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DamnInterestingon CNET Has Been Quietly Publishing AI-Written Articles for Months

Simon Whistler is a parasitic knob. I own and operate a website where I have been researching and writing original non-fiction content for almost 20 years, and Simon used to do paid voice work for me, narrating my writings for podcasts and audio books. Everything seemed to be on the up-and-up, but one day I discovered that he had quietly started making videos for a site that was systematically borderline plagiarizing my writings. Then he started multiple other YouTube channels where he covered the same topics he had recorded for my site, often with striking similarities.

To date there are well over 100 of his videos that appear to be "inspired" by my content. For example:

Me, 2008: https://www.damninteresting.com/the-third-reichs-diabolical-... Simon, 2021: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mP4RQ783lk

Me, 2005: https://www.damninteresting.com/the-man-who-was-a-dwarf-and-... Simon, 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpdMolMlDzw

The list goes on and on. I've been writing online long enough that I've been poached and plagiarized six ways from Sunday, but no one else has come close to leeching so long and systematically as this unoriginal, abject freeloader. Simon Whistler is downright seaward.

DamnInterestingon ‘That girl is going to get herself killed’ (2022)

I once worked maintenance at a department store, and one of my main responsibilities was electrical repairs (despite lack of formal training). The lighting circuits were all commercial 277 volts. A fluorescent light appeared to be burned out, but as I was changing it, I learned that it was actually a wiring issue when I was installing the new tube atop a 12 foot ladder. My knuckle grazed the fixture and I lit up like a Christmas tree. The resulting reflex caused me to crush the fluorescent tube, but somehow I managed to not fall. Oh, hello death, I acknowledge the brush.

DamnInterestingon Ask HN: Share your personal site

https://www.damninteresting.com/

A WordPress-based site I established way back in 2005. It's all non-fiction stories from history and science, plus I curate links to other interesting content.

DamnInterestingon Ask HN: What sub $200 product improved your 2022

Yes, it's essentially a miniature convection oven. It cuts down a lot on preheating time. Life is short. It is also quite easy to clean.

edit: Also, I should point out that the "basket" form factor of the air fryer is helpful. In the convection oven things tend to lie flay on a sheet, and cooking is less even. Granted, I could put a basket-like container in the convection oven, but it would still be much slower to heat.

DamnInterestingon Ask HN: What sub $200 product improved your 2022

There are lots of options, but the ones I finally landed on were these:

For my desktop: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09224KKPV

For behind my desk (which doubles as a recording space, so the disorganized cables bugged me): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B014BMTQ34

I also used a lot of Velcro cable ties, and this monster of a power strip which fits inside the behind-desk box: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B099NB3TTY

DamnInterestingon Ask HN: What sub $200 product improved your 2022

I disagree. I cook with a fairly wide range of techniques (e.g., sous vide, convection oven, slow cooker, smoker, pressure cooker), and my recently acquired air fryer has been a pleasant surprise. I was skeptical, but happy to be proven wrong. It is fast, versatile, and the results are often outstanding. It is great for things like fries, reheating frozen food, and fish. It is easily the best pizza reheating device I have yet encountered.

DamnInterestingon Ask HN: What sub $200 product improved your 2022

I'm surprised by how many things mentioned here are things that improved my own 2022 (air fryer, Steamdeck, bone-conducting headphones, etc.)

A couple of things that I haven't yet seen mentioned:

A LifeStraw Home water filter. It removes the slightly metallic taste from my home tap water.

Cable management boxes (multiple brands). These allow me to hide away the unsightly power strips, power bricks, hubs, excess cords, etc, and make my desk/office much more organized.

DamnInterestingon JFK Assassination Records – 2022 Additional Documents Release

Just a reminder that someone claiming to be the nephew of an "associate" of a historical figure, with extraordinary claims and zero evidence, is not a very good source.

DamnInterestingon Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?

i just told this story earlier today on HN! It's something I did just in the past few days, but it is quite satisfying.

My site has recently been the target of some extremely aggressive "card testers" (criminals who have huge lists of stolen credit cards; they use bots to stuff small donations into donation forms to test which cards are still working). At first I just blocked the offending IPs, but they kept finding new IPs, creating a lot of annoying work for me. So I pivoted--instead of blocking their IPs, I started feeding them randomly generated false responses with a statistically accurate "success" rate. They are trying to build a list of working cards, and getting absolute garbage results.

It is still ongoing, but so far they have run ~50k card tests in over a week, and 99.9% of the data they have collected from us looks legit, but it is totally bogus. It pleases me to know that I am polluting their data, and ultimately wasting a lot of their time and effort. Consume excrement, evil-doers!

DamnInterestingon Ask HN: Someone is proxy-mirroring my website, can I do anything?

> pure IP blocks are easier to detect than tarpitting and returning fake/corrupted content

I recently had to employ such a strategy against some extremely aggressive card testers (criminals with lists of stolen credit cards who automate stuffing card info into a donation form to test which cards are still working). Instead of blocking their IPs, I started feeding them randomly generated false responses with a statistically accurate "success" rate. They ran tens of thousands of card tests over many days, and 99% of the data they collected was bogus. It amuses me to know that I polluted their data and wasted so much of their time and effort. Jerks.

DamnInterestingon Ask HN: Are things getting more convenient but less satisfying?

> We've made things convenient with engineering, but they often suck in comparison to older technology.

Well, one does want one's vacuum to suck.

DamnInterestingon The Exceptionally American Problem of Rising Roadway Deaths

Likewise anecdotal: At least in the area where I live (Salt Lake City, Utah, USA), there seems to be a sharp rise in drivers who tailgate dangerously close on the freeway, especially in the carpool lane. I can be going 9+mph over the limit, and cars will still come flying up from behind, follow dangerously close for a few minutes, then illegally pass over the solid double white line so they can proceed 2-3 mph faster. And the drivers look so pissed off. Like it was a major insult that they were temporarily forced to drive slightly slower than their preferred speed. Yikes, people. Check your priorities.

