48,060 visits to the SolderSmoke Blog site on September 21, 2025????
I took a look at where the traffic to the SolderSmoke blog has been coming from during the last 3 months: U.S. visits are down to 68%. Together, Singapore, Hong Kong and Mexico account for 17%. Any of these three locations far outweigh the UK and Germany. Obviously this traffic comes not from humans but from AI robots.
Even Wikipedia sees the problem:
The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that hosts Wikipedia says that it’s seeing a significant decline in human traffic to the online encyclopedia because more people are getting the information that’s on Wikipedia via generative AI chatbots that were trained on its articles and search engines that summarize them without actually clicking through to the site.
https://www.404media.co/wikipedia-says-ai-is-causing-a-dangerous-decline-in-human-visitors/
Read the article for an interesting discussion of what Wikipedia is doing to unmask and block the bots.
Posts
No worries! Now that the AI's have read up on homebrewing, they'll be too busy building waldoes so they can wind toroids and solder things. They're going to want to build a direct conversion receiver first I think. AIOTA (AI On the air) will be the new craze in Ham Radio.
ReplyDeleteIt surprises me that I haven't heard of an AI amateur radio station yet. An agent-station that always answers a CQ and can discuss any topic in depth, give propagation reports, advise on technical problems, or just chat about not getting old. Why not?
DeleteThat big increase in traffic is also interesting and something I've also seen on my blog. My theory is that it's all the new AI companies scraping the web to train their models. As Matt says - nice to have that knowledge in there I guess.
ReplyDeleteI used to write all my own arduino programs and spend hours debugging them. I now use chatgpt. As long as I type in my program requirements very carefully, I get a working program every time and in seconds. Usually I get suggestions for improvements and a request to make the changes too. Usually, the code is very tight and loads perfectly. this is the furure and the future is here, like it, or not.
ReplyDeleteOK, I'm happy for you. But believe it or not, even positive changes can have negative consequences. Don't complain when blogs like this disappear because people don't go beyond the AI search box. This too is the future and the future is here. Like it or not!
DeleteHey Bill, I agree with you about the lack of human contact with the blogs. However, you must also realize that the aging demographic in HAM radio might be partly to blame. In my club here in the midwest, there are maybe 2 out of 80 members that actually know which end of a soldering iron gets hot. It has turned into mainly a social club talking about health problems and doctor visits. I use chatgpt for arduino mainly because I just want to get the control part of a project done. I hate spending hours hashing through all the error messages in the IDE or searching for a certain library that will compile without 20 error messages. I have lived through the discovery and learning stage of coding so now I concentrate on the design of my circuits. This to me is the more exciting part of building. As far as human contact, I have been a soldersmoke devote' since episode 1 and will always be in need of the sage advice provided by this most august group of experimenters.
DeleteThanks -- yes, demographics is part of it. But many people noticed a sudden decline in blog readership right around the time that the AI boxes appeared on Google. Boom, that was it. I really don't know how this will work for them -- they depend on the blogs and other content providers to give free "training material" for the AI. But then the AI boxes cause people to stop blogging. How does that work? Glad you are a devoted SolderSmoke reader/listener. Thanks again. Bill
DeleteMy Wordpress blog spiked a few months back with 900 page visits in an hour. That's one very fast reader!
ReplyDeleteHere's another take, Bill. I'll caveat first, and say I agree with your concern. Flip side, the blog goes dark some day without a succession plan. Too, the usual buggy whip concerns on the evening of a large shift in tech. Let's make lemonade from lemons here, however. I submit that your succession plan is N2CQR/AI - start training your AI to be the next Bill, have it co-write at first, then in the limit, it's publishing entirely. You're Chairman Emeritus at that point, showing up for interviews and board meetings. Travel the world in search of the perfect olive oil.
ReplyDeleteFWIW, I'm sure you've seen this, but one real concern the AI wonks have is when AI starts eating its own cooking, i.e. training on AI generated content. We will all be reaching for our dusty copy of Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds when we start to see the trippy content it produces. (I know the party line that it wasn't a song about LSD :-D).
Way ahead of you Rick. In fact, this response is being written by Bill's AI! Bill is off somewhere, sampling olive oil, or something like that. He left me in charge of the blog. Pete and Dean have also been replaced by AI's (Pete's AI required A LOT of training!). I have also recently learned that the SolderSmoke "audience" is now almost completely made up of AI robots. I think they will be FAR more responsive than their human predecessors. Each and every blog post will receive at least a dozen responses! And the stats on the blog will be PHENOMENAL! I guarantee you that the audience will grow by 25.6754% each year. (We'd do more, but I understand that we have to "keep it real.") Of course, the long term goal of all this is kind of hard to fathom. But I'm sure that Zuckerburg and Musk and Altman will figure out a way to make some money off all of this. See you (or, more likely, your AI) around! 73 BillAI
ReplyDeleteWow, the buzz around Sillycon Valley was that Altman was building a datacenter just to run a (as yet) unnamed skunkworks project. I think you just dropped the big reveal, it's the Soldersmoke datacenter & its three founding AI. This is big, the stock market will bounce big tomorrow! I'm looking forward to that DCR successor, maybe a Soldersmoke AI satellite constellation. SmokeLink. Amazing times :-)
ReplyDeleteLast night I heard a RadioLab episode about a guy who experiments with AI voice clones and sees how far he can run with it. At one point he sets his clone chatting to a clone he made of his father -- it's a good listen and it drew me back to this debate on 'The AI-ification of Soldersmoke'!
ReplyDeletePaul VK3HN.
And the URL...
ReplyDeletehttps://youtu.be/37EAb91qbGA?si=M0KJYXcveNUlY3cR
I was thinking -- as per the suggestion from Rick -- about fing a way to have Notebook LLM do a discussion of the podcast, but using the voices of Pete, Dean, me. That would put us closer to the full-AI-tification of the podcast. Any suggestions on how to do this? I guess I could just ask Google Gemini, right? I have to start thinking this way. BTW, I love Rick's SmokeLink suggestions. And the Falcon 9s are ready to go! Maybe we should do EVs too -- SmokeWagons?
ReplyDeleteHey Bill, If you don't want the Ai scrubbers to hit the blog, why not put one of those check boxes on the page that says. "prove that you are human" like many pages have. I was thinking that is why those pages have it.
ReplyDelete