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Database slop

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Who needs AI when we can generate our own slop?

My home address seems to have found itself on the National Database for gas suppliers and I am now receiving a bill for the supply of gas. This is despite the fact that I do not have a gas supply. Just how my address is randomly associated with an account without any kind of verification remains a mystery to be resolved once I navigate the Kafkaesque “customer services” of British Gas and disentangle my address from their database. Should you also find yourself drowning in the inefficacy of British Gas “customer services” I found this form actually reached people who may be able to do something to help.

The UK government has a General Register cataloguing our births marriages and deaths since 1837 (with some gaps). This is very useful when documenting a family history except so much of it is wrong. The errors are mostly from the transcribing of the original hand written records but it does mean everything needs to be questioned and double checked before being accepted.

Just because it is in the database does not mean it is correct. Bring on our AI future. What could possibly go wrong?

Name? Age? Who knows?

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The Buckinghamshire Archives said…

We’ve had a few enquiries come in after chatbots told researchers that we hold documents we don’t actually look after

…in response to a warning from the ICRC about AI nonsense-bots generating fabricated references because they are designed to spew out something that looks like an answer even if there is no answer available.

Having fallen down a family history rabbit hole recently it seems that such erroneous content is not limited to AI bots.

    Birth dates before 1st July 1837, when a national register started, are endlessly variable and a person may have five or more different years recorded as their birth year during their lifetime.
    As old records are handwritten details such as surnames may not be deciphered correctly.
    Just because somebody ticked the box confirming that all the information provided on a census form is true and accurate does not mean that all the information provided on the form is true and/or accurate.
    The transcribers of census forms can miss people from a listing because they were ‘hidden’ on the next page.
    Even if somebody is included in another family tree it does not mean that person actually existed.

Crosser Country

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Despite the crew’s best efforts and frequent apologies there is always a sense of excitement tinged with trepidation when one travels on a CrossCountry train. Will you actually arrive at your destination or will the train break down halfway? Will the train be so overcrowded that it should be condemned as a danger to life? Will there be an announcement that the train will not fully complete the journey and you need to sprint around the labyrinthian concourse of New Street to board another CrossCountry train which may (fingers crossed) get you home?

To reflect such abysmal service they have updated their app to one of those not-quite-an-app-not-quite-a-website abominations. It works exactly as you would expect. First you must change your password. Your new password, comprising a lengthy sequence of random characters, will be rejected if it does not contain a “special character” even if there is actually nothing special about those particular characters within a lengthy sequence of random characters. Helpful links are provided to show and hide your password. This, as they fail to explain, will do nothing if your cursor is not in the text box.

But once we have overcome such challenges we can finally log in to the shiny new app:

Ho-hum. Let the one star reviews begin:

One day….

Our phones are not your computers

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It is common to find software developers who imagine that everyone shares their understanding of, and enthusiasm for, computers. This is not the case. Most people merely tolerate computers:

This leads them to assume that we would like to have our phones transformed into something akin to a computer from the 1990s. This also is not the case. For example Brent Simmons argues that iPhones and iPads should be able to download software from anywhere just like computers because “those devices are computers“. No. They are not computers.

Certainly a phone has all the internal gubbins just like a computer. But my TV comes with a screen, a processor, an operating system, a web browser and is connected to the Internet. It is not a computer. Refrigerators come with processors and screens and an Internet connection. They are not computers. Motor cars come with processors, screens, web browsers and an Internet connection. They are not computers.

Apple sells far more phones than they do computers because phones are not computers. People who want a computer buy a computer. People who do not want a computer buy a phone. Nobody calls their phone their pocket computer… because they are not computers.

I use the splendid NetNewsWire (as mentioned here in 2008) which is available from the App Store for devices that are not computers but, alas, only from the website for Mac computers.