A.C. Flory's Blog

Cheers,
Meeks

The reality of renewables:

Renewables destroy good farming land? No. Mining destroys good farming land.

Renewables can restore poor grazing land!

If you really cared about Australia, you’d embrace renewables instead of voting for politicians who are in bed with the mining industry.

Nett Zero by 2050 could be the making of Australia. But I guess you’d have to believe in Climate Change first. You clearly don’t.

Meeks

This message is for all NON-AMERICANS. US corporates are slowly squeezing the life out of ordinary Americans like you and me. Ordinary Americans are fighting back by boycotting those corporations. Let’s help them by showing those corporations that they are not as powerful as they think. Only by joining forces can ordinary people fight back.

Help Americans fight back and we help ourselves as well.

R.E.S.P.E.C.T!

Meeks

The examples used in the video below are predominantly about how and why Grok, Musk’s AI went off the rails, but the underlying problems apply to all of the AI currently out there. More worryingly, those problems also apply to the AI still in development as frontier companies push hard to take advantage of the goldrush that is AI. Speed is the operative word, and any pretence at caution is mostly cosmetic.

To put the speed of change into context, this video was published ‘one month ago’ [sorry Youtube doesn’t give a precise date]. As today is November 6, 2025 here in Australia, that means the actual date would have been on or near October 5 in the US.

That date is telling because, as part of the video, there is a clip of Sam Altman [OpenAI] being interviewed [minute 34:48]. In that interview he makes a point of saying “…we haven’t put a sexbot avatar in ChatGPT yet.”

That ‘yet’ says a lot because at 3:02am, October 15, 2025, Altman tweeted on X:

Click on the screenshot to see it in full screen.

So, essentially, some time in December of 2025, ChatGPT will be allowed to…tickle your fancy. I wonder what the porn industry thinks of that?

The thing that worries me is not that people will be able to indulge their most erotic fantasies, it’s that OpenAI is so desperate to make money that it is happy to turn its flagship AI into a pornbot. Or perhaps the strategy is to make ChatGPT so ‘indispensable’ that people will keep paying for the privilege even as the price goes up and up and up?

Given that OpenAI and all the other AI developers are bleeding money and not earning even close to break even, they will have to make money somehow or go belly up when investors finally stop believing in the hype.

And, of course, if the sexbot gambit works, every other AI developer will have to provide something similar or get left behind.

AI slop? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Meeks

I’m on a bit of a music kick at the moment so I hope you enjoy this glorious duet as much as I do:

cheers,
Meeks

I said once that Australia had inspired the unforgiving geography of Vokhtah. Well, today I discovered the soundtrack to my imaginary world, and it was created by actor and musician, Mark Cole Smith.

Smith recorded the sounds of the Kimberley and fused them into a music that even white bread people like me can recognise and enjoy. I hope you enjoy this trailer as well:

If any Aussies are watching, you can enjoy Smith’s magnificent documentary about the Kimberley on ABC iView. Unfortunately you do have to login, but it’s worth the aggravation! This is a Short about the series:

Have a great weekend everyone,
Meeks

I quite enjoy the odd murder mystery or police procedural, but most of the time I forget what they were about two days after I finish reading them. Then there are the stories that stay, lingering in my memory and becoming refreshed whenever life presents me with a situation or an insight that mirrors fiction.

The Weight of Snow and Regret, by Elizabeth Gauffreau is one of those books. I finished reading it last night, and I found myself completely agreeing with this review by Audrey Driscoll.

Rather than re-inventing the wheel, I’ll hand you over to Audrey. Cheers!

Book Review: The Weight of Snow and Regret by Elizabeth Gauffreau

I don’t know the name of either runner, but I wanted to save this moment for me, so that when things in the world seem most bleak, I can take hope from this moment. Courage and Compassion. We are not a complete waste of oxygen.

Hugs,
Meeks

I don’t want to scare people who already have a pc running Windows 11 but…things are getting grim with the latest news from Microsoft. The quote below is from Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi:

‘“We think we’re on the cusp of the next evolution, where AI happens not just in that chatbot and gets naturally integrated into the hundreds of millions of experiences that people use every day,” Yusuf Mehdi, executive vice president and consumer chief marketing officer at Microsoft, told The Verge in a briefing. “The vision that we have is: let’s rewrite the entire operating system around AI, and build essentially what becomes truly the AI PC.”

