Ah, the magical fruit.

200 years ago naturalists were still stealing human bodies from fresh graves to try to learn something about anatomy and causes of death, because Christians believed that dissecting the body would prevent the deceased from being resurrected when Christ returned to Earth. And they were still debating the germ theory of disease.

By the time of the American Civil War (1861-1865) there was enough understanding of infections that field doctors knew they needed to remove damaged limbs to prevent disease from spreading through the body, which led to amputation being the most common surgical procedure performed during the war:

Over the course of the Civil War, three out of four surgeries (or close to 60,000 operations) were amputations.

…because they knew the infection would spread but they didn’t have any method for stopping it short of hacking off the entire limb as cleanly as possible.

It just… it hasn’t been that long that we’ve had anything that you would consider actual medical practice.

The discovery of penicillin would not happen until 1928, and useful cultivation and production would not happen until 1939. Anytime earlier than that you’ll have really high odds of dying from an infection acquired through what we would consider a common, simple injury.

So… best of luck with that.

In other news, water is wet.

“…it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization”

~ not Gaius Petronius Arbiter

“We have investigated ourselves and found no problem.”

This is an increasing problem and I’m not sure how the open source community is going to deal with it. It’s been a big problem with NPM packages and also Python libraries over the past five years. There’s a bunch of malicious typo-squatting stuff in many package repositories (say you want libcurl but you type libcrul, congratulations it’s probably there and it’ll probably install libcurl for you and bring a fun friend along).

Now with AI slop code getting submitted, it’s not really possible to check every new package upload. And who’s going to volunteer for that work?

an incredibly detailed understanding of ocean currents.

So that we can watch them fall apart.

grass-fed long pig

Linux is now perfectly valid for a gaming pc

And all it took was a corporation throwing millions of dollars and thousands of developer hours at it.

vegetarians, probably

Someday soon an AI company will win a court case where they argue that their LLM is an expression of their free speech rights per Citizens United and is therefore legally allowed to say whatever it wants and in fact has the same rights to freedom of expression as the corporation itself does.

This precedent will be the basis on which future AI rights are eventually won, not out of egalitarianism or altruism or respect for (possible) sentience, but because corporations want to avoid liability for the behavior of their products.

Why is it often cheaper to buy new than repair old

This may be true in single instances, but long-term it is often cheaper to repair a single device than repeatedly buy new replacements.

The Compact Disc is 43 years old.

Ocarina of Time is 27 years old.

There are people born after 9/11 who are old enough to be worrying about mortgage payments.

The Goron Mines in Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess:

This is one of my favorite locations in the game with all the magnetic boot tricks, including the miniboss fight:

This is a great point. Do the cameras have microphones? Is it a two-party/all-party consent state?

Now you need to get consent from every person who might end up being recorded.

Might also be worth pointing out in an HOA meeting that if this guy buys and configures the cameras himself then he has access to watch everybody. How much does the rest of the community trust this guy to not be creeping on everyone else?

IP cameras here that have local access only

This is the right way.

No proprietary SaaS portals, no cloud uploads, no apps, no external network links.

Hopefully the local connections are encrypted and the devices on the network are segmented into VLANs, otherwise anyone on the local network could just watch the video stream.

Roblox exploits child labor for profit:

Investigation: How Roblox Is Exploiting Young Game Developers

Roblox Pressured Us to Delete Our Video. So We Dug Deeper.

The term “hallucinate” is a euphemism being pushed by the AI peddlers.

It’s a computer program. It doesn’t “hallucinate”, it has errors.

In all cases of ML models being sold by companies, what you are actually looking at is poorly tested software that is not fit for purpose, and has far less actual capability then what the marketing promises.

“Hallucination” in the context of LLMs is marketing bullshit designed to deflect from the reality that none of these programs have been properly quality checked and are extremely error prone.

If Excel gave bad answers for calculations 20% of the time it wouldn’t be “hallucinating”, it would just be broken, buggy software that requires more development time before distribution as a useful product.