Is the BBC publishing AI Slop on it’s website?

BBC Account of Bridge damaged once again.

Quote from BBC Account: “Network Rail said over-height vehicles crashed into the bridge over the Cambrian railway line despite numerous warning signs, causing more than 1,110 minutes of train delays and the A470 to temporarily close.”

Updated: 1st December 2025
Seems like my observation was correct, but…
What is a road bridge?
It’s a bridge carrying a road over an obstacle.
So Network Rail’s account is complete rubbish, and the BBC blindly copied the rubbish.

My original observation was of the photo shown, It is a RAILWAY BRIDGE, NOT A ROAD BRIDGE.
Slop, slop and more slop.

Below is Network Rails account of the latest incident.
Network Rail Media

AI – There’s also those that don’t know they don’t know.

Yes. Said by a Yorkshire man many years ago. The full quote is:
There’s those that know, and there’s those that don’t know, There’s also those that don’t know, they don’t know.
The stifling effects of industrialisation on humankind are already known. Individualism in the design of clothes, carpets, curtains etc., has virtually disappeared, with the exception of those resourceful folks which chop up rags, and create original pieces of their own design.
The same can be said for almost every utensil, or machine we make use of.
The BBC recently published an article on AI chatbots Sadly they did not publish a link on their post to the study itself. I found that using a search it is here.

It’s interesting where a study of some other’s work takes you, especially when the BBC itself employs folk who simply repeat what they have read from an unreliable source, such as boasts by a company regarding a motionless wind generation system.

One such item I followed was regarding the recommendation of vaping to give up smoking. Again, the report does not provide a link to the source. So I checked the NHS website on giving up smoking. This makes grim reading. The three options ‘recommended’ are all chemical options. The NHS comments giving up is difficult: Many people try to quit with willpower alone, but going cold turkey can be tough.
That apparently is the help you get for a non-chemical approach. This is nothing short of appalling. No wonder AI chatbots get it wrong.

I gave up in 1986. After smoking from the age of 12. I’m 78. I’ll leave you to do the arithmetic.
I had a friend, who had been a smoker, but was then a member of ASH – Action on smoking and health. He advised me, and informed me about both the good things that would happen and the bad. He warned me about ‘transferring’ my addiction to alcohol or food. He also informed me of more colds, and personal plumbing failures.
It was bad, very bad at times, but ‘situation normal’ was eventually resumed. I’ve never smoked a cigarette since.
On the NHS site the chemical ‘solutions’ are presented first. Only later are you invited to contact your ‘local’ Stop Smoking Service – everyone has one, don’t you know.. Significantly ASH are never mentioned. Their summary on vaping is interesting.

My advice on giving up is simple. Don’t transfer your addiction by consuming nicotine by other means. Talk to those who have given up by ‘cold turkey’. Enjoy the extra spending in your wallet.

The Scraped Crap Leading The Blind

Take a look at this: Crisp packet gun
Yes, there will be more. It ain’t intelligent – it’s a bag of shit. What is intelligent about relying on an image recognition system that can’t distinguish the difference between a gun and a packet of crisps?

The idiots that mandate installion of this crap, should be penalised heavily. Saying ‘Sorry’ should be a million dollar fine.

BBC – Internet failure that didn’t really happen

Once again the BBC’s ‘Timely, trusted tech news‘ is neither timely, nor can be trusted.
Yup. The Y2K ‘failure’ didn’t happen on the scale predicted Thomas Germain, so why even mention it?
The reason it didn’t happen, was because tens of thousands of software engineers such as myself, fixed code, so that it wouldn’t happen – something the BBC article studiously leaves out. That some companies, and indeed some authorities ignored what they had been told accounted for several failures.
Apparently Thomas regards train delays and misprinted jury summons as ‘trivial’ – that is only his point of view.

Wickipedia gives a reasonably accurate account of the reason why remediation was required. Year 2000 Problem
It also lists a considerable number of ‘falures’ where the problem hadn’t been fixed. An example:
In New York, a video store accidentally generated a $91,250 late fee because the store computer determined a tape rental was 100 years overdue.’ – It doesn’t mention whether the tape renter had a heart attack when he was given the bill.
The BBC article: Internet Outages

AI – The madness continues

Jerry Kaplan, an early entrepreneur in AI has recently commented:
“We’re creating a new man-made ecological disaster: enormous data centres in remote places like deserts, that will be rusting away and leaching bad things into the environment, with no one left to hold accountable because the builders and investors will be long gone”

A post on BBC.com gives an account comparing the ‘bubble’ of investment now, with the hype and swipe of the dotcom.bubble.
There is one particular statement made by Jeff Boudier, who builds products at the AI community hub Hugging Face, made me laugh at its’ absurdity.
“The thing that comforts me is that the internet was built on the ashes of the over-investment into the telecom infrastructure of yesterday,”
The ‘Internet’ Mr Boudier, was built on the back of military spending, primarily by the US government on it’s ARPANET project. The ‘ashes’ you refer to are the ashes of the dreams of greedy investors in a bubble.

But I’m guessing your ‘comfort’ is an attempt to soothe concerns for investors in your company.
In a separate post I relate my experience with ChatGPT, simply a lazy way of accessing scraped items from other folks postings on the web. ‘Comfort’ is not the word I would use for idiotic crap ‘counselling’ worrying young folks about their personal relationships.
BBC post: A Tangled Web Of Dreams
My post regarding ChatGPT: Advice to young people

AI chips communicate faster than the speed of light?

