Or alternatively they’ve only ever had temperatures below 0°.

Litterally everything we have ever made and called an AI is an algorithm. Just because we’ve made algorithms for making bigger, more complicated algorithms we don’t understand doesn’t mean it’s actually anything fundamentally different. Look at input, run numbers, give output. That’s all there ever has been. That’s how thermostats work, and it’s also how LLMs work. It’s only gotten more complicated. It has never actually changed.

The phrase AI has never actually meant that though? It’s just a machine that can take in information and make decisions. A thermostat is an AI. And not a fancy modern one either. I’m talking about an old bi-metallic strip in a plastic box. That’s how the phrase has always been used outside of sci-fi, where it usually is used to talk about superintelligent general intelligences. The problem isn’t that people are calling LLMs AI. The problem is that the billionaires who run everything are too stupid to understand that difference.

I mean, the entire first point I made there was about how that was meaningless. Having the exact same chemical called a “chemical” sometimes and not others actively hurts our ability to communicate about what’s in our food. That’s not your fault, but it still bothers me.

The problem with that is that it is a completely meaningless distinction. Some of the worst chemicals we often put in our foods are certain kinds of nitrates that are used as preservatives, but those same nitrates occur naturally in celery. If you just eat celery the concentration is low enough to be harmless, but it can be concentrated naturally. If you’ve ever seen celery juice or celery powder on the list of ingredients for a food it is the exact same thing, and just as bad for you.

Naturally occurring isn’t the same as healthy. Most plants are some degree of poisonous. They don’t want to be eaten, and can’t run away. That’s just how they defend themselves. We farm the ones we are well adapted to eat, but even with that and millennia of selective breeding it’s still not perfect. Ultra processed foods are bad for you because your health is not a priority for the people doing the processing, not because there is something inherently worse about industrially synthesized ingredients. They can be anything we want, and they are currently mostly addictive and only satisfying for a very short amount of time, but that is a decision, not an inherent flaw.

What, you aren’t on the dark matter diet yet?

Yes, because it gives them full legal access to share basically everything ever published by the US government. It’s not a magic bullet for all their woes or anything, but it is one less thing to worry about.

Mmm, yes. I too love eating metals that explode when they touch water. Extra spicy. It does more than double the sodium content of your salt though, so watch out for that if you have high blood pressure.

I love how these tech companies are so desperate to prove that AI is useful that every time an engineer ever uses any kind of software that has even the tiniest element of machine learning they’re all like, “See, AI did this! This was AI! Isn’t AI so useful, and amazing, and definitely worth all the money we’ve spent and environmental damage we’re doing!”

I’m starting to get worried that Obsidian will be the first of Microsoft’s recent acquisitions to get EAed. They make neat little $40 AA games that I really like, but Microsoft seems just convinced that if they can use a massive budget to fix the bugs and give them the shiniest new graphics then they’ll somehow turn an Obsidian game into the next Skyrim, and that just doesn’t even begin to make a lick of sense. They do not and have not ever made that kind of game. The closest they ever came was Fallout: New Vegas, and that’s because they were literally working with Bethesda’s game engine, and the things people love most about that game are the things that make it the most different from a Bethesda game.

Now not only were they trying to sell this game for $70, but the next one’s going to be $80. Obsidian is screwed, and that makes me sad.

Man, it would be such a massive upgrade for the western US if the borders had been carefully negotiated by… literally anyone, for any reason. They’re actually just mostly straight lines drawn at random by people who had never been within a thousand miles of them, and they make absolutely no sense at all.

Also, for the record, I hate the idea that cities and the rural areas surrounding them should be separate and have no shared finances and no say in how each other are run. That’s a stupid plan that would immediately result in rural areas having their infrastructure fail, and the cities then all starving. It is a very, very stupid idea, and the very fact that there is a big urban/rural cultural divide is one of the things killing America.

The problem there is that stable vs unstable distro uses a slightly different meaning of the word stable than you would use to talk about a stable vs unstable system.

In distro speak, a stable distro is one that changes very little over time, and an unstable one is one that changes constantly. That’s sort of tangentially related to reliability, in that if your system is reliable and doesn’t change then it’s likely to stay that way, but it’s not the same thing as reliability.

Normal people who use Arch don’t bring it up much, because they’re all sick of the memes and are really, REALLY tired of immediately being called rude elitist neckbeard cultists every time they mention it.

The Ubuntu hate is because Canonical has a long history of making weird, controversial decisions that split the Linux community for no good reason.

No you weren’t. That would be ridiculous. The deb dependencies are most of your Linux install. Maybe counting just the new dependencies being installed alongside a typical deb install, but that’s still not an apples to apples comparison to 100% of all the flatpak dependencies, even ones shared with other flatpaks, and even that’s still very rarely over 1GB.

Atomic distros are cool, and I’m sure they will only get more popular, but I don’t buy the idea that they’re “The” future. They have their place, but they can’t really completely replace traditional distros. Not every new thing needs to kill everything that came before it.

That’s not really true. It lists all the flatpak dependencies in that disk use, but a lot of those are shared, so they don’t actually use that much each if you install more than one, and the deb dependencies aren’t included at all. Flatpaks really do use more space, especially if you only have a small number of them, but it’s not as bad as that.

Crap. My rep is on there. I’m actually going to have to call, aren’t I? Fine. Fine. I’ll do it. It is done.

Australia’s bigger than Antarctica, and if you don’t care about that “canal crap” then there are only really two continents bigger than it.

Look, Mozilla makes tons of decisions I disagree with, and this is one of them, but some of y’all have turned hyperbolic, misleading, unwarranted Mozilla hate into your entire personality.

Feel free to point out when they do something stupid, but if you’re going to do that try to keep it to the facts instead of trying to make it seem like every dumb little thing they do is the apocalypse. It’s impossible to take you seriously with titles like this.

So… How many burritos worth of debt do you need before you count as a VIP?