Swallow Your AI Pill or Else
July 18, 2025
Just a dinobaby without smart software. I am sufficiently dull without help from smart software.
Annoyed at the next big thing? I find it amusing, but a fellow with the alias of “Honest Broker” (is that an oxymoron) sure seems to upset with smart software. Let me make clear my personal view of smart software; specifically, the outputs and the applications are a blend of the stupid, semi useful, and dangerous. My team and I have access smart software, some running locally on one of my work stations, and some running in the “it isn’t cheap is it” cloud.
The write up is titled “The Force-Feeding of AI on an Unwilling Public: This Isn’t Innovation. It’s Tyranny.” The author, it seems, is bristling at how 21st century capitalism works. News flash: It doesn’t work for anyone except the stakeholders. When the stakeholders are employees and the big outfit fires some stakeholders, awareness dawns. Work for a giant outfit and get to the top of the executive pile. Alternatively, become an expert in smart software and earn lots of money, not a crappy car like we used to give certain high performers. This is cash, folks.
The argument in the polemic is that outfits like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, et al, are forcing their customers to interact with systems infused with “artificial intelligence.” Here’s what the write up says:
“The AI business model would collapse overnight if they needed consumer opt-in. Just pass that law, and see how quickly the bots disappear. ”
My hunch is that the smart software companies lobbied to get the US government to slow walk regulation of smart software. Not long ago, wizards circulated a petition which suggested a moratorium on certain types of smart software development. Those who advocate peace don’t want smart software in weapons. (News flash: Check out how Ukraine is using smart software to terminate with extreme prejudice individual Z troops in a latrine. Yep, smart software and a bit of image recognition.)
Let me offer several observations:
- For most people technology is getting money from an automatic teller machine and using a mobile phone. Smart software is just sci-fi magic. Full stop.
- The companies investing big money in smart software have to make it “work” well enough to recover their investment and (hopefully) railroad freight cars filled with cash or big crypto transfers. To make something work, deception will be required. Full stop.
- The products and services infused with smart software will accelerate the degradation of software. Today’s smart software is a recycler. Feed it garbage; it outputs garbage. Maybe a phase change innovation will take place. So far, we have more examples of modest success or outright disappointment. From my point of view, core software is not made better with black box smart software. Someday, but today is not the day.
I like the zestiness of the cited write up. Here’s another news flash: The big outfits pumping billions into smart software are relentless. If laws worked, the EU and other governments would not be taking these companies to court with remarkable regularity. Laws don’t seem to work when US technology companies are “innovating.”
Have you ever wondered if the film Terminator was sent to the present day by aliens? Forget the pyramid stuff. Terminator is a film used by an advanced intelligence to warn us humanoids about the dangers of smart software.
The author of the screed about smart software has accomplished one thing. If smart software turns on humanoids, I can identify a person who will be a list for in-depth questioning.
I love smart software. I think the developers need some recognition for their good work. I believe the “leadership” of the big outfits investing billions are doing it for the good of humanity.
I also have a bridge in Brooklyn for sale… cheap. Oh, I would suggest that the analogy is similar to the medical device by which liquid is introduced into the user’s system typically to stimulate evacuation of the wallet.
Stephen E Arnold, July 18, 2025
Software Issue: No Big Deal. Move On
July 17, 2025
No smart software involved with this blog post. (An anomaly I know.)
The British have had some minor technical glitches in their storied history. The Comet? An airplane, right? The British postal service software? Let’s not talk about that. And now tennis. Jeeves, what’s going on? What, sir?
“British-Built Hawk-Eye Software Goes Dark During Wimbledon Match” continues this game where real life intersects with zeros and ones. (Yes, I know about Oxbridge excellence.) The write up points out:
Wimbledon blames human error for line-calling system malfunction.
Yes, a fall person. What was the problem with the unsinkable ship? Ah, yes. It seemed not to be unsinkable, sir.
