The Following Section Should Probably Be Removed Before You Begin Reading Aloud

A New Brunswick politician has chalked up a dubious world’s first for Canada by reading out AI prompts in an official speech.

In a June 9 speech to the legislative assembly, Progressive Conservative Bill Oliver read out the following line from a prepared text: “Here’s a more natural flowing version of that section that reads like a legislative speech rather than a series of short points.”

While it’s certainly not the first time a politician has been caught using an AI engine to write their speeches, this does appear to be the first time that the politician in question didn’t bother to remove the telltale signs of the act before reading the speech into the public record.

That video description is actually a wee bit misleading. He didn’t just do it once, he did it three times before it veeery sloooooowly dawned on him that something had gone extremely awry.

In the text Oliver read, there were three instances where his AI use was obvious, including where he said: “Here’s a more natural-flowing version of that section that reads like legislative speech rather than a series of short points.”
A few minutes later, Oliver read out these words: “Here’s a more developed and flowing version of the same section.” And a few minutes after that he said, “This section adds roughly … excuse me.”

The craziest part of this, obviously, is that it happened at all. But a big honourable mention has to go to the fact that his speech was so gripping and exciting that not a single person in range of it noticed what he’d done until somebody posted about it on Reddit weeks after the fact.

And since I’m sure you’re waiting for it, yeah, that’s what I thought of too.

Google Is Determined To Kill The Good Internet

The End of Google Search—and the Internet—as We Know It
For years now, Google has been tweaking its search formula to prop up AI and bury actual links. Now it’s rounding into its final form—and changing the internet forever.
There’s a lot of truth and a lot to think about here. Google, at least from the standpoint of what it’s historically been and what most people would like it to continue to be, is dying. It’s dying, and intentionally or not, it’s determined to take the rest of the internet down with it.

As someone who has kept this here little website chugging along for almost 23 years now, I’ve had a lot of reasons to consider this lately. Since the beginning, we’ve primarily relied on two things. People coming directly here, and people looking up random crap and finding their way to us. There have been ups and downs of course, but those two things have always been constants. Even when people started spending more time on social media and less time deliberately visiting their favourite sites, there were always plenty of folks Googling stuff. but the last couple years? It’s been rough, man. And it doesn’t matter who you are. Whether you’re us who does this mostly because it’s fun and we like keeping it around or the largest of publishing outfits with hundreds or thousands of livelihoods depending on you, you’re feeling it. That flood of search traffic you used to get is a trickle now if it’s anything at all, and the results are crushing.

And the worst part, to my mind anyhow, is that all of this ultimately benefits no one. Yes, in the short-term Google wins somewhat because it can keep all the money for itself, but what happens when there’s no more hosts off of whom to leech? When you take away the incentive for people to create and those people either stop creating entirely or find ways to work around you and cut you out of the deal, what does the AI do then? AI can’t do anything for itself. Everything it knows is based on what humans have given it, willingly or otherwise. So beyond a certain point, there’s nothing left. If that day comes, what’s the product? I fear where things are headed, but I also have to hope that we’ll never find out.

“At this pace, All About Berlin will not survive into 2027,” a guy named Nicolas Bouliane, the independent proprietor of website All About Berlin, tweeted last week. Bouliane has been frank lately about the realities of his dwindling Google-driven traffic. In a blog post written earlier this year—titled “AI Is Killing All About Berlin”—he pinpointed when he felt things had gone wrong: in 2024, when Google began tinkering with its search results design, aggressively pushing AI Overviews and pushing content providers like him ever deeper down the page.
Last month, Bouliane was one of the guests on an NPR segment about the changes to Google; he told the hosts that his traffic was down 75 percent since AI Overviews was launched in 2024. Another guest, Amanda Natividad of SparkToro, offered a sobering stat (well, unless you’re a product manager at Google) about “zero-click” rates these days. “Sixty-eight percent of all U.S. Google searches end without a click,” she said—meaning that users get what they need directly in the search page (or just get distracted, I guess) without having to visit any outside sites. That’s an increase from 45 percent a decade ago. Another grim figure, per The Telegraph: While appearing first in Google search results used to mean getting a click 27 percent of the time, that number drops to 11 percent when there’s an AI Overview up top. 
This summer, researchers at internet provider Cloudflare reported that “automated bot traffic has eclipsed human activity on the Internet, now generating roughly 57% of all web requests. This milestone emphasizes a seismic evolution from an Internet built for human clicks to a digital landscape now dominated by AI agents.” It’s no surprise, then, that anyone who relied on search engine inbound traffic is taking a hit. We are well and truly in the predicted “Google Zero” era.

