ABOUT OUR BOTS

[webenda]

Nearly 2300 users online at MTJ at 0813 today...one wonders if this is legit or if we're being attacked by bots.

Curious Wayne googled, "How much of Model Train Journal's internet traffic is bots?"

Answer: "51%"

I wonder who the other thousand are?

Reference:
https://www.thalesgroup.com/en/worldwid ... ord-levels
https://youtu.be/BOk8l6xMBOM?si=n55h59FEv6gS_A1d

[healey36]

What is a "bot" anyway?

According to the wik, "An Internet bot, web robot, robot, or simply bot, is a software application that runs automated tasks (scripts) on the Internet, usually with the intent to imitate human activity, such as messaging, on a large scale."

[webenda]

Yes, and there a many types of bots.
https://www.kaspersky.com/resource-cent ... t-are-bots

[healey36]

My uneducated guess is that these bots are what's running up the view numbers on the Weekend Photo threads. July just crossed over 4000 views, and three or four days ago it was barely up to 1500.

[sarge]

I suspect some of those bots are from Google, specifically tailoring Google AI responses to searches.

Rather than giving me an overview on the subject of Ma & Pa boxcars as I requested in a search, I get this.


It knows (by my association here no doubt) that I'm a model railroader. It thinks I'm interested in one of Google's paid-product-placement clients, Lionel. Between its data gathering on me and awkwardly working in hot-linked paid-product-placement, Google AI becomes even less a citable source, even less credible than Wikipedia. Bloody useless.

Maybe better call it the Google a-Eye. Big Brother watches....and sells things!

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Bloody useless.

That would be a pretty accurate assessment were people interested in reality, but the AI craze is, well, a craze.....but it's worse.

AI's are well known to be wildly inaccurate, have "hallucinations", flat out fabricate and lie, and then just be wrong. Interesting little article recently where 3 AI's were asked to provide the structure of caffeine. 2 could not do it correctly and the 3rd was "unable to respond at this time". You can do it in seconds and get it right. There was a nice editorial from Harvey Turner on AI use in medical applications that showed them to be roughly 30-50% correct on diagnoses. There's your new physician assistant.....

However, I am told the new metric in hiring from HR departments is that you have to prove that an AI cannot do the job that you want to hire a human for to be permitted to hire a real person. You have to prove a negative........

I celebrate my ongoing retirement every day.

[healey36]

Went in for a scan the other day and in the waiting room was a huge banner touting their use of AI to improve analysis/diagnoses via said images. Boy, I now feel better about that, lol!

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Went in for a scan the other day and in the waiting room was a huge banner touting their use of AI to improve analysis/diagnoses via said images. Boy, I now feel better about that, lol!

If the AI is an improvement, just imagine how bad they might have been prior to its inclusion

Oddly enough, I see "Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 90 guests" while I'm here so I'm not sure how this is counting anyone or anything,

[healey36]

Went in for a scan the other day and in the waiting room was a huge banner touting their use of AI to improve analysis/diagnoses via said images. Boy, I now feel better about that, lol!

If the AI is an improvement, just imagine how bad they might have been prior to its inclusion

Oddly enough, I see "Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 90 guests" while I'm here so I'm not sure how this is counting anyone or anything,

Yup...I tried adding up the number of folks viewing the individual discussions and the sum was less than half of the total the "users online" count reported. I'm not sure how this thing works.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Yup...I tried adding up the number of folks viewing the individual discussions and the sum was less than half of the total the "users online" count reported. I'm not sure how this thing works.

I'm still not here!

But at the bottom of the page: Registered users: Google [Bot]

[healey36]

I thought being off-line for a few days might have knocked the "user" numbers down, but they are still reported at 2000+; maybe the MTJ reboot is legitimately generating a lot of interest...nope, that can't be it.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

I thought being off-line for a few days might have knocked the "user" numbers down, but they are still reported at 2000+; maybe the MTJ reboot is legitimately generating a lot of interest...nope, that can't be it.

Users browsing this forum: Google [Bot] and 80 guests

[healey36]

Hmmm...when I just looked it said "In total there are 2010 users online :: 1 registered, 0 hidden and 2009 guests (based on users active over the past 5 minutes)". Where are you looking? I'm looking at Home Board Index.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Hmmm...when I just looked it said "In total there are 2010 users online :: 1 registered, 0 hidden and 2009 guests (based on users active over the past 5 minutes)". Where are you looking? I'm looking at Home Board Index.

Bottom of this page -- Hmmm? Different results; page/topic specific?

[healey36]

Looks like the bots are dropping off...we’re down to just 300+ viewers at 1840 this evening.