The write up says:
Wimbledon’s new automated line-calling system glitched during a tennis match Sunday, just days after it replaced the tournament’s human line judges for the first time. The system, called Hawk-Eye, uses a network of cameras equipped with computer vision to track tennis balls in real-time. If the ball lands out, a pre-recorded voice loudly says, “Out.” If the ball is in, there’s no call and play continues. However, the software temporarily went dark during a women’s singles match between Brit Sonay Kartal and Russian Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova on Centre Court.
Software glitch. I experience them routinely. No big deal. Plus, the system came back online.
I would like to mention that these types of glitches when combined with the friskiness of smart software may produce some events which cannot be dismissed with “no big deal.” Let me offer three examples:
- Medical misdiagnoses related to potent cancer treatments
- Aircraft control systems
- Financial transaction in legitimate and illegitimate services.
Have the British cornered the market on software challenges? Nope.
That’s my concern. From Telegram’s “let our users do what they want” to contractors who are busy answering email, the consequences of indifferent engineering combined with minimally controlled smart software is likely to do more than fail during a tennis match.
Stephen E Arnold, July 17, 2025
Again Footnotes. Hello, AI.
July 17, 2025
No smart software involved with this blog post. (An anomaly I know.)
Footnotes. These are slippery fish in our online world. I am finishing work on my new monograph “The Telegram Labyrinth.” Due to the volatility of online citations, I am not using traditional footnotes, endnotes, or interlinear notes. Most of the information in the research comes from sources in the Russian Federation. We learned doing routine chapter updates each month that documents disappeared from the Web. Some were viewable if we used a virtual private network in a “friendly country” to the producer of the article. Others were just gone. Poof. We do capture images of pages when these puppies are first viewed.
My new monograph is intended for those who attend my lectures about Telegram Messenger-type platforms. My current approach is to just give it away to the law enforcement, cyber investigators, and lawyers who try to figure out money laundering and other digital scams. I will explain my approach in the accompany monograph. I will tell them, “It’s notes. You are on your own when probing the criminal world.” Good luck.
I read “Springer Nature Book on Machine Learning Is Full of Made-Up Citations.” Based on my recent writing effort, I think the problem of citing online resources is not just confined to my team’s experience. The flip side of online research is that some authors or content creation teams (to use today’s jargon) rely on smart software to help out.
The cited article says:
Based on a tip from a reader [of Mastering Machine Learning], we checked 18 of the 46 citations in the book. Two-thirds of them either did not exist or had substantial errors. And three researchers cited in the book confirmed the works they supposedly authored were fake or the citation contained substantial errors.
A version of this “problem” has appeared in the ethics department of Harvard University (where Jeffrey Epstein allegedly had an office), Stanford University, and assorted law firms. Just let smart software do the work and assume that its output is accurate.
It is not.
What’s the fix? Answer: There is none.
Publishers either lack the money to do their “work” or they have people who doom scroll in online meetings. Authors don’t care because one can “publish” anything as an Amazon book with mostly zero oversight. (This by the way is the approach and defense of the Pavel Durov-designed Telegram operation.) Motivated individuals can slap up a free post and publish a book in a series of standalone articles. Bear Blog, Substack, and similar outfits enable this approach. I think Yahoo has something similar, but, really, Yahoo?
I am going to stick with my approach. I will assume the reader knows everything we describe. I wonder what future researchers will think about the information voids appearing in unexpected places. If these researchers emulate what some authors are doing today, the future researchers will let AI do the work. No one will know the difference. If something online can’t be found it doesn’t exist.
Just make stuff up. Good enough.
Stephen E Arnold, July 17, 2025
Academics Lead and Student Follow: Is AI Far Behind?
July 16, 2025
Just a dinobaby without smart software. I am sufficiently dull without help from smart software.
I read “Positive Review Only: Researchers Hide AI Prompts in Papers.” Note: You may have to pay to read this write up.] Who knew that those writing objective, academic-type papers would cheat? I know that one ethics professor is probably okay with the idea. Plus, that Stanford University president is another one who would say, “Sounds good to me.”
