I typed into Google “potatoes pressure cooker” to get a reminder of how long to cook them. The AI told me, and correctly said that I should use the steamer sieve, but also told me to salt the water. The water that would be under the potatoes and that wouldn’t touch them.

I asked why, and the AI said that little splashes of salt water from the boiling would land on the surface of the potatoes and salt them gently, that the salt would increase the boiling temperature, and that the vapour would be aromatic.

I pointed out that the amount of salt landing on the surface of the potatoes would be negligible, that the vapour is distilled water in gas form, and that the increase in boiling temperature from salting the water is less than 1°C. The AI said, oh yeah, you’re right on all counts. Don’t salt the water.

What it has been doing was exactly what an LLM does. It gave me the received wisdom from the internet.

That aligns with what Cory Doctorow was saying here, namely that all the AI successes were from people who already knew what they were doing and could use the AI as a tool. Not from people who had no clue and just let AI do the job.

There is no difference between hypnotism and mesmerism. Mesmer was the great populariser of hypnotism, so that’s what it was called at first.

I’ve just been reading the Wikipedia article about the huggingface intrusion, and it reminds me strongly of the descriptions of hacking in Neuromancer.

To “effect” something is to make it happen. “Effecting change” is the typical usage.

To modify something is to “affect” it. So children are affecting their environment.

Endocrine disruptors are an important topic in environmental biology. They certainly have effects on wildlife, but Jones clearly didn’t understand it very well. There’s a pretty good overview on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endocrine_disruptor

Shattered is good, but the original pixel dungeon was absolutely brilliantly done in the sense that it was kept so small and with such tight gameplay that there was no grinding, just a fun mixture between puzzle game and roguelike.

I recently had to uninstall Angband because I was spending too much time on it. I had never thought it would work on mobile, but it’s an amazingly faithful representation of the desktop version.

It’s a weird business where everyone is offering an environmentally unsupportable service at below cost, hoping to outlive the competition.

Market share of a negative profit market.

They should offer them a Music Dance Experience with Defiant Jazz.

There’s a big difference between moral and morale.

waked banker
woozy banker
banking witch
fussy pucker

I loved Redmi last time I bought one, but now they’ve basically made it impossible to root or mod their devices. So I bought a used Pixel and donated my newish Redmi to my GF.

https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html

Ed, the greatest WYGIWYG editor of all.

No, nobody else does. It’s just you.

The fuck is this question?

Coming soon: “Does anybody else hate it when they get a paper cut?”

Emacs is a pretty nice OS - all it’s lacking is a good text editor.

I guess I should take another look at evil-mode.

git config --global core.editor "ed"

if you don’t like using vim.

Yes, started using vi when I started using a Unix login at university. That was in about 1994 or so. When I started using Linux it was definitely vim.

I’ve tried using evil-mode and vim keybindings in other editors. I somehow keep coming back to vim, though.

Take your EV in for its smug check

With the current fuel prices, every EV will pass its smug check :-D

Yeah, that tracks - I came back to Debian after a few years on Ubuntu, and even before I returned, I removed snap from my Ubuntu system.