I strongly recommend reading the entire story about Microsoft’s plan in this Futurism article [no paywall]. For everyone else, here’s my quick summary:

With support for Windows 10 ended, users will either have to upgrade to Win11 [after buying a new, compatible pc] or keep using Win10 and risk security issues [more on that at the end],Current Windows 11 users will be automatically upgraded to a system in which Copilot [the Windows AI] will be at the heart of the whole operating system. This will include:Voice activation where you ‘talk’ to Copilot instead of manually selecting what you want to do,Copilot Vision where the AI ‘…will be able to see everything that happens on your screen so it can give context-based recommendations and tips.’Copilot Actions ‘…which allow the AI assistant to perform tasks on your local machine, like editing folders or looking stuff up.’

I’m sure that there will be a lot of people out there who think these innovations aren’t such a bad thing. After all won’t it be more convenient to use voice commands instead of having to peck away at a keyboard?

And so what if the AI sees everything on your screen… like the password for your online banking or that ‘interesting’ website that shows artistic nudes doing all sorts of gymnastics or that comment you left about how ugly that person is and how they should just kill themselves because no one wants to look at them or…

As for the AI independently changing things on your pc, what’s so bad about that? You could never find stuff anyway so who cares?

The answer to ‘who cares’ is EVERY ONE! Giving up both your security and your privacy to an AI that belongs to Microsoft and lives in the ‘Cloud’ means that all of your most intimate data will live there too. It won’t be safe on your pc, it will be available to whatever bad actor first discovers how to hack Copilot. Given how full of holes Microsoft software has always been, this is not some airy fairy scifi kind of threat, it is a threat that is simply waiting to happen.

According to the Futurism article:

‘For now, the Copilot features will be technically opt-in, but it’s more than possible that this will change in the future. Remember when Microsoft tried to force everyone to use its last stab at a virtual assistant, Cortana, when Windows 10 came out? That also had voice controls and a host of privacy woes. This time it’ll be different, of course.’

I honestly don’t know what to say to people who are already using Windows 11.

Be careful?

Try not to put anything that is security dependent on your pc?

Good luck?

Seriously, I’ve always believed that AI would become an integral part of our future, but this is not it.

Why?

Because we are not the ones controlling the AI. That is such a huge caveat. Personally, I would get a kick out of having an AI assistant…but only if I owned it. And only if it lived on my pc and NOWHERE ELSE. The reality, however, is that we will neither own Copilot nor control where it ‘lives’ and who gets to see our data.

Do you really trust Microsoft to have YOUR best interests at heart?

For me, I’ll stay with Windows 10 until the programmes I need are no longer supported. Then I will probably leave Windows for good and migrate to Linux. I’ve wanted to get away from Windows for a very long time, but I was worried my tech skills would not be up to the job. Then I worried that I wouldn’t be able to do how-tos. Then I worried that the games I escape to wouldn’t be available…

Now, I’m finding that all three of my fears are proving to be groundless. Linux is a heck of a lot more ‘mainstream’ than it was, and now even my favourite games are being supported. Unfortunately, CorelDraw and Videostudio Pro are not supported, and I’ve invested too much time and money to just walk away. So, I’ll buy a top of the range anti-virus software to protect my Windows 10 pc, I’ll be careful not to get caught by scams, and I’ll wait.

Can you do the same? If you’re still on Windows 10, you CAN use third party software to protect your pc, or you can pay for extended security from Microsoft, or you can investigate some of the Linux offerings to see if any are right for you. Or you can do nothing and just hope that Microsoft won’t abuse your trust.

Have a great weekend,
Meeks

Rick Beato is:

‘… an American YouTuber, multi-instrumentalist, music producer, and educator. Since the early 1980s, he has worked variously as a musician, songwriter, audio engineer, and record producer; he has also lectured on music at universities.’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Beato

Rick also happens to know a fair bit about math [52 factorial?] AND the limitations of AI. This video was an absolute eye-opener for me because I didn’t expect a math lesson from a musician. Then again, I should have known that math and music are soulmates.

And in case anyone is wondering why I’m posting so many links to Youtube videos, the answer is that my boy Golli is on the way out and asks for cuddles a lot of the time. So we sit at my pc and watch videos together. It makes him happy so I’m happy too.

Cheers,
Meeks