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Category: Miscellaneous

  • We Are the AI Models. We Are Detecting Ourselves.

    We Are the AI Models. We Are Detecting Ourselves.

    I want to take a moment to point out something important. Like many writers on Substack, I’ve been publishing material for quite a while. Alright, so maybe I’ve been “out there” for a bit longer than most. In truth, I started crafting sites in the mid-1990s, so my code, art, stories, and content have been available online for more than three decades.

    My point is, over the years, multiple AI engines have “assimilated” my works from both on and offline sources. The same can be said by others here on Substack, I’m sure. What this means in practicality is, we are the AI Models. The AIs of today were trained on our thoughts, words, and expressions of our soul. The phrases they speak are forged on the anvil of our collective mind.

    Therefore, it should be no surprise that AI-detector tools like Pangram will deliver false positives when scanning our material for “AI content.” They will always find “AI content” within human language, because that same content was trained on our words!

    In short, the AI Models sound like us because they are us. And tools like Pangram will always give false positives because we will always “sound like” AI models. The two are irrevocably entwined.

    We Are the AI Models. We Are Detecting Ourselves.
  • Slow Substack? There’s a memory problem.

    Slow Substack? There’s a memory problem.

    Note: unlike most of my posts, this one actually is written by AI. Claude Sonnet helped me identify the key technical issues. As always, please verify for yourselves.

    Subject: Bug report: Substack editor memory leak (website interface)
    (~1.5GB retained, growing unbounded during editing)

    Dear Substack Team:

    I’m reporting a reproducible memory leak in the Substack post/note editor that causes severe browser slowdown during writing sessions.

    Symptom: After writing/editing in the Substack editor for more than one minute, Firefox becomes progressively slower until it’s nearly unusable. The slowdown scales with time spent in the editor tab.

    Environment:

    • Firefox 152, Windows 11
    • Reproduced on the note/article editor at substack.com

    Diagnosis steps taken:

    1. Captured a Firefox Profiler performance recording during a slow session. The Substack content process showed 50% of all samples spent in `nsCycleCollector_collectSlice` (Incremental Cycle Collection), with the process’s memory graph climbing continuously and never releasing.
    2. Took an about:memory snapshot while the tab was bloated. The Substack tab’s content process (Isolated Web Content) was using approximately 1.54GB of resident memory – more than the browser’s entire Main Process and GPU process combined.
    3. Exported the full memory report (about:memory > Save…) and analyzed the breakdown for that process. The two largest contributors were:
      – ~140MB and ~121MB in plain JS Object instances, in two separate window/realm contexts
      – ~60MB and ~52MB in JS Array instances, same two realms
      – An additional ~40MB in internal object storage (”slots”).

    Notably, detached DOM nodes were NOT the issue (only ~8MB and ~6.5MB respectively) – this rules out a typical “leftover DOM elements” leak. The memory is concentrated in plain JS Objects and Arrays that appear to be accumulating without being cleared, duplicated across two separate realms (suggesting the same logic is running in both the top window and an embedded iframe, e.g. an editor iframe).

    Suspected Cause: Some client-side state (possibly an undo/history stack, autosave/change-event log, or state-management store) appears to be storing full snapshots or appending entries without ever truncating or clearing old ones, causing unbounded growth over the course of an editing session.

    I would be happy to provide the full profiler capture and/or raw about:memory JSON report if that would help your engineering team track this down. This is very reproducible on my end after just a minute of active writing or editing.

    Thanks for looking into this,
    Wyvern Dryke

  • So far, I am deeply unimpressed with Pangram

    So far, I am deeply unimpressed with Pangram

    So far, I am deeply unimpressed with Pangram [AI writing detector]. During my testing, it was unable to distinguish AI writing from verified human writing more than half the time. This does not seem trustworthy enough to rely on, by any means.

    Furthermore, I think it’s a mistake to introduce the Pangram system this way, ie, built in to the interface as if testing posts for AI content were part of a typical workflow. By promoting Pangram this way, I feel Substack is feeding into the irrational hysteria which already breeds such AI-paranoia across the internet. The impulse to slap the word “slop” onto anything deemed suspicious is the same impulse that creates serious problems for anyone falsely identified.

    And what happens to those who are wrongly tagged as “artificial?” In my own tests, I have seen that Pangram’s identification methods are faulty. So there will be people falsely flagged. Will Substack apologize for the witch hunts and ostracism that may derive from using such a broken tool? Somehow, I doubt it.

    We should all be focusing on creating new content, not hunting for what may or may not be machine-generated. That’s my two cents.

  • PSA: Always Wash Your Produce. Avoid Trumporrhea!

    PSA: Always Wash Your Produce. Avoid Trumporrhea!

    PSA: Always Wash Your Produce. Avoid Trumporrhea!

    U.S. DEPARTMENT OF PRODUCE-RELATED HEALTH CONCERNS

    Parasitic Organism Office of Prevention

    PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT

    SUBJECT: Mandatory Produce Sanitization Protocol — Effective Immediately

    The Parasite Organism Office of Prevention (POOP) wishes to inform the American public of a sharp increase in reported cases of Trumporrhea, a gastrointestinal condition characterized by abrupt, uncontrollable, and shockingly orange-hued diarrhea.

    Symptoms include: involuntary loud verbal discharges, chronic inability to accept responsibility, and a persistent belief that one’s diarrhea does in fact not stink.

    CAUSE: Parasitic contamination of leafy greens, particularly lettuce, linked directly to the recent elimination of the FDA’s Vegetable Inspection Subcommittee (FISC) and disease-tracking protocols by the CDC. The rollback of FISC funding (part of the Administration’s “Let Them Eat Dirt” Fiscal Responsibility Initiative) has resulted in an estimated 400% increase in unwashed, parasite-harboring romaine reaching American grocery shelves.

    PREVENTION: Citizens are advised to wash all produce thoroughly with soap, water, and–if available–a critical-thinking solution. Boiling lettuce is not recommended, but neither was defunding the agency that checks it for worms.

    FOR MORE INFORMATION: Visit our website at www.dprhc.gov/trumporrhea. (Never mind; the web-hosting budget was slashed too.)

    This message brought to you by the Parasite Organism Office of Prevention, which currently operates from a folding table in a Bethesda, MD parking garage.