Sunday 6 February 2022

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


14 comments:

  1. Fie on NFTs! They are the beanie babies of the day.
    I won't touch them.

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    Replies
    1. Dear Spo, never a truer word! The absurdness of such things defies all logic. If you cannot explain them to your parents then a bargepole needs inserting into the equation.

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  2. Some things seem to have their day and then vanish. Someone has a bright and shiny new idea and makes a million or so. Simultaneously, others lust for the bright and shiny and sometimes lose a million. Robots are looking better these days. See Boston Dynamics robots dance to 'Do You Love Me.' Go to Youtube.

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    1. Dear Susan, these robots are a teeny bit creepy! I feel a bit better about coping with the dog and the big bobbing bird but those fellows with the backpacks look like prototypes for Battlestar Galactica's Cylons, but I am green about their balancing act.

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  3. As an ex-Stock Exchange man, I always liked Groucho Marx's observation that 'A Stockbroker is someone who invests your money until it's all gone'. These days replace Stockbroker with Crypto-dealer.

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    1. Hahah!! I do like that truism, dear Cro. Tho' I hasten to add that when the stockbrokers of the world like to use the term Invest, they really mean Speculate.

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  4. MINE ARE ALL MEN MOSTLY ON INSTAGRAM.......I SPEND ABOUT TEN MINUTES A DAY DELETING THEM......EACH BOT TAKES THREE TAPS TO REMOVE THERE!IT's EXHAUSTING.........
    AS FAR AS THE BLOG ONLY SEX SITES SEEM TO VISIT.............THE LAST THING I SHOW IS CURVES AND ASS!!!!!!!MORE LIKE GREAY GAIR IS A COOMING AND THE SAGGING JOWLS!
    OH THE BALLET......THATS WHAT I NEED!!!
    JETE PADA BOUREE........ETC ETC.......THOSE WERE THE DAYS MY FRIEND!!!
    XXX

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    Replies
    1. Oh, dearest Contessa, how tiresome for you!!! Curiously, my blog's bots don't make their presence known beyond the visitor numbers going crazy, which was what made me speculate as to what their possible purpose could be. Yours sound like a proper aphid-style nuisance!

      Surely by now theatres are opening up near you? An outing to the ballet would be a marvellous tonic! xx

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    2. SORRY I DIDNOT PROOF READ BEFORE PUSHING THAT BUTTON!YIKES!!!
      PIANO PIANO PER ME as I have that LADY Windermere and cough already!
      I DO NOT WANT THE COVID COUGH!
      BEEN JABBED THREE TIMES SO YES IT MIGHT BE TIME........XXX

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    3. Oh, you are right to take it slowly. Besides, there is no easier way to raise the ire of fellow theatre-goers in these times than with a nagging cough!! Such unfortunates need to wear a placard hung from their necks saying It's Not Contagious!! xx

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  5. Dear Pip, wow, I am impressed by your explanation why those bots appear!
    For aphids I see a reason: one tit has to collect a bucket full of aphids PER DAY to feed its breed!
    While I still had my big garden I was looking for the ingenious Victorian tool to get rid of aphids (once glanced at it in a London Garden Museum): a sort of big tweezer with bristles like a toothbrush on both sides inside: you clip it around the stem of your poor rose and go upwards...
    I always wondered who made those strange comments on a blog - and when I looked at statistic split off to countries I wondered even more ... being a romantic person I saw a discontent soul trying to get some attention, hahaha.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I do often veer toward flights of fancy with my, ahem, theories, dear Britta but I hadn't seen your romantic angle with the foil-clad bots!! As to the Victorian ingenuity of aphid-pluckers, I daresay they were banished long ago by the Agro-Chemical industry who scorned such useful items as the over-engineering of a problem that could be solved by a few squirts of their patent concoction. Well, that's my theory, hahah!

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  6. Not the point, but, man, I loved Flight of the Conchords. Bret and Jemaine 4eva.

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    Replies
    1. Ah, a typo! Fixed it ... Yar, we still laugh merrily whenever we revisit them. Unbelievably funny show!

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