QotD: "Ethernet: because cables are ugly, but packet loss is uglier."

Hanlon's Razor. futurism.com/ai-coding-se...

#MorningMusing : Removing the first letter from both words in the phrase "trick troll" yields a phrase that means roughly the same thing.

Nudge theory in action. www.business-standard.com/health/skipp...

This is basically Part 2 of a train of thought that @rohitkhare.bsky.social started a few decades ago. (link in comments) kk.org/thetechnium/...

"...the median prompt—one that falls in the middle of the range of energy demand—consumes 0.24 watt-hours of electricity, the equivalent of running a standard microwave for about one second." www.technologyreview.com/2025/08/21/1...

Probably a test of some kind. www.theregister.com/2025/08/21/c...

This is not surprising. Without: ⁍ Training (of the humans using it); ⁍ Training Data (for the models); and ⁍ Use cases (of actual pain points); this will just be another hypefest that will wither in the face of the inevitable backlash.

Can't really argue with this. One only hopes the political appointee coach doesn't overwork him into premature retirement. indianexpress.com/article/spor...

If the MSM has picked up on it, has it peaked? :) nymag.com/intelligence...

Art imitates life imitates art... This seems to be the first case of a company developing a feature because ChatGPT is incorrectly telling people it exists. www.holovaty.com/writing/chat...

Researchers have demonstrated that it is possible to detect cancer-specific DNA fragments in the bloodstream more than three years before a clinical diagnosis. aacrjournals.org/cancerdiscov...

I sure don't mind a change I sure don't mind a change Yeah, I sure don't mind I sure don't mind a change I sure don't mind a change But I've fell on black days I've fell on black days

Just read an article where the writer had to use AI to filter out the flood of AI generated job applications he was getting. I am wondering what the net utility value is.

24T tokens of organized web data arxiv.org/abs/2506.14111

#TIL: Add swearing to your Google request for AI-free results. "How to paint a fence" will return AI summaries & recommended results, in addition to actual results. "How to paint a fucking fence" will omit that & focus on actual results. Not sure why, or how long this will last, but here we are.

I sat down with Sandeep Balaji and Pushkar Singh of the Building in India podcast recently for a wide-ranging conversation about (heh) building a startup in India. Give it a watch here, and feel free to forward it far and wide if you think it is useful.: www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H-Z...

The progeny : "The entire credit card business is based on people going into DEBT! Why would they DO that?" A demo of 1. Admirable clear headedness 2. Amazing naïveté 3. All of the above Discuss.

For those following the latest Meta privacy controversy. Here's a somewhat technical explanation of how they are evading Android's sandbox restrictions, and how it could lead to VERY LARGE liability. www.zeropartydata.es/p/localhost-...

Moore's Law. Kryder's Law. Edholm's Law. These are the what that enabled business to move to the cloud. That also implies your business is at the mercy of someone else's server infrastructure. And when (not if) it goes down, there's not a whole lot you can do. www.moneycontrol.com/technology/c...

Coming back into town after a couple of weeks, started the car, which was throwing up scary messages about battery failure. Turns out the system needed to be rebooted. So the first law of tech support still holds. ("Most problems can be fixed by turning it off and on again.")

This is tomorrow, 5:30 pm IST.

For me, there's an easy answer: Judas Priest's Painkiller.

This sounds like the line about putting a humidifier and a dehumidifier into the same room and letting them fight it out. www.newscientist.com/article/2480...

You may have heard of the tale of a car engine that wouldn't start when the owner bought vanilla ice cream but was OK with other flavours. Here's a similar story of Janet Jackson crashing laptop drives. devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/...

"Fraud is a necessary business expense". Put another way, it is often preferable to tolerate (some amount of) false negatives in order to drive down false positives. In the legal world, this is known as 𝗕𝗹𝗮𝗰𝗸𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗻𝗲'𝘀 𝗥𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼 www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/opti...

The pain is real.

At the TGP Sessions, we’re doing an open gallery — like an open mic, but for visual artists — and want to feature artists at the early stages of their careers and dedicated amateurs too. Please help us reach more people? thegoaproject.wordpress.com/2025/04/18/s...

We continue our series of open platforms for early- to mid-career practitioners. After poets, storytellers, and musicians, the next one is for visual artists. Please see thegoaproject.wordpress.com/2025/04/18/s... And don’t forget to register! bit.ly/TGPSessions

via Bruce Schneier: NIST just released a comprehensive taxonomy of adversarial machine learning attacks and countermeasures. nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ai/...

QotD from @scalzi.com that echoes some of my thoughts about engaging in 'debate' online with all but a small selection of people (not all of whom agree with me, but are known to be high SNR). If you're not familiar with the term "Gish gallop" I encourage you to look it up.

Everything is securities fraud, as Matt Levine reminds us. economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/interna...

Nehru Place in Delhi (and similar places in other Indian cities) have been doing this kind of jugaad for many years. www.theverge.com/tech/639126/...

And what about vampires? www.dw.com/en/a-new-dru...

If you are (or know) an upcoming musician, this is a great opportunity to showcase your original work. Please share.

An expanded form of the "Chinese curse", which is not really Chinese, but is most definitely a curse: May you live in interesting times May you meet your heroes May you come to the attention of people in high places May all your dreams come true.

I like to say that "the most valuable function of a consultant is to be a scapegoat". Ted Chiang makes exactly the same point here, and further advances the hypothesis that AI is likely to have the same utility to some of the same people. www.newyorker.com/science/anna...

Follow the money. medium.com/predict/tesl... "Honestly, the only way Tesla can continue like this is if Musk manipulates one of the largest and most powerful governments in the world to…"

Interesting paper: "our findings suggest that machines may need more than large-scale language and image data to allow the kinds of innovation that a small child can produce." journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Whatsapp spam received just now. That last line made me chuckle (and prompted me to share)

Ouroboros QotD: "It's called the Dunning-Kruger effect." "No. Dunning-Kruger is when dumbasses think they're smart. I *am* smart. The question is, are you?"

An interesting experiment, confirming what many of us know but tend to ignore - the various free services we use online exist only because of ads. Would YOU pay ~$150/month to be ad-free? www.androidpolice.com/how-much-wou...

via The Ken: A BBC News research study analysed four of the most popular ones—ChatGPT 4o, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini and Perplexity—on the thing that these tools are supposed to do best: summarising text. They did not fare well. www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/...

A missing aglet is an inconvenience that occupies mindspace out of proportion to its actual nuisance value.

If you've been procrastinating on this, today is the deadline.

Meanwhile, Indians actually fought a war over this. www.npr.org/2025/01/20/1...

A metal/rap/folk fusion song about...mom's cooking? www.youtube.com/watch?v=nihF...

This sounds like a Very Big deal: "a drug called suzetrigine that works by selectively blocking sodium channels on pain-sensing nerve cells and delivers opioid-level pain suppression without the risks of addiction, sedation or overdose". www.nature.com/articles/d41...

I mean, one always knew at some level that TV shows are fantasies. But looking at the legal and political shows set in the US, with their emphasis on decorum, rule of law, or even just plain humanity; reinforces that at an extremely visceral level, as compared to the news headlines from there.

The things you find while spring cleaning. I hope you're doing well, Chris.