Tales from the jar side: Claude in the Spring, Plagiarism on YouTube, Upcoming milestone, and the usual silly tweets, toots, and skeets
What do you call a one-legged hippo? A hoppo! (rimshot) And if you don't like that joke, you're being hippo-critical (rimshot again) (both from @Dadsaysjokes on the evil birdsite)
Welcome, fellow jarheads, to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of December 3 - 10, 2023. This week I taught week 1 of my regular Spring and Spring Boot in 3 Weeks course on the O’Reilly Learning Platform and my regular Software Design course at Trinity College in Hartford, CT. I also published my video on accessing Claude AI in a Spring app.
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Claude AI video published
Last week I talked about how I accessed the Claude AI API using Java. This week I (finally) published the video version:
I asked my YouTube Summarize plugin in Chrome to have GPT-4 write a bullet-point summary of the video, and this is the result:
Ken Kousen introduces the Claude AI API as a simple way to integrate AI with Java, on his channel Tales from the Jar Side.
The Claude AI API, accessible via anthropic.com/earlyaccess, requires filling out a form for an API key, which includes details like email, organization, and intended use cases.
The API functions through RESTful web service and requires specific formatting for prompts, alternating between "Human:" and "Assistant:" labels.
Kousen demonstrates using the latest Spring and Spring Boot features to connect Java to the Claude API, highlighting the ease of creating a REST client and handling JSON data.
The process involves sending a simple JSON object request and receiving a concise JSON response, which Kousen showcases with examples in his video.
That’s about right. If you’re interested in the technical details, you can find them in the associated blog post, or just watch the video. Here’s the GitHub repository containing all the source code.
As a personal note, I really tried to use a different video tool for this one. I spent a few hours with the Descript tool, which has some very nice AI features, like studio sound and automatic shortening of word gaps. After about my fifth failure to get it to do what I wanted, I finally gave up and went back to my regular Screenflow process. Sigh. Eventually I’ll hire an editor to handle all that stuff and just focus on the content, but I’m not there yet.
The Viral Plagiarism Video
If you have any connection to YouTube at all, you probably encountered this viral video from the creator known as hbomberguy:
The video appeared only 7 days ago. It’s a whopping 3 hours and 51 minutes long, and the whole thing is simply captivating. I didn’t have time to watch it this week, and I certainly didn’t have time to watch it twice, and yet I wound up doing so. Apparently I’m not the only one, as it currently has over 8.3 million views.
According to his Patreon page, the name “hbomberguy” stands for Harris Bomberguy (whose last name is apparently Brewis), so there’s that. He’s a long-time YouTuber who is mostly active in the gaming space, which is not really an area I’m all that interested in. Occasionally, however, he does these magnificent take-down pieces on frauds and charlatans and he does a brilliant job of it. In this particular video, he absolutely destroys, with tons of evidence, at least three major video producers, the most notable of whom is James Somerton, who will most certainly never recover from this.
Here’s an online article that summarizes the situation pretty well as of a few days ago.
While all the plagiarists discussed in the video are blatant, Somerton combines arrogance, smugness, and a complete lack of shame in a dazzling combination. While he’s been dogged by accusations for years, he’s also famous for having a thin skin and setting his own followers to attack anyone who angers him. This guy reads entire book chapters as part of video scripts that give the illusion of his own work and thinks nothing of it.
My favorite image from the video is making the rounds:
On the left, you see an excerpt from a script by Somerton. On the right, you see a color-coded list of which sections of the script were lifted verbatim from which creators. To top it off, Harris admits these are only the stolen sections he was able to identify — it’s likely that the rest came from others as well.
None of the people on the right were given proper credit. When credit was given at all, it was only a list of people in the description, without saying what each did, and some of these people were left out entirely.
I’m only giving you the tip of the iceberg. This is as thorough a takedown of evil as I’ve ever seen, which is partly what makes it so appealing. Justice is most definitely being served, in a highly entertaining way. Frankly, this video is a masterclass in video making. Someday, and that day may never come, I hope to be able to produce something within two standard deviations of this quality. Wow.
Seriously, the whole video is worth watching. It’s well done while doing good work, a nice combination.
