If we're looking for the current pig being chased through the (global) village (and please excuse my crude translation of "die neuste Sau durchs Dorf treiben", a German phrase to point out the current big thing that's being made the Biggest Thing Ever and gets mixed in everywhere) - I'd say it's certainly AI.

Personally, I'm very, very torn on that topic. Yes, it can be a great help, and very useful in specific instances. But then there's so many not-so-good things about it. 

For once, I look with a shudder on the immense amounts of energy that go into generating, running, and using AI. It's slowly approaching a whole percent of global energy consumption, at a time where we'd all profit from dialling down a bit and trying to reduce what we use, so that we can stay within sustainable limits.

Then, a lot of it is just... bad. It already starts with the high-handed decisions of the AI trainers to just use anything that is there to train their models, regardless of copyright. Books, images, music, you name it. I have had issues with piracy of the book I wrote together with Gillian Polack (The Middle Ages Unlocked), which did cost both of us a good chunk of potential royalties income. This AI training - it''s piracy on a whole new level.

Artists complain as they are getting pushed out of their jobs, understandably so. A lot of people seem to think that AI will solve all their problems in the future, and make things, and better plus quicker than people. We will not be able to turn back time and go without AI, so my personal opinion is that it's smart to keep an eye on the developments and not reject all of it in every case, across the bank (even if personally, I'm a little tempted to do that, and please don't ask me why). In some cases, I have used AI to assist me, and I have found that it can be very helpful in some very specific situations. Like when I have a text in a language that I don't really read fluently, and I get translation assistance. (Quality differs between models, and it's always necessary to stay alert to possible hallucinations and mis-translations.) Like when I have a small, very well-defined programming issue where the language and (best case) the problem are rather well-known and have been handled and solved on the Internet somewhere, in some obscure corner, before, and I can describe in detail and very exactly what I need to have done, but am not able to just write out the code. Basically, another translation/language problem with a large pool of knowledge accessible in general. Or when I have a large, multi-page website and I need to find one specific bit of information on it (the case was a search for a VAT number that was not in the imprint). 

In these cases, it has served me really well to use AI. Regarding the translation, it's a really helpful tool for me that aids me a lot, and makes reading texts that I'd stumble on and spend a long while leafing through dictionaries (or typing words into online dictionaries) much quicker and much more painless. In other cases that were close to my successful use-cases, but not quite as specific and well-documented, well, I tried, and it tanked spectacularly. Which means that now I am very motivated to be very specific, and think hard about whether it is an AI-solvable problem, or probably not.

If I could wish for something, it would be people using AI like ChatGPT less for everything. You really don't need it to generate you a recipe for Butter Chicken, there's plenty of them on the web already, written by humans, just use one of those. You can just, well, use a search engine (preferably one with the search function turned off). And while I can somehow understand the temptation of having AI render a photo of you into an action figure, or a cartoon character, or whatever else... I'd wish people would not just use it so freely. It has a high hidden cost, and at some point, the price will have to be paid.

I won't go into any speculation on whether liking to use old programmes is somehow linked to being an archaeologist or not (it might just be me being cheap and lazy, after all), but, well... I did the jump from Windows7 to Win10, which should tell you a lot already.

Now the end of support for Win10 is approaching quickly, and I'm here with a still perfectly functional computer that is, as the Win11 evaluation programme tells me, not good enough to run Win11. 

This, as you may have guessed already, irks me quite a bit. And not only for me and my system - after all, I bought this machine refurbished four or so years ago, which can be considered as quite a while in IT terms - but also for all the millions of computers that are now forced into obsoleteness. The amount of unneccessary trash that makes, it's mind-boggling.

For a bit now, I had already decided to draw out any change or upgrade to the OS for as long as possible. Today, I looked into possibilities of extended support, at least for security patching... and found some interesting things.

Firstly, if you have the latest version of Win10 installed, you might even be eligible for free extended-life support by Microsoft. This life extension with security updates was offered on previous versions of Windows, but usually just for companies, and at a price (quite hefty, too). It looks like they are now offering it to everybody, and in some cases for free. The some cases are either using Microsoft Rewards points, or syncing your Windows backup to OneDrive (5 GB are free). I have not found out if the sync option means you have to backup everything there, or just the Windows settings, but either way it's not an option that I personally find attractive. You can read more about the MS extended support here or here. The extension is planned for at maximum three years, although there seems to be a plan to extend Win10 support for some companies until 2032. (Don't ask me how you get this, I have no clue.)

