A Whitetip Reef Shark resting under a ledge off the black sand beach at Mauna Lani.
When I saw this scene, I thought the dark shape in front of the shark was a diver taking photos. It wasn’t until I got home, and examined the photo closely, that I realized it was just a rock!
A small Spotted Coral Blenny peeks out from a head of coral.
This week’s Sunday Stills color challenge is ‘Ocher, saffron (yellow hues), plus burnt orange.’ See more responses here.
The idea of The Numbers Game is to enter a number into the search bar of your computer and then post a selection of the photos that turn up. This week’s number is 211. Captions are on the photos. You can see more responses here.
A bee forages on ’Ulei flowers. ’Ulei, also known as Hawaiian Hawthorn, is an indigenous shrub that grows in a variety of habitats. I saw this one hiking on the Kau Desert Trail in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.
Yellow Tangs feed on algae growing on a submerged block.
I took this photo when I saw what looked to me like a couple of brains resting on this sandy bottom. In fact they’re the castings of a Yellow Acorn Worm. These worms live under the sand and filter it to extract organic matter. The mounds are what’s left after this process.
I’m not likely to ever see, let alone photograph, an acorn worm. If they are dug up, the mass of sand inside them often causes their thin-walled bodies to burst!
This weekend, when I logged into my WordPress account, I was startled to see that my blog views had skyrocketed overnight. My usual numbers are anywhere from 50 to 150. On Saturday I logged 27, 768.
This wasn’t due to the fantastic post that day because, despite all those views, the number of likes and comments was distinctly average. The number of visitors was only marginally higher. Since this post is number 3,538, that meant a few people had looked at every single post on this site at least six times, on the same day!
There is a simple answer of course. My blog has not been visited by people, suddenly interested in life on the Big Island. It’s been scoured by AI scrapers, which harvest information, copyrighted or not, for training the various AI models. This is nothing new. Tech companies have been gathering data from everyone on the web for years. AI training is just a boost in the scale of this behavior. But rest assured, it’s all for our benefit. It’s so that those AI models will be able to help us out even better than they do now. And because it’s for our benefit, we shouldn’t even think about asking the tech companies to pay for our work harvested in this way.
Now, like most of us, I haven’t read the multi-page terms of use of these companies. However, I strongly suspect that if I was to use any tech company’s copyrighted material for my use, without paying for it, I would soon be visited by their legal department, and treated the way a lame chicken is treated by a pack of hungry wolves.
Food for thought.
Posted for Bushboy’s Last on the Card. See more here.
