Robots, What Are You Up To?

 

Bots. Everywhere.

They're a bit like aphids, really. All over our roses. You squash them, they come back. You ignore them, they make more merry. Then one day they just vanish. But for why are they here infesting our gardens in the first place? Are we unwittingly in a symbiotic relationship with them? Just what are they up to?

I'm speaking of Bots, actually.  Some of whom/which have names: Like Jemaine and Brett, for inst. above, or Carmen, who outed herself/itself to me this week in an online "conversation" to do with matters financial. I do believe these are just geeks in foil-clad cardboard boxes operating out of the basement of Reynholm Industries.

But what about those robots that seem to poke around our blogs? Lumped in with the somewhat creepy category of spiders and crawlers [shudder ...] Frankly, you'd not notice them if it wasn't for the mysterious Visitor Count in the toolshed of Blogger. When the numbers start whirling frantically upwards or pulsing like Morse Code, mostly during the night, I know it's a fiction, for it's just you, Dear Reader, and me around these pages. 

But 2021 really was Year of the Bot for Flying With Hands. The odometer tripled last year!

I put my hand up to admit that a good 25% of the total so-called visitors are, ahem, moi, fiddling and tweaking things as is my wont. But I've deduced that around 65% has come from bots that visited last year from Indonesia, America, Sweden & Israel. 

My theory up until recently was that the blog was some kind of portal to enable the computing power of my laptop to be harnessed by the robots for the SETI programme. Naturally, they'd be wanting to reach out to Aliens in other worlds. I'm still rather wedded to that idea, and I'm all for it. But lately, I've had reason to think it's something else. 

A project for 2021 was to try to come to grips with the world of Cryptocurrencies, DeFi, NFTs and other whatnots [yes, yawn ...] You know, like, The Future. But it was so terribly tedious, for the aficionados are like Evangelists and do go on rather, and the lecturing and reading was long, boring and heavy on the technicalities, so I kept wandering off to do other things. 

As a consequence, before I really had time to come to grips with the whole shebang, the Crypto-World seemed to want to flush itself down the toilet! Oh, well. It hasn't been an entirely wasted exercise for along the way I think I've discovered what the bots are up to. It's not the SETI programme that my laptop is hooked into while I'm sleeping, it's Mining for Cryptocurrencies! 

The proof of this pudding, of course, is when Dogecoin and his friends went into a tailspin*, my blog's bots more or less vanished. And now the cryptocurrencies are bouncing back again in price, the bots are also creeping back ... Or are they still hunting for Aliens?

Such theory

Anyways, I can't summon up enough interest in The Future, so I've set these distractions aside and gone back to my comfort zone of The Past, for I've a patiently waiting copy of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina that requires reading before we go off to see it at the ballet in April!

* Past market performance is no indicator of future performance is even always the disclaimer for such fictional entities as these.

Image credits: 1: via Google; 2: Redbubble.com