The write up says:
Nikkei looked at English-language preprints — manuscripts that have yet to undergo formal peer review — on the academic research platform arXiv. It discovered such prompts in 17 articles, whose lead authors are affiliated with 14 institutions including Japan’s Waseda University, South Korea’s KAIST, China’s Peking University and the National University of Singapore, as well as the University of Washington and Columbia University in the U.S. Most of the papers involve the field of computer science.
Now I would like suggest that commercial database documents are curated and presumably less likely to contain made up information. I cannot. Peer reviewed papers also contain some slick moves; for example, a loose network of academic friends can cite one another’s papers to boost them in search results. Others like the Harvard ethics professor just write stuff and let it sail through the review process fabrications and whatever other confections were added to the alternative fact salads.
What US schools featured in this study? The University of Washington and Columbia University. I want to point out that the University of Washington has contributed to the Google brain trust; for example, Dr. Jeff Dean.
Several observations:
- Why should students pay attention to the “rules” of academic conduct when university professors ignore them?
- Have universities given up trying to enforce guidelines for appropriate academic behavior? On the other hand, perhaps these ArXiv behaviors are now the norm when grants may be in balance?
- Will wider use of smart software change the academics’ approach to scholarly work?
Perhaps one of these estimable institutions will respond to these questions?
Stephen E Arnold, July 16, 2025
AI Produces Human Clipboards
July 16, 2025
![Dino 5 18 25_thumb[3]](https://www.arnoldit.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Dino-5-18-25_thumb3-1.gif "Dino 5 18 25_thumb[3]")
No smart software involved with this blog post. (An anomaly I know.)
The upside and downside of AI seep from my newsfeed each day. More headlines want me to pay to view a story from Benzinga. Benzinga, a news release outfit. I installed Smartnews on one of my worthless mobile devices. Out of three stories, one was incoherent. No thanks, AI.
I spotted a write up in the Code by Tom blog titled “The Hidden Cost of AI Reliance.” It contained a quote to note; to wit:
“I’ve become a human clipboard.”
The write up includes useful references about the impact of smart software on some humans’ thinking skills. I urge you to read the original post.
I want to highlight three facets of the “AI problem” that Code by Tom sparked for me.
First, the idea that the smart software is just “there” and it is usually correct strikes me as a significant drawback for students. I think the impact in grade school and high school will be significant. No amount of Microsoft and OpenAI money to train educators about AI will ameliorate unthinking dependence of devices which just provide answers. The act of finding answers and verifying them are essential for many types of knowledge work. I am not convinced that today’s smart software which took decades to become the next big thing can do much more than output what has been fed into the neural predictive matrix mathy systems.
Second, the idea that teachers can somehow integrate smart software into reading, writing, and arithmetic is interesting. What happens if students do not use the smart software the way Microsoft or OpenAI’s educational effort advises. What then? Once certain cultural systems and norms are eroded, one cannot purchase a replacement at the Dollar Store. I think with the current AI systems, the United States speeds more quickly to a digital dark age. It took a long time to toward something resembling a non dark age.
Finally, I am not sure if over reliance is the correct way to express my view of AI. If one drives to work a certain way each day, the highway furniture just disappears. Change a billboard or the color of a big sign, and people notice. The more ubiquitous smart software becomes, the less aware many people will be that it has altered thought processes, abilities related to determine fact from fiction, and the ability to come up with a new idea. People, like the goldfish in a bowl of water, won’t know anything except the water and the blurred images outside the aquarium’s sides.
Tom, the coder, seems to be concerned. I do most tasks the old-fashioned way. I pay attention to smart software, but my experiences are limited. What I find is that it is more difficult now to find high quality information than at any other time in my professional career. I did a project years ago for the University of Michigan. The work concerned technical changes to move books off-campus and use the library space to create a coffee shop type atmosphere. I wrote a report, and I know that books and traditional research tools were not where the action was. My local Barnes & Noble bookstore sells toys and manga cartoons. The local library promotes downloading videos.
Smart software is a contributor to a general loss of interest in learning the hard way. I think smart software is a consequence of eroding intellectual capability, not a cause. Schools were turning out graduates who could not read or do math. What’s the fix? Create software to allow standards to be pushed aside. The idea is that if a student is smart, that student does not have to go to college. One young person told me that she was going to study something practical like plumbing.