I’ve Heard of Music In Your Soup. What About Music In The Road?

I was looking up some stuff for another post that I want to do, and I discovered something neat that I never knew about. Apparently, there are some roads in the US that have been built with grooves in them, so if you drive at the right speed, 45 miles per hour, they sing a song! Seriously! That would have taken one heck of a lot of work.

Here’s a list of five of them, although some of them are closed, and some of them were built less well.

In case that page goes splat, here is the list.

  • PALMDALE, CALIFORNIA
    R. Lee Ermey Musical Road
    The road plays 30 seconds of the Marine’s Hymn when driving over the grooved pavement.
  • ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO
    Musical Highway
    If drivers cross the rumble strip on this stretch of Route 66 at just the right speed it plays “America the Beautiful.”
  • “Singing Runway” at the Abandoned Disney World Airport
    The only runway directly into the magic kingdom has been closed since 1972, but it still sings to you if you drive fast enough.
  • LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
    ‘Remnal of a Senging Chave’
    Behind legendary Meltdown Comics is a marker for an engineered musical roadway of the Tehachapi, the great road builders of Kcymaerxthaere.
  • LANCASTER, CALIFORNIA
    Civic Musical Road
    Finale of “William Tell Overture” can be heard as drivers pass over grooves in the road.

Because I was way too curious, I found videos showing 3 of these roads. Two of them are in the same video, and there is a lot of description of how it works.

And here’s one about the Route 66 bit outside of ALBUQUERQUE, although it seems like there’s also one in Springfield, Missouri that might work better.

I have also learned that there are musical roads in other countries. How have I never heard of this?

And I learned all of this while looking for something else. What a rabbit hole!

Dumpster And Donation Box May Start With The Same Letter, But They Are Not The Same

It gets hard sometimes when you have to pay attention to the news, but no matter what, I always do my best to hold on to my belief that in spite of what feels like literally everything now, people are, over all, good and well-meaning. And while I’m sure that’s true of most of the folks donating to these people’s wildfire relief store, the mere thought that enough folks haven’t been that they felt the need to take time out of their lives to say knock it the hell off kinda makes me want to go back to bed forever.

The store in Penticton is stocked with donations from the community such as racks of men’s and women’s clothing, along with school supplies and personal hygiene items evacuees need to rebuild their lives.
But while Patan is grateful for every contribution, he and his volunteers have noticed some people treating the store as a place to dispose of goods that are better suited for the landfill.
“We opened a box together and it was half-used bars of soap, half-used makeup,” Patan said.
In one case, a shirt donated to the store reeked of cat urine.
“We would open bags where, you know, you had to take it outside because it smelled so bad,” he said.

He added, volunteers were making daily trips to the landfill just to dispose of these items.
Patan said he doesn’t believe people are donating maliciously, but said the issue escalated to where he felt he had to speak up.
“Where is that fine line of what should we be giving?” he asked.
He posted online, asking people not to use the store as a space to clean out their homes. He said that after everything evacuees have lost, they still deserve to feel human.

It’s worth pointing out that the person who started the store also lost his family home in one of the fires. That he could go through that and still find the time, the energy and the will to try to help so many others is an amazing thing. Also amazing, to me at least, is managing to kindly say that he doesn’t believe there’s malicious intent involved in some of these drop-offs. I’m not sure I could manage that, to be honest.

If you’d like to donate something better than the soap from your ass or a cat piss shirt (Who has one of those just lying around?), here’s how you can help.

TOTAL-LOSS FAMILIES FREE STORE
& DONATION DROP-OFF:
2130 Government Street, Penticton
10 AM – 4 PM • 7 DAYS A WEEK
Our Community GoFundMe is another important way to help:
https://gofund.me/b99d9854c
It is helping fill the gaps for total-loss families who may be uninsured, underinsured or discovering things simply aren’t covered.

It’s Not Just The Municipal Sector They Don’t Understand, I Assure You

Great news, you guys! Based on some of the comments in this anonymous survey of municipal administrators, I think I might be qualified to work for the city! Well, at least if banging on about most of this same stuff for almost a decade counts towards the standard.

The survey, conducted by government relations firm StrategyCorp, compiled anonymous reflections from a sample of 32 CAOs, allowing them to freely discuss the behind-the-scenes relationship with the provincial government.
Top municipal civil servants described a government that’s filled with ambition but falls short on implementation, rushes through the consultation process, and is often “thin-skinned and unforgiving” when faced with criticism.
“We have to tread very carefully in our response to anything that the province is doing,” one CAO said. “Our mayor is cognizant of that.”
Another city administration put it more bluntly: “the province doesn’t accept dissent, and you are punished for it.”

