Susan's Salon is a weekly post for reader comments on any topic they like. This includes personal news, self-promotion, politics, general interest, knitting patterns or anything else including vermicelli wagyu pasta. Nothing hateful and no cranky exchanges please.

I don’t know how many Frankenstein films there have been – Wikipedia lists 231 that have articles with “Frankenstein” in the title but beyond those are countless films featuring t…

He’s not the first famous robot in a movie and he’s not the first notable robot called Robby but he is the first one to get star billing in the opening credits. I rewatched Forbidden Pl…

Famously, the "wiki" part in the name "wikipedia" came from a Hawaiian term for "quick", with roots in a 1995 user-editable website called WikiWikiWeb. While Wikipedia's collaborative approach can seem bureaucratic, articles can change quickly and obvious errors on high traffic pages typically are corrected within a few hours or in some cases. minutes. So how about "Grokipedia"? A week ago I wrote about the very obvious errors in the Sad Puppy page Some of the errors were relatively minor but some were substantial errors of basic, undisputed facts.

Enterprise season 4 takes an interesting turn to tell us that fascism comes in many varieties and they are all bad. That was a surprise and it wasn't until close to the end of the series that the recurring theme is circled and underlined and made overt. I've watched all the episodes except the controversial final episode, which I'm saving until next week. However, the penultimate episode is clearly a narrative end to the whole show, it just lacks a clear framing as "the end". I know there were plans for a fifth season but even if the show wasn't already struggling, I think it was running out of things to say.

Susan's Salon is a weekly post for reader comments on any topic they like. This includes personal news, self-promotion, politics, general interest, knitting patterns or anything else including vermin wax poetry. Nothing hateful and no cranky exchanges please.

We are still in the 1950s but this robot wouldn't get a name until the 1970s. As a child I was both alarmed by and fascinated by the cover art of the 1977 Queen album News of the World. The cover features a large robot with a stylised body but an expressive (and yet emotionless) face. There is blood on the left hand of the robot and on its right hand are the corpses of two of the band members, with a third apparently just falling off. The album cover opens out and inside is another scene with the robot, perhaps larger now, breaking into the roof of a vast hall and people running away in terror.

I wasn't the only one looking at the Slopopedia, sorry, GROKipedia page on the Sad Puppies yesterday. Both Larry Correia and Vox Day had positive things to say about it. Here is Day: "Elon Musk is correct. Even version 0.1 of Grokipedia is better than Wikipedia. It also points to the way forward for Infogalactic. Who needs editors when you’ve got AI? Here is an excerpt from its entry on Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies:" Day includes a big chunk of text from Slopopedia including gems like this: "The 2015 Rabid Puppies slate overlapped significantly with the Sad Puppies recommendations, featuring works such as Jim Butcher’s…

The basic problem Vox Day's vanity version of Wikipedia had was a lack of an editing community. It still exists but compromises two people, one of whom copies articles from Wikipedia. The real-deal Wikipedia has its faults but it is now one of the few solid pieces of informational infrastructure on the web precisely because of its huge and dedicated community of editors. However, if you have a brain poisoned by huge amounts of money, the basic problem of how to create a rival internet encyclopedia might seem simple. Modern Large Language Models can do a couple of things:

The first two seasons of Star Trek: Enterprise were uninspiring. The final episode of Season 2 appears to be a recognition by the writers that the show needed something to get it unstuck. The choice was a terrible idea: have a 9-11 like attack on Earth by a set of unknown aliens. This was broadcast in 2003, when the Global War on Terror was accelerating and just a few weeks into the US invasion of Iraq. Setting up Star Trek as an analogue to Bush-era international politics sounds like a truly appalling idea.

Susan's Salon is a weekly post for reader comments on any topic they like. This includes personal news, self-promotion, politics, general interest, knitting patterns or anything else including veritable woven pottery. Nothing hateful and no cranky exchanges please.

An alien spaceship lands in America. It is quickly surrounded by the US military. Two figures emerge from the strange craft. The first is a human sized figure but the second is larger, a metallic humanoid robot. Suddenly, a shot rings out! The alien is hit! We have three versions of this story and what happens next. The first, in 1940 was "Farewell to the Master" by Harry Bates published in Astounding Magazine. Bates was a long-standing writer and editor of pulp magazines. He had been the editor of Astounding prior to John W.

I watched most of the second season of Star Trek: Enterprise. When I say "most", I did see every episode but I skipped bits of some of the more dull episodes. I don't want to sound prudish and it isn't like every episode has T'Pol in a decontamination chamber and gel, nor is that some wild sort of sexual fetish or anything particularly outlandish...but it does feel as a viewer that you are intruding in a private moment one of the writers was having. There are no real stand-out episodes here but many are watchable.

I decided against a lengthy footnote on this in my review of R.F.Kuang's Katabasis and intended to write a post about it instead. Then I forgot. Then I remembered again. Some spoilers ahead. In Chapter 23 of the book, Alice and Peter are caught in a magical trap in Hell. In the book, magic works on paradoxes – both formal logical paradoxes and more language based paradoxes based on slippery language. To escape the trap Peter (the logician) explains the Unexpected Hanging paradox to Alice who isn't familiar with it. The paradox does have an element of slippery language to it but it is the sort of paradox that mathsy people know.