Let me flip the argument.
Smart software is a factor, but I think the US educational system and the devaluation of certain ideas like learning to read, write, and “do” math manifest what people in the US want. Ease, convenience, time to doom scroll. We have, therefore, smart software. Every child will be, by definition, smart.
Will these future innovators and leaders know how to think about information in a critical way? The answer for the vast majority of US educated students, the answer will be, “Not really.”
Stephen E Arnold, July 16, 2025
An AI Wrapper May Resolve Some Problems with Smart Software
July 15, 2025
No smart software involved with this blog post. (An anomaly I know.)
For those with big bucks sunk in smart software chasing their tail around large language models, I learned about a clever adjustment — an adjustment that could pour some water on those burning black holes of cash.
A 36 page “paper” appeared on ArXiv on July 4, 2025 (Happy Birthday, America!). The original paper was “revised” and posted on July 8, 2025. You can read the July 8, 2025, version of “MemOS: A Memory OS for AI System” and monitor ArXiv for subsequent updates.
I recommend that AI enthusiasts download the paper and read it. Today content has a tendency to disappear or end up behind paywalls of one kind or another.
The authors of the paper come from outfits in China working on a wide range of smart software. These institutions explore smart waste water as well as autonomous kinetic command-and-control systems. Two organizations funding the “authors” of the research and the ArXiv write up are a start up called MemTensor (Shanghai) Technology Co. Ltd. The idea is to take good old Google tensor learnings and make them less stupid. The other outfit is the Research Institute of China Telecom. This entity is where interesting things like quantum communication and novel applications of ultra high frequencies are explored.
The MemOS is, based on my reading of the paper, is that MemOS adds a “layer” of knowledge functionality to large language models. The approach remembers the users’ or another system’s “knowledge process.” The idea is that instead of every prompt being a brand new sheet of paper, the LLM has a functional history or “digital notebook.” The entries in this notebook can be used to provide dynamic context for a user’s or another system’s query, prompt, or request. One application is “smart wireless” applications; another, context-aware kinetic devices.
I am not sure about some of the assertions in the write up; for example, performance gains, the benchmark results, and similar data points.
However, I think that the idea of a higher level of abstraction combined with enhanced memory of what the user or the system requests is interesting. The approach is similar to having an “old” AS/400 or whatever IBM calls these machines and interacting with them via a separate computing system is a good one. Request an output from the AS/400. Get the data from an I/O device the AS/400 supports. Interact with those data in the separate but “loosely coupled” computer. Then reverse the process and let the AS/400 do its thing with the input data on its own quite tricky workflow. Inefficient? You bet. Does it prevent the AS/400 from trashing its memory? Most of the time, it sure does.
The authors include a pastel graphic to make clear that the separation from the LLM is what I assume will be positioned as an original, unique, never-before-considered innovation:
Now does it work? In a laboratory, absolutely. At the Syracuse Parallel Processing Center, my colleagues presented a demonstration to Hillary Clinton. The search, text, video thing behaved like a trained tiger before that tiger attacked Roy in the Siegfried & Roy animal act in October 2003.
Are the data reproducible? Good question. It is, however, a time when fake data and synthetic government officials are posting videos and making telephone calls. Time will reveal the efficacy of the ‘breakthrough.”
Several observations:
- The purpose of the write up is a component of the China smart, US dumb marketing campaign
- The number of institutions involved, the presence of a Chinese start up, and the very big time Research Institute of China Telecom send the message that this AI expertise is diffused across numerous institutions
- The timing of the release of the paper is delicious: Happy Birthday, Uncle Sam.
Net net: Perhaps Meta should be hiring AI wizards from the Middle Kingdom?
Stephen E Arnold, July 15, 2025
Google Is Great. Its AI Is the Leader, Just As Philco Was
July 15, 2025
No smart software involved with this blog post. (An anomaly I know.)
