What's with these posts? (Spam?)

I noticed a two posts today which seem to follow a similar pattern: they're both a second level reply to some very old node. They're both written by an anonymonk, both (poorly) formatted in the same manner, ending with a name, an explicit email address and a website, although not in the form of a link. What is strange is that they're both moderately OT, indicating that considerable more thought and handcrafting is put in them than in spam generally is, OTOH none of them seems to suggest a trolling, flamebaiting behaviour. So is this supposed to be spam?

Comment on What's with these posts? (Spam?)

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Re: What's with these posts? (Spam?) by syphilis (Archbishop) on Apr 18, 2007 at 12:12 UTC
Not sure what's going on. Judging by the fact that Avner (the anonymonk in the second of the two posts) has today asked essentially the same question on perlmonks (in another separate sopw posting), c.l.p.misc, c.l.p.modules and the makemaker mailing list, I gather that request for help has been made in earnest. Cheers, Rob	[reply]
Re: What's with these posts? (Spam?) by roboticus (Chancellor) on Apr 18, 2007 at 12:05 UTC
blazar: Doesn't appear to be spam to me ... it looks more like a sig line... ...roboticus	[reply]
Re: What's with these posts? (Spam?) by herveus (Prior) on Apr 18, 2007 at 12:40 UTC
Howdy! The first one looks weird; the second has Perl content and appears (at a cursory glance) to bear on the topic. yours, Michael	[reply]
Re: What's with these posts? (Spam?) by hardburn (Abbot) on Apr 19, 2007 at 03:11 UTC
They both look something like what a markov generator would put out if the generator was fed text from the parent nodes. This seems to a be a common spammer technique these days. The second one, though, looks like there might be a human behind it. The usage of '-MTd' as a cmd param doesn't appear in the parent posts, though the DOS-style '/MTd' does. It would likely take a sophisticated natural language generator to be able to come up with that. As a side note, I believe it was tye who hypothesized that the first strong-AI will come out of the escalation between spammers and anti-spammers. "There is no shame in being self-taught, only in not trying to learn in the first place." -- Atrus, Myst: The Book of D'ni.	[reply]
Re^2: What's with these posts? (Spam?) by ambrus (Abbot) on Apr 19, 2007 at 06:55 UTC
As a side note, I believe it was tye who hypothesized that the first strong-AI will come out of the escalation between spammers and anti-spammers. He's right. The first true AI will be written as an anti-spam tool.	[reply]