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saaaaaam

Re:Serbia just elected the world's brainiest parliament on Saturday October 31, 2026 @03:14PM (#50319130)
The generation above me in my family were largely life-long tenured senior academics. My father and uncle were both well respected academic administrators and my father was a small p politician within the confines of the university at which he was seated.

Lots of people told my father that he should go into big P politics and his response was always Groucho Marx: “I refuse to join any club that would have me for a member”.

I think he also found Politics of that sort futile and aggressive and based on all the things that he felt didn’t (or shouldn’t) matter in academia: who can speak loudest, build factions, and influence an agenda with no regard for data or facts. Of course many of those things are in fact present in academia.

But it’s very inspiring to see this parliamentary cohort. I do wonder whether they will find it exhausting and disillusioning to operate in the cut and thrust of modern personality politics.

I sincerely hope not though.

I think you know that this approach is optimal.
Very much hoped that the article itself would be written without the letter e. Disappointed.
Yes I slightly mangled that one. But I’m sure there is a survival technique that involves crawling into the body cavity of a hollowed out cow. You probably wouldn’t want to do that in an igloo though. I’m not even sure you could get a cow into an igloo. If standard issue humans are this flawed it’s hardly surprising that top flight LLMs get things so wrong sometimes.
I have not, sadly. But I’m pretty sure I also had the book you mention. My brother and I made our own motor and many other things that would now be considered entirely unsuitable for 10 year olds to be doing. Copper sulfate crystals seem like a great idea until you have to explain why the playroom carpet has melted.
As I said elsewhere, you can always burn the books! And eating a laptop is considerably crunchier and more fraught than chewing through some good old fashioned leather facings, horse glue and nice heavy 120gsm wove.
When you’re living in an igloo trying to stay warm in the hollowed out belly of a cow having a few books around the place is probably more useful than some files on a laptop that ran out of battery just before it got morbidly damp. Plus you can burn them if you really need to.
Given the whole thing reeks of vibe I don’t think anyone picked anything.
We had a set called something like “How to do anything in an emergency” which had instructions for this and more. Alongside lots of creative uses of potassium permanganate.

I’m pretty sure it also told you how to butcher a sheep.

I used to be obsessed with it as a kid. The spectre of nuclear war and a three volume handbook on how to survive the impending apocalypse with nothing more than a plastic bucket, a packet of potassium permanganate, some charcoal and string. The late 80s and early 90s were a wild time to be a kid.

> Mac or PC with 16–31 GB | IBM Granite 4.2 8B | 14 of 22 right | 6 GB

So on a regular consumer machine this is going to be wrong nearly half the time. Great! Let’s hope it’s only on the simple stuff and not the “how do I perform an emergency appendectomy”.

Honestly, just buy some books.

Re:Google cloud outage takes down banks on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @12:55AM (#50176243)
Settle down CJ Craig.
Re:Turn an old junk phone into a Talking Jack-O-Lantern on Thursday October 15, 2026 @02:31PM (#50108124)
I don’t know where you live but a talking pumpkin with a phone inside it would be gone in sixty seconds round here. Even a very old phone.
Re:Catch a Bird – I made it for my own sanity on Thursday October 15, 2026 @01:19AM (#50099483)
This is absolutely lovely.
Re:Gemini 4 Argon on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @02:35PM (#50076446)
A pelican with an empty pouch would have no need for a bicycle to get home.
Re:Apple HomeView on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @12:53PM (#50074820)
Fax machine? Genuinely not sure what you mean. Is the answer just "a computer" ?

Because while yes, that's true, this apparently recognises the different users. So presumably if a child is using it, that will be under managed parameters set by a parent - meaning that it's much harder for the child to circumvent.

Re:Apple HomeView on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @11:41AM (#50073487)
For families who want to reduce screen time and device reliance this could be a very good alternative to everyone having their own device.
Re:An hour of audio transcribed in about 13s on MacBook Air on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @09:29AM (#50071419)
I recently swapped to using Parakeet v3 on my old M1 Macbook Air, using MacWhisper. It was so fast I thought it had failed. As in, by the time I clicked "transcribe" and looked at my screen again a few seconds later the transcript had finished. Absolutely insanely fast.
Re:US Man Given Prison Sentence for Bot-Farming Music Streams on Thursday October 08, 2026 @07:25PM (#50013862)
ahhaha yes! I didn't even catch that because I was so focused on SUPER INTELLIGENCE! :@
Re:US Man Given Prison Sentence for Bot-Farming Music Streams on Thursday October 08, 2026 @05:27PM (#50012550)
>To obtain the necessary number of songs for his scheme to succeed, SMITH turned to super intelligence, which he used to create hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs for which he could manipulate the streams.

He turned to what, exactly, Donnie?

Re:The 15-year search for a band that charted once and vanished on Thursday October 08, 2026 @05:24PM (#50012521)
It's funny how things have flipped. Most people I know love receiving actual personal post now, because it's such a rare thing.
This is so brilliantly simple.

I semi-regularly chair or panels and very often the venue hasn’t thought about a countdown timer so that I and the speakers know how long we have left. Having a timer massively improves the quality of a panel from an audience perspective as you can better pace things, move speakers on, wrap up without rushing, and so on.

Because of how often a timer wasn’t available last year I made something where I could quickly spin one up using ffmpeg. This is much easier and much more useful. (And doesn’t require having my Mac with me!)

Being able to stick one of these on an iPad on a table so that speakers can see it but audience can’t will be really useful.

Thank you!

Re:Claude Haiku 5.5 on Thursday October 08, 2026 @01:19AM (#50002027)
Some of you might be but some of us appreciate joyous absurdity and look forward to the pelicans with great pleasure and anticipation. Chacun à son goût.
Re:Claude Haiku 5.5 on Thursday October 08, 2026 @01:15AM (#50002011)
Frog on a unicycle!
Enterprise customers and dark patterns.
Re:Owed a billion dollars in Nvidia stock on Monday September 28, 2026 @09:46AM (#49877884)
A friend sold his house in 2005. He was a huge Apple fanboy. With the proceeds that were left after he paid off his mortgage, he splurged on a quadcore Power Mac G5, and a new top of the range PowerBook.

And then put the rest into Apple stock. I told him he was absolutely insane.

He sold about a quarter of it at some point in 2018, but is currently sitting on several million dollars of gain.

Your entire website stinks of vibe. I can smell the vibe from here. Either you’re lying or your copy is all AI generated. If you really wrote the code yourself you might want to consider how you present the project and how the presentation builds or destroys trust. I’m 100% the target for this - I send a lot of large files to non technical clients. But I would not use this.
Re:iPhone Duo on Wednesday September 23, 2026 @12:07PM (#49818195)
My HomePod speakers have now updated to iOS (or whatever) 27 and the response time is almost instant. So that’s an improvement!

Siri is still pretty awful and useless though.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose and so on.

I have no idea what you’re talking about. I didn’t say your comment is AI.
You avoided answering the most important question though which is how is anyone meant to trust the security of files delivered through something so obviously vibe coded?
Re:Community condemn Bedminster AI mural as 'insult' to artists on Wednesday September 23, 2026 @12:01PM (#49818103)
Maybe the art is the letter and the resulting media outrage rather than the mural itself, like the Leeds 13 “Going Places” degree show.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/1999/jun/08/martinwainwright

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