A recent post by the BBC regarding AI Data Centres What’s the big deal about AI data centres? by Michael Dempsey Technology Reporter, asks the following important question:

Why is proximity so important?
Every metre of distance between two chips adds a nanosecond, one billionth of a second, to the processing time.

Really?

The definition of the speed of light is: 299,792,458 metres per second.

So light can travel 0.299792458 metres in 1 nanosecond.
A rough multiplication shows that it takes approximately 3 nanoseconds for light to travel 1 metre.

Information cannot be conveyed at a speed faster than that of light.

On first principles then, the article is incorrect.
I could go on regarding inter-chip comms, but won’t.

Footnote. I investigated into making a comment on the article to the BBC, but was faced with spending time giving details, that I considered were not important, and I simply gave up. No, they didn’t ask what colour toilet paper I use..

‘Motionless Wind Energy’ ? BBC Have you lost the plot?

Read this: Motionless Wind Energy

Now unpick the article: ‘It features wing-like vertical aerofoils that create a vacuum effect, drawing air behind an internal propeller’.

Hmmm. A ‘propeller’. Let’s look at that..
All of the definitions I’ve looked at convey a sense that a ‘propeller’ does just that, propels water or some gas, usually air. The propeller is the delivery system from a source of energy, NOT as is implied in the article, a ‘receiver’ of energy, in this case wind.
The word Galya Dimitrova is ‘TURBINE’.

Moving on to ‘motionless’. The article is a monumental bag of crap. Just because the ‘propeller’ is hidden, doesn’t justify it as motionless.

Thank you, and good night BBC.

Free Speech or Me Speech?

Some considerable time ago I wrote on a Facebook post, about effective blackmail of politicians because of their behaviour whilst still at ‘Public School’. I used an epithet that apparently didn’t pass Facebooks ‘standards’, and the post never made it. I was accused both by them, and by someone else, who should know me better, of being ‘homophobic’. Quite clearly they were unable to distinguish illegal sex with a minor from sex between two same-sexed adults.
Later, the performance whilst on Facebook was appallingly slow, as every word I typed was being monitored. I ditched Facebook, and I no longer use ‘social media’, which has become distinctly ‘anti-social’.

The rich and powerful are free to spout their nonsense, whilst condemning others that oppose their views.
This morning I read a post on BBC News by Nick Robinson. His article references the US Historian Tim Snyder’s views regarding ‘the direction America is heading under Trump’, and I quote:

The US historian Tim Snyder, who is an outspoken public critic of the direction America is heading under Trump believes that free speech should be distinguished from what he calls "me speech".
"Me speech is a common practice among rich and influential Americans," writes Mr Snyder. "Practitioners of 'me speech' use the phrase 'free speech' quite a bit. But what they mean is free speech for themselves. They want a monopoly on it.
They believe that they are right about everything, and so they should always have giant platforms, in real life or on social media.
The people with whom they disagree, however, should be called out and intimidated in an organised way on social media, or subjected to algorithmic discrimination so that their voices are not heard."

Read the full article here

Faded Pictures

Yes, I have several prints I had purchased circa 1986, which have since faded to the point of misery. Each pic I bought was with cash I didn’t spend on roll-your-own tobacco.
I started smoking at age 12, add that to my birthday, and that would be 1959. So, totalling up I smoked for 27 years, and haven’t for 39 years.

Despite both personal and physical problem which I’ve had since the ‘puffing’ ended, I believe I’m in better shape that the prints I bought when I quit.

Some time ago, one English guy commented on how well-preserved I was. I had replied “You haven’t seen my picture in the attic.” He laughed. If he saw the photo of myself, taken some time ago, he would understand fully my reference to Oscar Wilde’s brilliant ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray.”
No, I didn’t sell my ‘soul’ to the Devil – that was stolen from me some time ago, when I began to understand what ‘God’ had created as men – A likeness of himself? An incredibly awful aberration?

So, time to remove the faded pics, and replace with more images of loveliness. Hopefully I don’t live long enough to see them also fade away to almost nothing once again.

Like the pics, other ‘favourites’ have also faded. One photo that hasn’t, is of my 4th Form taken when at Elgin Sec. Tech School in Gateshead. This has too many ‘ticks’ pencilled on it for those who have ‘moved on’.

Recently a trawl on the web, revealed a good friend who had unknowingly played an important part in carving out my future. Sadly, I was unaware of his demise, until a year too late.

Arsehole billionaires trump on about ‘living forever’. Who, in their right mind would want to experience the non-stop fading of photos, and the passing away of friends and lovers?

The band Queen recorded one song that encapsulates my feelings precisely. Written by Brian May, it is probably the best Queen ever did and featured in the movie ‘Highlander’, another allegorical tale of the world being dominated by one man.


There's no time for us.
There's no place for us.
What is this thing that builds our dreams
Yet tips 'em 'way from us?

Who wants to live forever?
Who wants to live forever?

There's no chance for us
It's all decided for us
This world has only one sweet moment
Set aside for us

Who wants to live forever?
Who wants to live forever?
Who?

Who dares to love forever?
When love must die

But touch my tears with your lips
Touch my world with your fingertips
And we can have forever
And we can love forever
Forever is our today

Who wants to live forever?
Who wants to live forever?
Forever is our today
Who waits forever anyway?