Some CAOs interviewed for the report said the province “doesn’t understand the municipal sector,” leading to “far too many unintended consequences.”
“I think [the provincial government] is an absolute disaster,” one CAO said. “It’s knee-jerk reactions with no analysis, no policy, no business case.”
Another CAO labelled the Progressive Conservatives as a “spaghetti government.”
“You just throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and see what sticks. If it sticks, then you draft regulations. If it doesn’t stick, you don’t.”

Ultimately, some said, decisions are made without local guidance.
“Changes appear to be made by a very small group of people without real consultation or analysis on what the impact will be,” one CAO said.
“We see that when they must be rolled back.”

“I get nervous whenever Doug Ford steps up to a podium because I have three months’ work ahead of me whenever he opens his mouth,” One CAO said.
“There have been 8 years of constant change.”

As AI Whitney Houston Might Say, I Bulorve That Choldreninen Are Our Fuviture

Tell me again about how AI is the future, because it sure as shit ain’t the present.

A school in Kentucky sent students home with a bound agenda that included absurd errors clearly made by AI. The periodic table was nonsense. The map of the U.S. lists the state of Illinois as “Vitoiis,” and Kentucky is listed as “Venecky.” There’s an extra planet called Marc, and Saturn is listed as “Sature,” among countless other gibberish errors.

Between this and Africa’s new geography, things are going super great.

A U.S. government map of Africa mislabeled every country during a State Department presentation at a global conference taking place in Brazil this week, causing a stir among attendees who took screenshots and posted them online.
Reuters viewed a video of the presentation given at the AIDS 2026 conference in Rio de Janeiro, which shows the errant map displayed halfway during a presentation about the State Department’s new health agreements.

A Reuters analysis found the image of the map included in the presentation contained an artificial intelligence watermark that signals it was made with OpenAI tools. The company said it was investigating the report.
The State Department said it took “full responsibility” for the confusion caused and that the map had been produced by a team member who hastily changed the slide deck before the event.
The map showed Nigeria, where the U.S. currently has several hundred troops deployed, as landlocked in the Sahara Desert. Mozambique, which is in southeastern Africa, was relocated to the Horn of Africa, while Ivory Coast in West Africa was placed on the other side of the continent.

Seriously, how does stuff like this even happen? Not the part where it escapes into the world, that part is easily explained by dumb, lazy humans. I’m talking about the bit where the AI spits it out to begin with. If a technology is trained to function based on all of the world’s best sources of information and is supposed to be smart enough to handle every aspect of our lives, why does it still routinely go so spectacularly wrong in spite of all the years and money that I’m constantly told have been poured into making it not suck?

Close!

The conversation Steve and I had about empanadas reminded me of a time when I asked Google something, and I think the AI, if it could, would have looked at me and said “Are you that stupid?”

If you ask Google what is the difference between two things, even if they’re not that similar, the AI will be generous and find some similarity. For example, when reminding myself what empanadas looked like, I asked to compare empanadas with samosas. It first said they were different, but they were both pastries with filling, and went about describing them. But in another case a few months ago, the AI just said “no!” and I felt really dumb. Here’s why.

Back a while ago, Dairy Queen had a sweet and spicy menu they were pushing. One of the items was a spicy lemonade. When I heard the commercial, I thought it said the lemonade was made with tahini. That was the only word in my vocabulary that even came close. So I pondered and I wondered and I thought. I don’t consider tahini spicy, but how on earth would that even go with lemonade? So I asked other people. And they hadn’t noticed the commercial and were also perplexed. I continued talking to other people, making the old broccoli ice cream joke about how lemonade and tahini are both good but you wouldn’t put them together,

and laughing and laughing because I thought I was so so funny. If you listened, you might have heard the sound of me digging myself a hole. Dig dig dig.

Here’s why. I thought the stuff in the lemonade was called Tahini. It is in fact called Tajín. You can see that this is not even close to tahini. *thump* Carin goes in the hole. Now all these people who watched me make dumb jokes either already think I’m a moron, or will as soon as they see what the name of the stuff actually is.

Hoping to redeem myself just a little bit, I asked Google, “are tahini and Tajín related?” This, or something similar, is what it said:

No, tahini and Tajín are not related. They are completely different foods from different parts of the world, and they only share a similar sound.
📌 The Main Differences
Feature
Tahini
Tajín

A creamy seed paste (like sesame butter)
A dry chili-lime seasoning powder…

Things have become a bit more generous since I googled this last time. At least now, the Google AI acknowledges their names share a similar sound because the j in Tajín is pronounced with an h and the i is pronounced with a long e. Back when I did it, it felt like the AI was just like “Nope. I don’t know what planet you’re on, stupidface. I can’t even imagine where you’re coming from at all.”