The Google and its Code Red Yellow or whatever has to pull a revenue rabbit out of its ageing Stetson. (It is a big Stetson too.) Microsoft found a way to put Googzilla on its back paw in January 2023. Mr. Nadella announced a deal with OpenAI and ignited the Softies to put Copilot in everything, including the ASCII editor Notepad.
Google demonstrated a knee jerk reaction. Put Prabhakar in Paris to do a stand up about Google AI. Then Google reorganized its smart software activities… sort of. The wizards at Google has pushed out like a toothpaste tube crushed by a Stanford University computer science professor’s flip flops. Suffice it to say there are many Google AI products and services. I gave up trying to keep track of them months ago.
What’s happened? Old-school, Google searches are work now. Some sites have said that Google referral traffic is down a third or more.
What’s up?
“Google Faces Threat That Could Destroy Its Business” offers what I would characterize as a Wall Street MBA view of the present day Google. The write up says:
As the AI boom continues to transform the landscape of the tech world, a new type of user behavior has begun to gain popularity on the web. It’s called zero-click search, and it means a person searches for something and gets the answer they want without clicking a single link. There are several reasons for this, including the AI Overview section that Google has added to the top of many search result pages. This isn’t a bad thing, but what’s interesting is why Google is leaning into AI Overview in the first place: millions of people are opening ChatGPT instead of Google to search for the things they want to know.
The cited passage suggests that Google is embracing one-click search, essentially marginalizing the old-school list of links. Google has made this decision because of or in response to OpenAI. Lurking between the lines of the paragraph is the question, “What the heck is Google doing?”
On July 9, Reuters exclusively reported that OpenAI would soon launch its own web browser to challenge Google Chrome’s dominance.
This follows on OpenAI’s stating that it would like to buy the Chrome browser if the US government forces Google to sell is ubiquitous data collection interface with users. Start ups are building browsers. Perplexity is building browsers. The difference is that OpenAI and Perplexity will use AI as plumbing, not an add on. Chrome is built as a Web 1 and Web 2 service. OpenAI and Perplexity are likely to just go for Web 3 functionality.
What’s that look like? I am not sure, but it will not come from some code originally cooked up someplace like Denmark and refurbished many times to the ubiquitous product we have today.
My view is that Google is somewhat disorganized when it comes to smart software. As the company tries to revolutionize medicine, create smart maps, and build expensive self driving taxis — people are gravitating to ChatGPT which is now a brand like Kleenex or Xerox. Perplexity is a fan favorite at the moment as well. To add some spice to the search recipe, Anthropic and outfits like China Telecom are busy innovating.
What about Google? We are about to learn how a former blue chip consultant will give Google more smarts. Will that intelligence keep the money flowing and growing? Why be a Debbie Downer. Google is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Those legal actions are conspiracies fueled by jealous competitors. Those staff cutback? Just efficiencies. Those somewhat confusing AI products and services? Hey, you are just not sufficiently Googley to see the brilliance of Googzilla’s strategy.
Okay, I agree. Google is wonderful and the Wall Street MBA type analysis is wonky, probably written with help from Grok or Mistral. Google is and will be wonderful. You can search for examples too. Give Perplexity a try.
Stephen E Arnold, July 15, 2025
Killing Consulting: Knowledge Draculas Live Forever
July 14, 2025
No smart software involved with this blog post. (An anomaly I know.)
I read an opinion piece published in the Substack system. The article’s title is “The Consulting Crash Is Coming.” This title is in big letters. The write up delivers big news to people who probably did not work at large consulting companies; specifically, the blue chip outfits like McKinsey, Bain, BCG, Booz, Allen, and a handful of others.
The point of the write up is that large language models will put a stake in the consulting Draculas.
I want to offer several observations as a former full-time professional at one of the blue chip outfits and a contractor for a couple of other pay-for-knowledge services firms.
First, assume that Mr. Nocera is correct. Whatever consulting companies remain in business will have professionals with specific work processes developed by the blue chip consulting firms. Boards, directors, investors, non-governmental organizations, individual rich people, and institutions like government agencies and major academic institutions want access to the people and knowledge value of the blue chip consulting firms. A consulting company may become smaller, but the entity will adapt. Leaders of organizations in the sectors I identified will hire these firms. An AT Kearney-type of firm may be disappeared, but for the top tier, resiliency is part of the blue chip DNA.
