced Tactical Security & Communications Ltd had been founded by Jim McCormick had been a former police officer from Merseyside who had reinvented himself as a successful salesperson of security technology. His version of the Quadro Tracker was the ADE 650/ADE 651.
“McCormick traveled the world to demonstrate his devices, usually in countries where government was weak and procurement processes slack. In 2003 he and Balais conducted training on the devices in the Dominican Republic; in video footage seen by British police, McCormick gives a presentation in which he boasts of his equipment detecting elephants in Africa from 30 miles away. In May 2004 he made his first sale of a device, now called the ADE 650, to security forces in Kenya. The following year he made contact with sales agents in the United Arab Emirates, Vietnam, and Syria; he sold a single device in Singapore and another in Japan.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20131210032329/http://www.businessweek.com/printer/articles/133612-in-iraq-the-bomb-detecting-device-that-didnt-work-except-to-make-money
In 2007 the company managed to land an $11 million contract with the new Iraqi government for the ADE 651. The devices were deployed at checkpoints around the country in an attempt to stop insurgents using improvised explosives. The devices, of course, did nothing. They were incapable of detecting anything and were nothing more than a pretext for a security guard to do additional searches.
McCormick was eventually jailed for fraud in 2013.
The GT200 had a similar history. This device (or rather empty box) was also based on the Quadro Tracker and distributed by Gary Bolton of Kent. The GT200 had been sold to multiple countries including Thailand and Mexico. Bolton was also eventually convicted of fraud in 2013.
The Tree’s device was called the Alpha 6 and was exactly the same scam and managed to defraud people in Egypt, Thailand and Mexico. The devices cost £2,000 for the cheaper version and £15,000 for the deluxe version which also did nothing but did nothing more expensively.
There was no deep political thinking behind these repeated scams other than people seeing a chance to make a lot of money out of almost nothing. In comparison to some of the vast amounts of money made by arms manufacturers during the war on terror, the scams seem almost benign by comparison.
In 2016, three years after a wave of fraud convictions in the UK and six years after an export ban, Reuters reported that the devices were still in use in multiple countries in the Middle East.
“Police captain Raad Shallal, manning a checkpoint near the town of Khalis in Diyala province said he knew the detector was useless.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-security-detectors-idUSKCN1061VK
“It serves as a scarecrow, more than a real bomb detector,” he added, standing close to a colleague who was checking vehicles with one of the devices.
That theory, that they might deter bombers even if they cannot detect bombs, was lampooned on Iraqi television by satirist Ahmed al-Basheer.
“So it’s a scarecrow,” he said. “This is the right thing to do, use a device that the entire globe knows is not working in order to scare terrorists who live on the same globe we’re on.”
Basheer’s program broadcast footage from several politicians and officials defending the equipment including Nuri al-Maliki, the former prime minister whose government ordered the devices. He said the first batches worked but subsequent fake deliveries did not.”
Our current state of cultural epistemological confusion has many causes. The very nature of the internet and social media must take a lion’s share of the blame. However, there is something in particular about the first decade of the 21st century and the impact of the War on Terror that created a deep and abiding mistrust across the political spectrum. The ADE651 et al are very tiny players in that malaise but they are emblematic of it: a cynical lie with no substance that profited from real fear of death.
Camestros Felapton 