So yeah, I’ve learned something, and a bunch of people probably wish I knew stuff. Or maybe they learned something too, and we can feel silly together. I hope it’s that.

A Lot Of People Are Saying I Make The Best Mexican Food

I’m familiar with TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) and NACHO (Not A Chance Hormuz Opens) as food acronyms to describe Trump’s approach to policy. But apparently I’m behind the times, because I was unaware of two more that people have been using. One of the benefits of having no social media, perhaps. Anyway, they’re fun, and just complicated enough that I know I’m not going to remember them, so I’ll stick them here for my benefit and yours.

One of the clever ways to deal with the unprecedented and disruptive U.S. presidency of Donald Trump is to make up acronyms using Mexican foods.
This has given us TACO — Trump Always Chickens Out — to reflect the U.S. president’s tendency to escalate a situation before retreating once the economic and political costs become too heavy.

Then there was EMPANADA — Everybody Makes Promises And Nobody Actually Delivers Anything — used to describe countries making outrageous and unachievable trade promises in the hope of avoiding the worst of Trump’s tariffs.
More recently, NACHO — Not A Chance Hormuz Opens — was popular. The vital Strait of Hormuz did sort of reopen after Washington and Tehran signed an interim peace deal on June 17. But even that partial relief is now in question after Trump said on Wednesday that the MOU was “over,” reviving the risk that the waterway could again become a pressure point.
Perhaps the best Mexican food acronym for Trump is TAMALES, standing for Trump Always Messes Around, Leaves Everybody Shafted.

Please Stop Ruining Corn On The Cob For Everyone

There’s some internet wisdom I’ve heard over the years that says that when a headline contains a question, the answer to that question is almost always no. Quite often, it’s correct. But here’s one of those almosts I was talking about.
Is It Rude To Shuck Corn Before Buying? We Asked an Expert

This has to be a city people thing, because I never noticed anyone doing it until I grew up and had to start living in cities and buying my own groceries. But now that I’m here, I can’t count all the times that Carin or I has had to sometimes rather firmly protest to get whomever happens to be helping us to stop trying to husk our damn cobs! It’s bad enough when they’re purchased, but sometimes they’re not even our damn cobs yet! And you wouldn’t believe how many of them are completely taken aback by this, as if *we’re* the ones from another planet.

Corn on the cob is not that hard. If you want to inspect it first, just pick it up and lightly molest it. Does it feel firm and heavy? If yes, you’ve likely found a good one. Then you buy it, you bring it home, and when you’re ready, you husk it and put it in the pot. Note that I said when you’re ready, because that’s important. Removing your husks and then letting it sit is a fine way to make sure that you’ll be eating worse corn.

And of course husking in public is rude. First of all, husking corn can be messy as all hell, so you should be doing it outside or indoors in a place where you can clean up after yourself. It shouldn’t be left to the already overworked people at the store or the market. And what makes you think that it’s ok to do this in the first place? Would you unwrap a cut of meat and then put it back? Would you peel a bunch of bananas and then decide you’re not taking them? That’s the sort of thing that would get you thrown out of any decent store. So for that reason alone, just don’t.

We reached out to Rob Shenot, owner of Shenot’s Farm and Market, who shared that while his grandfather, who was, in Rob’s words, the original corn king of their farm, was very annoyed by customers doing this very thing, he understands that some customers want to inspect before they buy. So, what takes the action from understandable to rude? This shift happens if the customer doesn’t take the ears that they’ve opened. As Shenot notes, “We don’t know how often our customers scrub under their fingernails, and if you’re not a professional corn picker, there’s a good chance you’ll pop some kernels at the top of the ear.” This affects the quality of the corn, as “the husk is a great protector against bruised kernels that also preserves moisture in the ear.”
The note about quality and how husked corn’s quality goes down is an oft-repeated point when arguing against husking corn before buying. It is strongly recommended that corn should only be husked right before being cooked or eaten—this keeps the kernels sweet, bright, and moist. And if you shuck corn and don’t buy it, it will dry out rapidly, most likely get rejected by other shoppers, and become part of the staggering food waste stats.

If you want to see this in action, go to a store and instead of buying fresh, unhusked corn, grab a couple of those plastic trays full of mostly husked cobs. They’re almost always under-sized and tough, not to mention that half of them look like they’ve been through a war.