The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning
Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
Overhead
The Comment form you’ll see down below says:
Spam comments get trashed, so don’t bother. Comment moderation may cause a delay.
My apologies to real people, but this junk would appear without that little speedbump:
The IP addresses map to Singapore and China, for whatever that’s worth.
The game is on …
Just for fun, I handed the text of a recent post to one of the myriad AI detectors:
AI generation score: 12%
This text reads as highly authentic human writing, likely from a personal blog or DIY/home repair journal. The author demonstrates a genuine personal voice throughout, with specific technical details that feel lived-in rather than generic. Phrases like ‘sad bent wreckage on their stems’ and ‘yet another nonstandard standard size’ carry real personality and mild frustration that feels genuinely human. The writing has a casual, matter-of-fact tone typical of someone documenting their own project for an audience of fellow hobbyists.
Yeah, that’s about right.
Of course, an AI analyzed my text and generated the response, so I tossed its response back into the hopper:
AI generation score: 72%
This text has several hallmarks of AI-generated content, particularly in its analytical, evaluative framing. It reads like an AI detector’s own output — a meta-analysis of writing rather than original creative or personal content. The language is polished and structured in a way that feels templated: it moves systematically through observations (voice, tone, specific phrases, audience) in a formulaic progression typical of AI summarization tasks. Phrases like ‘feel lived-in rather than generic’ and ‘carry real personality and mild frustration’ are the kind of hedged, evaluative language AI systems use when describing human qualities they’re trying to identify or simulate.
However, we know real humans sometimes steal content from other authors, so I ran the same text through one of the myriad plagiarism detectors:
Guilty as charged: my text always exactly matches what you’ll find at softsolder.com. I have no idea where the “83% Match” for the first paragraph came from.
Remember: you read it here first …
Few enough folks stop by to make the bump from Hackaday’s mention of the Wasp Blower stand out:
Apparently Subaru fuses remain elusive and that old Thermador wall heater retains its hotness:
The WordPress AI came up with this prompt and image based on the minimal text above:
Gotta get me a workshop like that …
The AI Assistant says this post needs improvement:
Which is why I don’t use AI for anything …
I discovered this commentary, in several variations in different contexts, after attending the Poughkeepsie No Kings protest last weekend:
You are allowed to say, at any point, “I can’t support this”.
Even if you did.
Even if you were unsure.
You can say, at any point, “This has gone too far.”
And, while the best time to say that was earlier, the second best time is now.
That is relevant, because the Executive branch of the United States government has internalized two facts:
The President and the Executive branch now act with the knowledge that the separation of powers, the checks and balances, and the restrictions written into the US Constitution no longer apply.
Justifications based on Constitutional hairsplitting are irrelevant. The Founding Fathers did not intend the Executive branch to operate as it does now.
Justifications based on “But what about …?” are irrelevant. The scale of current malfeasance dwarfs all precedent; there are no valid comparisons.
Justifications based on “But Congress is dysfunctional!” are irrelevant. It takes only one to dysfunction and the parties have been swapping irresponsibility for decades.
I commend to your attention the Army Talk Orientation Fact Sheet 64 from March 1945. It is straight-up US WWII propaganda with a rosy view of the Soviet Union, but you should fact-check all items in the section “Can We Spot It?” on page 4 against current events.
Should you think your particular identity, institution, tradition, behavior, property, possessions, protection, legality, or beliefs will remain untouched because you’re in a particular group, you are incorrect.
I changed my voter registration to “No Party” several decades ago, when it became evident the Republican Party had lost interest in whatever small-government / low-deficit / personal-responsibility principles it may have once had; thinking it had those principles was likely a misunderstanding on my part.
I cannot support many planks of the Democratic Party’s platform, either, but they remain based in rule-of-law and have some appreciation of what functions a government should perform.
I still vote in every election and intend to continue doing so.
WordPress likes images and this seems appropriate:
Every day, about 200 readers peruse 300 pages, but sometimes this happens:
Unlike AI or robot scrapers, this spike came from actual humans reading a note on Hacker News.
I was surprised at how much traffic came from the various Referrers based on Hacker News.
Here today, gone tomorrow …
Eventually this happened:
Three weeks, more or less, from my exposure to clearing the hurdle. Mary, being tougher than I, got it done in two.
For the better part of the first two weeks I was in bed ten hours every night, plus an hour or two of afternoon nap (no milk & cookies, drat), plus dragging around the house getting nothing done.
No major health problems, good blood oxygen levels throughout, no loss of smell apart from what you’d expect during three days of complete nasal blockage, and we’re both feeling OK-ish now.
However, we are making more than the usual number of stupid mistakes, which is one way we know we’re not really OK yet.
Back to the Basement Shop, with considerable caution …
Memo to Self: That was the first time in four years you didn’t wear a mask in close quarters. Don’t ever do that again.
The forecast of several pleasant days will have me in the garage wrenching on bikes, doing car maintenance, and finishing home chores.
Back next week …
Obligatory cat(erpillar) picture:
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 