This is a practice question for the MCAT, the Medical College Admission Test. Can anybody ask a chatbot because I have no idea what the answer is supposed to be.

The creators of ChatGPT have a far more lucrative goal in mind than simply taking my job. The bigger picture is the multi-billion dollar sector that is internet search. And that is why it has been dubbed the Google killer. Google’s parent company Alphabet made $104bn (£86bn) in revenue in 2020 alone, just from search. Taking even a tiny fraction of that market would be a huge prize… Imagine going to a search engine, typing in your query and back comes one definitive answer, rather than pages and pages of links (and ads) to wade through?

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology

Erm. No, I don’t want “one definitive answer”. The whole attraction of Google is that there’s a lot of different sources of information, not just one “final truth” preselected by some woke 23-year-old Snapchat addict. Also, Google has no barrier to entry while the chatbot is completely inaccessible unless you provide tons of info it can’t possibly need. Given how woke its creators are, the access to the chatbot and the quality of its responses will unavoidably be regulated according to everybody’s ideological reliability profile. People who are asking the chatbot facetious questions about political issues are putting themselves on all sorts of blacklists as we speak.

Let’s hope that the general stupidization of all online options doesn’t rob us of search engines, giving us instead “one definitive answer” chosen by a bunch of eager brainwashed children.

To distract myself from all the sadness, I have opened up my new blog on Ukrainian literature. You can find it right here but, as I warned before, it’s in Ukrainian.

The first post is dedicated to a novel about Ukrainian Soviet writers in 1946. As I say in the linked post, the scenes of writers having publicly to confess their ideological transgressions feel surprisingly current.

Yes, the cover art tends to be really out there. This is a sad remnant of the 1990s when nobody wanted to read anything serious, so trashy, garish cover art became a norm.

Terrible news from Turkey. What an incredible calamity! How fragile is human civilization in the face of natural disasters.

Humans should stand together defending civilization instead of murdering other people and destroying civilizational achievements.

I have had the dubious honor of becoming one of the leads – or sales targets – for unscrupulous salesmen of the kind you see in Glengarry Glen Ross.

Whenever you publish anything, salespeople arrive in droves, trying to exploit your belief that you are an unrecognized genius. For about a month, I got an avalanche of phone calls (including at work) telling me that Hollywood and Netflix are desperate to buy the rights to “my story”, and all that’s needed is for me to pay “a small cataloguing fee” for world fame to arrive.

I’m about the worst possible mark for these poor salespeople because I have no delusions of creative grandeur or dreams of quick riches. But the salesmen didn’t know that, so they kept trying until finally I got placed on some black list of “deadbeats” and they disappeared. Their techniques are identical to the ones you see in the movie. Apparently, there hasn’t been much progress in sales tactics since the 1990s.

I understand not wanting to live up to stereotypes but there’s no need to act as a complete idiot to disprove the stereotype of a smart Jew b

I just watched a bizarre video of a Russian army recruiter explaining to a bunch of 18-year-olds that “war is love, war is a friend, war is the future.”

But the craziest thing in the video isn’t even what the recruiter says. It’s that the young people whom she’s trying to encourage to enlist are… get this… masked and sitting six feet away from each other.

If there were ever a group of people who needn’t worry about COVID…

Did you hear that China has officially expressed dismay that the US shot down its spy balloon over US territory? How did that make you feel? I mean, these bastards are completely shameless, right? They send a spy balloon and then pretend that you are in the wrong for shooting it down.

Congratulations, now you know exactly how Ukrainians have felt every day for the past 350 years.

Damnation on the spying gadgets which can’t even use the intel they collect.

We watched a documentary about GameStop because N finds the story fascinating. For my sins, the CEO of a pet food company that will remain unnamed was mentioned in the documentary.

As a result, the Internet now thinks I have a pet. Everywhere I go, I get commercials from that pet company. Then, other pet companies joined in. My internet searches, YouTube videos and social media are now barking, meowing and oinking up a storm.

And I still don’t have a pet.