Second, anyone familiar with Stuart Kauffman (Santa Fe Institute) is familiar with his notion of spontaneous order, adjacency, and innovations creating more innovations. As a result of this de facto inferno of novelty and change, smart people will want to hire other smart people in the hopes of learning something useful. One can ask a large language model or its new and improved versions. However, blue chip consulting firms and the people they attract usually come up with orthogonal ideas and questions. The knowledge exercise builds the client’s mental strength. That is what brings clients to the blue chip firm’s door.
Third, blue chip consulting firms can be useful proxies for [a] reorganizing a unit and removing a problematic officer, [b] figuring out what company to buy, how to chop it up, and sell of the parts for a profit, [c] thinking about clever ways to deploy new technology because the blue chip professionals have first hand expertise from many different companies and their work processes. Where did synthetic bacon bits originate? Answer: A blue chip consulting company. A food company just paid the firm to assemble a team to come up with a new product. Bingo. Big seller.
Fourth, hiring a blue chip consulting firm conveys prestige to some clients. Many senior executives suffer from imposter syndrome. Many are not sure what happened to generate so much cash and market impact. The blue chip firm delivers “colleagues” who function to reduce the senior executive’s anxiety. Those senior executives will pay. My boss challenged Jack Welch in a double or nothing bet worth millions in consulting fees regarding a specific report. Mr. Welch loved the challenge from a mere consulting firm. The bet was to deliver specific high value information. We did. Mr. Welch paid the bill for the report he didn’t like and the one that doubled the original fee. He said, “We will hire you guys again. You think the way I do.”
Net net: Bring on the LLMs, the AI, the smart back office workflows. The blue chip consulting firms may downsize; they may recalibrate; they will not go away. Like Draculas, they keep getting invited back, to suck fees, and probably live forever.
Stephen E Arnold, July 14, 2025
Deezer: Not Impressed with AI Tunes
July 14, 2025
Apparently, musical AI models have been flooding streaming services with their tracks. But ai music is the tune for the 21st century is it not? The main problem: these bots can divert payments that should have gone to human artists. Now, we learn from MSN, “Streaming Platform Deezer Starts Flagging AI-Generated Music.” The article, originally published at The Economic Times, states:
“Deezer said in January that it was receiving uploads of 10,000 AI tracks a day, doubling to over 20,000 in an April statement — or around 18% of all music added to the platform. The company ‘wants to make sure that royalties supposed to go to artists aren’t being taken away’ by tracks generated from a brief text prompt typed into a music generator like Suno or Udio, Lanternier said. AI tracks are not being removed from Deezer’s library, but instead are demonetised to avoid unfairly reducing human musicians’ royalties. Albums containing tracks suspected of being created in this way are now flagged with a notice reading ‘content generated by AI’, a move Deezer says is a global first for a streaming service.”
Probably a good thing. Will other, larger streaming services follow suit? Spotify, for one, is not yet ready to make that pledge. The streaming giant seems squeamish to wade into legal issues around the difference between AI- and human-created works. It also points to the lack of a “clear definition” for entirely AI-generated audio.
How does Deezer separate the human-made tunes from AI mimicry? We learn:
“Lanternier said Deezer’s home-grown detection tool was able to spot markers of AI provenance with 98% accuracy. ‘An audio signal is an extremely complex bundle of information. When AI algorithms generate a new song, there are little sounds that only they make which give them away… that we’re able to spot,’ he said. ‘It’s not audible to the human ear, but it’s visible in the audio signal.’"
Will bots find a way to eliminate such tell-tale artifacts? Will legislation ever catch up to reality? Will Big Streaming feel pressure to implement their own measures? This will be an interesting process to follow.
Cynthia Murrell, July 14, 2025
Just What You Want: Information about Footnotes
July 11, 2025
No smart software to write this essay. This dinobaby is somewhat old fashioned.