In case that all doesn't sound attractive enough for you, I also learned that there is a company specialising in security support for outdated programmes and operating systems. It's called 0patch (pronounced zeropatch) and they have adopted Win7 before, and still provide it with security patches so the machines are safe to use. Now they will be offering the same for Win10, and their plan is to do that for at least five years.

I will definitely look into this!

 There's another long weekend coming up - so I'll be back on the blog on Monday. Meanwhile, if this video upload thingie has worked, you can enjoy a hedgehog checking out the feeding station in our garden:

Well, not much to tell about here today - there was stuff to be done on the computer, so there wasn't even sneaking away for a good bit to do some more sprang. (Which is still growing too quickly, by the way, so I'll only need about half the original row count for the original length. Grrr.) The Little Cat had a vet checkup today to get blood drawn, and she was understandably not very amused. The vet was, though, when I told him that the Little Cat's newest medication seems to be the tastiest thing ever available to a cat, and goes absolutely bonkers for it. (Apparently that's not normal.)

Otherwise, texts, reading, phone, writing, emails, stuff. And because you deserve something not as unexciting as hearing about this, here's a link for you to a new kind of sock heel that can be knit in top-down or toe-up, and a link to a paper about cats doing the "fetch" thing. Enjoy. 

It's the time of year again where public holidays mean nice and very welcome gaps in the work week... that's the case with Thursday this week, and since that is ideal to make it into a super-long weekend, I will be taking Friday off as well. 

On the Monday afterwards, I'll  take off to a workshop and networking meeting, with the goal of making textile research and conservation easier for everybody involved. I'm already looking forward a lot to this, the programme sounds really interesting!

Accordingly, I will be off the blog until Friday next week. 

In the meantime, maybe you'd like to read this article about fetching and retrieval by cats when they are playing! 

Yesterday was too hectic to get a picture in here - but now you are getting a view of the catproofed hedgehog restaurant: 

The stone goes on top of the roof/lid for the night, otherwise at least one of the cats will lift it off. (We saw him trying on one of the videos. Before he gave up on that method and contorted himself in through the door opening.) 

And this is how the inside looks:

I'm still impressed that the cats managed to squeeze around that corner. It's only about 11 or so cm wide, after all. 

The center space should be large enough for two hedgehogs to turn around each other (which should be possible here), and the food houses need two separate entrances so there's always a way to flee, in case there are disagreements about who is supposed to be in there, and who is not. That makes those food houses surprisingly large. Instead of adding the two sewage tube knees, some plans recommend closing off the entrance labyrinth paths on top, making them only about 12 cm in height, so it's more like a tunnel. We considered that option, but went for the knees - as we did not trust the cat burglars to get stopped by a little bit of a height inconvenience.

And yes, what you see in that dish is no more food, and some hedgehog droppings instead. They have a weird way of saying "thank you for the food", those guys! 

This is, supposedly, a hedgehog feeding station with a cat-proof design. Which means that a hedgehog can enter, and leave, and there's two entrances/exits so if two should happen to go in there at the same time, a route to run away is still open to each of them. (Hedgehogs are not social, as a rule.)

The inside has two partitioning walls so it's like something that dreams of being a labyrinth one day. But, well, you know, it's not complicated enough yet. That is supposed to make it cat-proof, because even if a cat is able to stick their head in, they would not crawl in all the way, with only 10 cm of door height, and then contort themselves around the inner walls to reach the food plate.

Well, well, well. My aunt kindly borrowed us her wildlife camera, and after seeing this:

I'm not so sure anymore about that "cat-proof" thing. The cat goes inside until just the tip of the tail sticks out, and then the data cuts off.

We know that cat, it's a slim, rather young-looking tom with a very beautiful ginger tabby fur. Apparently he's trying to work on the "slim" part with enthusiasm... 

So we'll have to find a way to pimp the cat-proofness. Maybe add something so the entrance is more like a tunnel? That would make slipping inside more awkward.