Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

*******

Reading an Atlantic article about sludge (gift link) raised my blood pressure. I had the sensation of being on hold, waiting to speak to a representative so I could cross something off my to-do list. Reading about how creating frustration is part of the plan; it’s not a glitch or a problem with the system but it’s the system itself to make it as difficult as possible for you to take care of a problem made me want to quit society and move to an island inhabited only by sheep.

Someone should make a database of sludge-free companies with excellent customer service when there is a problem. So far, the only one I can think of is Chewy.

*******

Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts connected to businesses or sponsored posts.

Clearly, AI is on my mind, so I clicked on a New York Times quiz (gift link) to see how well a person could identify AI-created video content.

I was terrible at this. The 3 I got correct, I got correct by guessing. And that guessing was based on how many AI or non-AI options came before it — as in, if there were just two AI-created videos in a row, surely this one must be non-AI… right?

I am curious to hear if you do better with this. I find the whole thing worrisome more than exciting.

Josh and I lean more towards brick-and-mortar shopping, but there are a few things we buy online, usually ordering more than we need at the moment, so we won’t have to place another order for a few months. Last week, we submitted two such orders from two different businesses, and both orders arrived with chunks missing from the sides of the products.

Before you ask, there were no marks on the shipping boxes. They arrived without a dent. But when I opened the two boxes, one item in each box had a U-shaped hole on the side. In one case, it was hair gel that was now coating everything else in the box. In the other case, it was guinea pig baby food, which was luckily dry but had spilled out of its packaging inside the box.

In both cases, the company sent a replacement. (Though the AI bot suggested that we send back the oozing hair gel until Josh requested to speak to a human that said, “Uh, no, please DON’T send that through the mail.)

I sense that this is our future. Instead of human hands placing items in the box or even a human looking into the box to make sure the robot hands didn’t puncture the items, we will now receive packages of oozing gel and spilled-out guinea pig baby food — all in the name of technology. And companies will find it cheaper to replace the wasted items instead of employing a human to make sure the machine can do what the machine promises to do.

Call me frustrated.

*******

Stop procrastinating. Go make your backups. Don’t have regrets.

Seriously. Stop what you’re doing for a moment. It will take you fifteen minutes, tops. But you will have peace of mind for days and days. It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

And now the blogs…

*******

But first, second, helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week. To read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “Gewappnet” (Elaine ohne Kind)

Okay, now my choices this week.

No Kidding in NZ builds off Middle Girl’s idea that now is not the time for accomplishments. She explains: “There is so much I need to do, but at the moment, surviving with some sanity intact is about all I can manage. Remembering to breathe. Treading water. And that’s okay.” Accomplishments are relative.

Lastly, The Road Less Travelled celebrated her 40th wedding anniversary. It’s an enormous accomplishment always — choosing one another year after year. Congratulations!

The roundup to the Roundup: I’m not ready for the robot overlords. Your weekly backup nudge. And lots of great posts to read. So what did you find this week? Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between July 4 – 11) and not the blog’s main URL. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week. Read the original open thread post here.

I’ll start this by admitting that I haven’t actually tried ChatGPT (or any LLM beyond trying to engage Pi into talking about books with me a few months ago), but the end statement of this essay summed up exactly how I feel: I would rather see a person’s prompt than the LLM’s output.

I would rather see how people are using the tool. I’d rather see people’s Google searches and see how they word them or use operators than see the answer. I am so curious to learn how to optimize the questioning, but I’m not really excited to read what the LLM finds.

I will get around at some point to checking out ChatGPT or another LLM — I’m not against it as a tool. But I find people’s usage of it more interesting than the tool itself.

Do you use an LLM? What do you use it for?

Quentin slid wildly into his toddler stage. One night he was a sweet, cuddly baby, happy to curl up on my lap and have his back stroked for an hour.

The next night, he was trying to popcorn on my lap. Popcorning is when guinea pigs jump up and down, which is how they express joy. He popcorns every night when it’s time for bed because he gets a timothy hay treat, and he’ll popcorn on the floor when we’re playing, but lap time has always been calm time. Until now.

He comes out to greet me every morning when I come downstairs, and he gets Zoomies before bed. (Bedtime is just very very exciting.) I really love this guinea pig, though I miss my Beorn still very much.