Personally, I’ve always been worried about plagiarism. Not that I’m afraid anybody will steal from me — if that’s ever happened, I’ve never heard about it, though I know there are many sites on the web that contain collections of technical books that include my own without paying any royalties. When I stumble across one, I dutifully forward the link to my publisher, who no doubt sends them a takedown notice. Honestly, though, the amount of money I make from any of my books is so small that they’re hardly worth stealing. I usually just imagine being glad somebody might actually be reading them, regardless of the money.
No, I worry a lot more that I’m stealing from others without giving proper credit. I mostly worry about that when I include jokes in this newsletter. People copy jokes from others all the time, which I know is hard on joke writers, but it’s very hard to resist, especially when you can’t tell where the original source might be.
Let me say this much:
The vast majority of jokes in my newsletter subtitles come from the twitter feed DadSaysJokes. Sometimes I give attribution, but mostly I haven’t done so.
The tweets, toots, and skeets section in each newsletter is mostly copied from their respective sources. I try to leave the overall source inside the copy, unless I suspect it’s just a retweeted image, at which point I just post the image.
I self-justify this by reminding myself I’m not claiming that any of that material is my own work, and that this newsletter is still free anyway so there’s no money involved. But I still worry about it. Let me know if you think I should be doing more.
One more thing: The essay doesn’t discuss the rise of AI tools for content generation until nearly the 3 1/2 hour mark, but it does eventually get there. As with most creators, the AI tools are viewed as plagiarism machines, but that’s a dicey question that we’ll all be struggling with in the future. I know having the AI Assistant inside JetBrain’s IntelliJ IDEA has helped me enormously, and GPT-4 is quite useful on many occasions. I’ve also made a lot of use of the DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion image generators (the thumbnail for my video above was created by DALL-E, for example). That toothpaste is not going back into the tube.
The irony I wonder about, though, is that if those tools had been available to Somerton, he probably would never be caught. He’d just take the scripts he was stealing, run them through an AI tool and ask it to reword them the way he wanted. Of course, the extraordinary levels of laziness Somerton demonstrated means he might not have bothered with that much. But it does make me wonder about the next generation of serial plagiarists.
Approaching Milestones
I just want to mention that while neither of these should matter, I enjoy round numbers as much as anybody. First, my Tales from the jar side YouTube channel currently has 968 subscribers, so I’m closing in on that magic 1000 number. I don’t think I’ll get 32 more before the end of the year, but that would be nice. Otherwise I’ll get there some time in January. That’s nowhere near enough to consider this a business, but it’s progress.
Second, this newsletter is approach a round number as well:
(See how Substack emphasizes that I have 1995 subscribers but that none of them are paid? Holy passive aggression, Batman!)
I’m about to cross the 2000 subscribers mark. Given that this is a company newsletter for a one-person company, I find that rather extraordinary. Thank you all for being here, even if I never get another sub. Writing this is a fair amount of work each week, but I really enjoy doing it. Plus I really enjoy having done it after it’s finished, which is a nice combination.
Tweets, Toots, Skeets, Etc
Tears
Ctrl-X means “cut” and he’s removing the onions from the grocery list. Get it? :)
The Brontë Sisters were giants (of literature)
The Brontë sisters were Anne, Emily, and Charlotte, in that order (according to Wikipedia). Somehow this post needed to include Anne, I think, but managing to get a dinosaur joke out of them was awesome.
Speaking of dangerous women
That most definitely needs a rimshot. 🥁
Conversationalist
That certainly would start a conversation.
Related
Good one. I need to find an opportunity to use that.
Venn Diagram
The central section is supposed to be reality, I guess, which is a bit scary.
Try it, it works
I want to see an AI tool come up with that.
Tis the season
Yes, but…
If your mansplaining lasts for more than four hours…
Where?
Finally, this one:
Have a great week, everybody!
The video version of this newsletter will be on the Tales from the jar side YouTube channel tomorrow.
Last week:
Week 1 of Spring and Spring Boot in 3 Weeks, updated for Spring Boot 3.2, on the O’Reilly Learning Platform
Software Design, my course for undergrads at Trinity College
This week:
Upgrade to Modern Java, an NFJS Virtual Workshop
Week 2 of Spring and Spring Boot in 3 Weeks, updated for Spring Boot 3.2, on the O’Reilly Learning Platform
Software Design, my course for undergrads at Trinity College. Final exam week! I’m doing a review on Monday and giving the final on Thursday/Friday.