DamnInterestingon The tragic birth of FM radio (2006)

For Damn Interesting (the site where this article originated), our approach is to offer our catalog as a DRM-free eBook, downloadable as a reward for certain donations (we are ad-free and user-supported). As a consequence, there are theoretically thousands of copies of this article (and our others) on our readers’ devices.

DamnInterestingon The tragic birth of FM radio (2006)

This article was written by a friend of mine, he passed away unexpectedly back in 2011. It's a shame, he was a swell fellow and had so many more stories to tell. We miss him.

DamnInterestingon You Might Also Like

If this is the direction Apple takes, I will be leaving their ecosystem. My attention is finite, and advertising is attention theft.

DamnInterestingon Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health

I do not care for this trend of omitting the publication date from news articles. Temporal context is very relevant in news articles, especially to assess whether the information has been superseded.

(I know, one can often find the publication date in the HTML source, but that requires savvy, and should not be necessary.)

DamnInterestingon Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2022 – Show and tell

It kind of depends on what one means by 'making $500/month'. I operate damninteresting.com, and we receive a bit over $1600/month in donations. But a lot of that is used to pay authors for new submissions, pay editors, pay podcast narrators, pay residuals, pay for subscriptions to archives, pay for hosting fees, etc. As the founder my personal per-month profit is in the neighborhood of $600/month.

DamnInterestingon So you want to be a writer?

> Apparently Douglas Adams found it very difficult to write. According to the biography by Neil Gaiman it was almost painful for him, every book or manuscript a chore.

As an author of many years and thousands of pages, I can relate to this. There is an oft misattributed quote on the matter, "I hate to write, but I love having written." In my case "hate" is too strong a verb, I merely find it exhausting. And yet somehow I wish I had more time to do it.

DamnInterestingon With Koe Recast, you can change your voice as easily as your clothing

As a person who does voice work, this is both exciting and worrying. I love the idea of convincingly altering my voice for certain things, such as quotations, but this kind of tech also greatly lowers the barrier to entry in the spoken word profession.

Coincidentally I also do a lot of work in illustration, and AI is likewise encroaching on my work in that space. How expensive is plumber school?

DamnInterestingon To Hell with Facebook (2021)

Hello! I am Alan, owner of Damn Interesting. We have never actually shut the site down, nor announced intention to do so. There was a long hiatus while I ended a bad marriage and reassembled my life. And on another occasion we announced that we were going to pump the brakes on our exhausting posting schedule to stave off burnout. But we never quit, and have no plans to do so.

I understand your skepticism regarding the premise of the article, but Facebook truly took over as the way people kept track of sites like ours. When Facebook introduced the "boosting" mechanism, and we didn't opt to pay them to regain access to our audience, our traffic tanked almost overnight. We were not the only content creators to notice this phenomenon[1].

[1]: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people

DamnInterestingon We're improving search results when you use quotes

> Next, invest in recency + relevancy over just page reputation.

Counterpoint: Google already gives priority to recency, and it heavily rewards "flip shop" sites that essentially plagiarize existing content. The original researchers/authors who did the leg work get buried in lazy rewrites.

DamnInterestingon Max Headroom is getting rebooted

Oof, the allthatsinteresting.com writeup (2021) is awfully similar to my telling of the incident (2007)[1]. Emphasis on awful. There are too many lazy "authors" out there willing to flirt with plagiarism in the name of generating content. And then Google rewards them for having newer content. Sigh.

[1] https://www.damninteresting.com/remember-remember-the-22nd-o...

DamnInterestingon You have a sad feeling for a moment, then it passes

This sounds like the name of a SpaceX droneship (in a good way).

DamnInterestingon HN is up again

A refreshing take!

DamnInterestingon Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)

Google also prioritizes what is new over what is original. This rewards the lazy borderline plagiarism copycats, resulting in perpetual soulless regurgitation of content.

DamnInterestingon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2022)

Wow, this sounds like it was custom-made for me. I am a PHP full stack dev accustomed to maintaining and improving legacy codebases in the education space, and I have a strong preference for a remote, part-time position. I am definitely going to apply, thanks for the link!

DamnInterestingon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (June 2022)

I'm a full-stack web developer/designer in the business for 20+ years. I just wrapped up a project for TED (of TED Talks fame) and I'm looking for an interesting new opportunity.

Location: Salt Lake City, UT, USA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: PHP, Python, Javascript, HTML/CSS, Design

Résumé/CV: https://alanbellows.com

Email: alan@damninteresting.com

DamnInterestingon Ask HN: What game do you wish existed?

A modern take on the game Freedom Fighters. It was the only single-player game I've played that convincingly felt like playing with a team. A modern version might let real players optionally jump in to fill the support roles.

DamnInterestingon I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

I built my first site in ~1997, and my primary email address is still webmaster@. Nevertheless, I do feel that these early-Internet nostalgia posts mostly forget how crappy many webpages were back in the day. Blinking text, marquees, animated gifs, frames, inline fonts, ActiveX, "Best viewed in Internet Explorer 3", popup windows, tables for layout, terrible search, etc. Today's sites are often bloated, but those of the past had their own issues.

For me personally, the appeal of the web back then was not that it was good, rather it was new.

DamnInterestingon That time Sony installed rootkit software on thousands of computers [video]

Months ago I spoke to an IP consultant who had previously helped me when another writer plagiarized my work; the consultant felt this YouTuber's behavior is not actionable, just scummy and shameless. And the YouTube terms of service don't seem to prohibit this sort of parasitism.