I am completing my 14th monograph. Some of these 150 page plus documents became books. Examples range from The Google Legacy, published in 2003 for a client and then as a public document in 2004 by Infonortics Ltd., a specialty publisher somewhere in England. Others were published by Panda Press in Sweden. Martin White and I published a book about enterprise search management, and I do not recall what outfit published the book. When I started writing texts to accompany my lectures for ISS Telestrategies, the US National Cyber Crime events, and other specialized conferences, I decided to generate Adobe PDF files and make these “books” available to those in my classes and lectures. Dark Web Notebook and CyberOSINT were “self published.” Why? The commercial specialty publishers were going out of business or did not have a way to market the books I wrote. I wrote a couple of monographs about Japan’s investments in database technology in the early 1990s for the US Office of Technology Assessment. But I have lost track of these “books.”
When I read “Give Footnotes the Boot,” I thought about how I had handled “notes” in my long form writings. For this blog which is a collection of “notes” to myself given the appearance of an essay, I usually cite an article. I then add my preliminary thoughts about the write up, usually including a couple of the source document’s “interesting” statements. The blog, therefore, is an online notebook with 20,000 plus entries written for an audience of one: Me.
I noted that the cited “footnote” article says:
If the footnote markers are links, then the user can use the back button/gesture to return to the main content. But, even though this restores the previous scroll position, the user is still left with the challenge of finding their previous place in a wall of text6. We could try to solve that problem by dynamically pulling the content from the footnotes and displaying it in a popover. In some browsers (including yours) that will display like a tooltip, pointing directly back to the footnote marker. Thanks to modern web features, this can be done entirely without JavaScript7. But this is still shit! I see good, smart people, who’d always avoid using “click here” as link text, littering their articles with link texts such as 1, 7, and sometimes even 12. Not only is this as contextless as “click here”, it also provides the extra frustration of a tiny-weeny hit target. Update: Adrian Roselli pointed out that there are numerous bugs with accessibility tooling and superscript. And all this for what? To cargo-cult academia? Stop it! Stop it now! Footnotes are a shitty hack built on the limitations of printed media. It’s dumb to build on top of those limitations when they don’t exist on the web platform. So I ask you to break free of footnotes and do something better.
The essay omits one option; that is, just write as if the information in the chapter, book, paragraph is common knowledge. The result is fewer footnotes.
I am giving this footnote free approach a try in the book I am working on to accompany my lectures about Telegram for law enforcement, cyber attorneys, and intelligence professionals. I know that most people do not know that a specific quote I include from Pavel Durov originated from a Russia language blog. However, citing the Russian blog, presenting the title of the blog post in Cyrillic, including the English translation, and adding comments like “no longer online” would be the appropriate way to let my reader know I did not make up Pavel’s statement about having more than 100 children.
I am assuming that every person on earth knows that Pavel thinks he is a super human and has the duty to spawn more Pavels.
How will this work out? My hunch is that my readers will use my Telegram Labyrinth monograph to get oriented to a service alleged to be a criminal enterprise by the French judiciary. If someone wants to know where one of my “facts” originates, I will go through my notes, including blog posts, for the link to the document I read. Will those sources be findable in 2025 when the book comes out? Probably not.
Online information is disappearing at an alarming rate. The search systems I use “disappear” content even though I have a PDF of the source document in my electronic file. Intermediaries go out of business or filters block access to content.
I like the ideas in Jake Archibald’s essay. I also like the academic rigor of footnotes. But for the Telegram Labyrinth, I am minimizing footnotes. I assume that every investigator, intelligence professional, and government lawyer will know about Telegram. Therefore, what’s in my new book is common knowledge. That means, “Sorry, Miss Dalton, Stevie is dumping 95 percent of the footnotes.” (I should footnote that Miss Dalton was one of my teachers who wanted footnotes in Modern Language Association style for everything single thing her students wrote.) Nope. Blame Web rot, blame my laziness, blame the wild social media environment.
You will live and probably have some of that Telegram common knowledge refreshed; for example, the Telegram programming language FIFT is like FORTH only better. Get the pun. The Durovs have a sense of humor.
Stephen E Arnold, July1, 2025
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