From Springfield.

Yes, but what about Italian Bobby?

It never was, but unlike the current batch of LLM assistants that are now dominating the tops of “search” results, it never claimed to be. It was more, “here’s what triggered our algorithm as “relevant.” Figure out your life, human.”

Now, instead, you have a paragraph of natural text that will literally tell you all about cities that don’t exist and confidently assert that bestiality is celebrated in Washington DC because someone wrote popular werewolf slash fanfic set in Washington state. Teach the LLMs some fucking equivocation and this problem is immediately reduced, but then it makes it obvious that these things aren’t Majel Barrett in Star Trek and they’ve been pushed out much too quickly.

…Revolt is the FOSS alternate for discord right?

Yes, or for a more limited feature set, Matrix.

I recently had a dream that involved a suburb of Green Bay, Wisconsin. I have never been to Green Bay Wisconsin. I know it as a rather small city that is the home to the Green Bay Packers, an administratively anachronistic NFL team that draws a large plurality of its fan base from the greater Milwaukee area. Off the top of my head, I don’t know if Green Bay has “suburbs” in the usual American sense at all.

I googled the name of this completely nonexistent community, along with the words “Green Bay,” and the AI very confidently hallucinated it into existence, describing it as a lovely shopping and residential area just over the bridge of the same name.

You say “looming data apocalypse.”

I say, “free high quality neodymium magnets!”

Yes, but that is less fun for my dad-joke purposes.

So the one in the old fable was even more of a dick than we’d been led to believe. Got it.

It clearly pissed him off enough that he refuses to finish the next book out of sheer principle.

Perhaps the wings are articulated ribs?

I have it on good authority that you’re not old.

I poked around a few other articles. A few are identical. Most are slight variations. Few are as different as these two. My guess would be that the original submission from the author or initial editor locks in a headline for the tab/title bar, but then the CMS lets them edit what appears in the main body of the webpage.

I am glad to see us respect our link-aggregation heritage of ignoring the article and starting heated discussions based on what we infer from the headline. 😂

It also seems that the headline currently on the article is different and switches out clickbait tactics from misleading omission to absurd pearl-clutching: “Are noise-cancelling headphones to blame for young people’s hearing problems?” If you combine them, you get something closer to actual content of the article.

I had a “Diamond Mako,” aka a Psion Revo Plus. Neat device, but I just wasn’t “on the go” enough to really need it. It was slightly smaller than the 5, IIRC, and it definitely wasn’t as good for typing as even a Netbook (another good candidate for a “writerDeck” btw), but it was very slick, and the word processor in particular I remember being very good. IIRC it had NiCAD or NiMH AAA batteries hard-wired into it.

You’re welcome.

The UAE in general is an interesting experience. I’ve only been once, but my wife has been several times for work.

The face they want to present has a kind of a Pan-European middlebrow banality (i.e. you want to impress many people who may or may not be all that thoughtful and who definitely speak many different languages and have different cultural touchstones… I am thinking of stuff like the old BASF “nothingburger” ads or the "anthems for Eurovision or Champions League football), combined with an American-like sense of recklessly cheerful enthusiasm for development and economic growth, but wrapped in a cloak of religiosity and always with a barely concealed underpinning of oligarchic authoritarianism.

To be perfectly honest, it felt a lot like what I expect the evil, but less mustache-twirlingly evil, hope America will be. Still open for business, and even superficially welcoming, but with true wealth only going to those selected by the entrenched power structure, with all others allowed to serve at their pleasure and under a bedrock expectation of not disturbing their preferred social order.

I’ve had chocolate made with camel milk. It was good, though being positioned as a premium thing it probably would have been just as good with cow milk.

Love After Lockup is full of extremely healthy relationships.

Yes, yes, I know, and in fact one does lost interest after a while. Still, some reality trash can be interesting in the first season or two when they’re gathering the initial crop of free-range crazy instead of raising their own herd. Frankly, I’m surprised we haven’t seen a proper “SovCit” reality franchise.

56k modem noises

I particularly remember the heart-dropping feeling of the repeated changes in pitch as it negotiated a lower baud rate to account for the shitty wiring my dad DIY’d.