This is BOO, a female Hawaiian Monk Seal, who I haven’t seen is quite some time. She had been resting in a pool at Upolu, but the tide was coming in. Eventually, she lumped her way out into the water, pausing in the frothy water by the rocks, before heading out to deeper water for a night of hunting no doubt.
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 210. Captions are on the photos. You can see more responses here.
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.
This week’s Sunday Stills challenge theme is ‘Things under Construction.’ See more responses here.
Last Friday, I had cause to visit the hospital in Hilo (Don’t worry, they say the leg will grow back!). The hospital is now called the the Hilo Benioff Medical Center. That’s because Marc Benioff, the CEO and co-founder of Salesforce, donated a chunk of the money to build the addition to the hospital seen in these photos. The addition will greatly expand the Intensive Care Unit and add additional hospital beds.
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 209. Captions are on the photos. You can see more responses here.
This is the smallest Whitemouth Moray Eel I’ve seen here. It was in a hole in the rock high up in the water so I could get quite close. I’ve taken a lot of eel photos over the years and I thought, even as I took these photos, it would be ironic if this little eel shot out and was the first one to bite me. Happily, it remained where it was, next to a Red Pencil Urchin, which gives a sense of scale.
This week’s Sunday Stills challenge theme is ‘Trees.’ See more responses here.
With their huge heads and big eyes, Giant Porcupinefish are unmistakable, but they always have a friendly look to them.
Graham's Island 