A Tip o’ the PSACOT Hat to Daniel Dern, for this free NYT link:

How Accurate Are Google’s A.I. Overviews?

The company’s A.I.-generated answers look authoritative, but they draw on an array of sources, from trustworthy sites to Facebook posts.

By Tripp Mickle, Cade Metz, Dylan Freedman, Teresa Mondría Terol, and Keith Collins
April 7, 2026

The reporters spoke with firms that study A.I. hallucinations before selecting Oumi and its A.I.-verification model, HallOumi, to evaluate Google’s accuracy via a widely used benchmark test, known as SimpleQA.

It is not only idiotbots that get confused and conflate results. Google can too.

In answer to my recent column on the subject, S.M. Oliva checked in:

“A favorite example of this in my own research is Tom Snyder. No, not the former late night talk show host, but an early programmer of educational software. Tom Snyder Productions, Inc., was one of the first “edutainment” software developers. He never hosted a talk show, although he later got into television production. Yet I’ve seen more than a few sources conflate the two Tom Snyders over the years.”

Plus, I forgot to mention my friend Larry King. Not former talk show host Larry King, but rather the journalist.

I had it, I lost it. I had it, I lost it. Just another day with the single worst user interface on the Internet: LinkedIn. If you don’t respond immediately, the thread disappears, never to be found again. Yes, I looked in my activity. Yes, I checked all of my connections. Nada. So, I don’t get to react to the original posts. 

With the exception of UIs produced by amateurs, this is the worst. The god-awful LinkedIn interface has done it again. They sent me an email that indicated I had a new message. Clicking on the link in the email sent me into deep oblivion. A few minutes of attempting to find it in the bewildering and useless message interface was fruitless.

I think this just proves we had AI slop before we had AI. I think a bot could have designed a better interface. It appears that, like so many other lousy UIs, this one results from the accretion of a bunch of random decisions yielding an impenetrable morass, which no human being ever sits down to rethink. But of course, if they rethink it, the familiar but crappy interface morphs into one that is no better, and is unfamiliar to boot. 

You may or may not recall that in the early days of the Internet, when HTML was simple, if you liked a page you went to the source version and borrowed big chunks of clever HTML. Now you can do the same thing with AI prompts, if the original prompter is careless–as in the sense of doesn’t care.

I was looking for a cover for my song How Many Times, which asks the question “How many times have we been together,” with the stinger “Would I do it again? You Bet.” Here is a discussion of the use of AI for that cover.

I can prove it is the 21st century. The power went out. We were switched automatically to our backup generator.

PG&E texted and emailed the equivalent of “We think your power is out, but we’re not sure. What do you think?” Instead of asking me to send a pointless email or text, it took me to a new form. “What’s your address?”

Then “it may take us a minute or two, but we’re going to have a look at your meter.” Less than a minute later, “The power is out at your meter. We’ll get on it as soon as it is convenient for us.” (OK, that last part is a little snarky).

I was pleased to be able to provide useful information. The only thing that would be better, but why didn’t they look at my meter without asking me?

In 1995, tips and tricks were a thing. I presided over a collection of 1,250 of them on the Winmag CD-ROM.

Here’s my first (and probably last) tip/trick:

Putting A Shortcut For A File Folder Or Specific Web Page On Your Windows 11 Task Bar

You’ve probably heard those stories about missing episodes of important shows that are found in an attic, or under a house, or in a box in storage locker. I was uploading all the ComChron video I had, then checking it against the Internet Archive. My collection included entire programs and some whole-season compilations of software reviews. Imagine my surprise to find I had two episodes (701 and 702) that were “lost.” They will soon be on  the Internet Archive with all their brethren.

The recent worldwide Amazon Web Services failure proves that AWS is a single point of failure for the Internet. At least one analyst says Amazon knows the source of the problem but isn’t fixing it because it’s too expensive. Another, a friend of mine in the computer security racket, says simply that Amazon was lying about the cause. “Yeah, a total shitshow. Blaming a bad DNS was bogus.”