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In this essay I will

I don’t entirely understand the question. Do I have to carry the food on my back the whole week, or do I just have to carry it to the fully functioning kitchen, and then stash it in the fridge/cabinets? If the latter, is this the same thing as weekly grocery shopping?

This reminds me of an old joke:

An SEO copywriter walks into a bar, pub, Irish bar, drinks, beer, wine, whiskey, cocktails, liquor.

But since then the situation has gotten a lot shittier.

In my experience, a lot of e-bike users have them to facilitate long commutes by bike. If they’re on pedelecs, they probably bring up the average, especially since someone who chooses a long e-bike commute over a train or car is likely to be pretty active in other ways.

Also they’re used a fair bit by old people. I’m not sure how that group would compare for bike exercise vs e-bike exercise though.

Sure, it’s hard to say whether a computer program can “know” anything or what that even means. But the paper isn’t arguing that. It assumes very little about how how LLMs actually work, and it defines “hallucination” as “not giving the right answer” with no option for the machine to answer “I don’t know”. Then the proof follows basically from the fact that the LLM-or-whatever can’t know everything.

The result is not very surprising, and saying that it means hallucination is inevitable is an oversell. It’s possible that hallucinations, or at least wrong answers, are inevitable for different reasons though.

The only thing that stops a bad guy with a flask of acid, is a good guy with a flask of acid?

Or maybe the good guy’s flask should have a buffering agent?

Follow-on serious answer: there are also electric rays, which are known as torpedos. According to Wikipedia, this is from the Latin torpidus meaning “paralyzed” or “numb” (the same root as the English “torpid”). The weapon is named after the fish. Edit: some of these live in the Mediterranean, and that Latin name predates understanding electricity; they were also known to Hippocrates who called them narke with a similar meaning in Greek.

IIRC some of the other pre-electricity names for electric fish are based on their ability to numb, paralyze or stun people and other creatures.

I was having a weird one today so I read through the book of Amos. It’s shockingly similar to the current situation.

Amos prophesied that Gaza would be destroyed, even genocided, as a reaction to crimes that included kidnapping entire communities. But that’s just an intro to a prophecy that Israel would be violently and mercilessly destroyed in response to a long list of their own crimes.

I’m not saying that Amos predicted the current situation, just that it’s sad how little we’ve improved in 2500 years.

So I wrote a long-ass rundown of this but it won’t post for some reason (too long)? So TLDR: this is a 17,600-word nothingburger.

DJB is a brilliant, thorough and accomplished cryptographer. He has also spent the past 5 years burning his reputation to the ground, largely by exhaustively arguing for positions that correlate more with his ego than with the truth. Not just this position. It’s been a whole thing.

DJB’s accusation, that NSA is manipulating this process to promote a weaker outcome, is plausible. They might have! It’s a worrisome possibility! The community must be on guard against it! But his argument that it actually happened is rambling, nitpicky and dishonest, and as far as I can tell the other experts in the community do not agree with it.

So yes, take NIST’s recommendation for Kyber with a grain of salt. Use Kyber768 + X448 or whatever instead of just Kyber512. But also take DJB’s accusations with a grain of salt.

Kyber is a to-be-NIST-standardized lattice encryption scheme.

Kinda weird IMHO to equate military coups orchestrated by the US against local and Soviet interests (in Latin America), with military coups against the US and France and local interests but toward Russia (in the Sahel), with a popular uprising supported but not instigated by the US (Euromaidan).

But regardless, the US is a serial offender here.

He’s not just ignoring it though: he’s been advancing and legislating (many of) these awful policies for literally fifty years. You might quibble about where to draw the line between “fascism” and “everyday atrocities”, but the guy has done a lot of harm in his life.

That’s not to say that everything he’s done has been bad. And I’d still rather have him in government than one of today’s fully mask-off GOP fascists: there’s no doubt that this label applies to Trump or DeSantis. But it’s important to recognize that neither party has any interest in ending many of the US’s worst crimes. We’re going to need some major … let’s optimistically say “reform” … for that to happen.

On the subject of Biden’s segregationism: this wasn’t closeted. He said that “jungle” bit as part of his enthusiastic and long-lasting opposition to busing to integrate schools, preferring the status quo of segregation. Kamala challenged him on this during one of the 2020 primary debates, and he refused to apologize or back down from that stance.

On a related note: pixian doubanjiang. It’s a spicy bean paste and a key ingredient in several well-known Sichuan dishes: hot pot, spicy poached fish, mapo tofu, ants climbing trees, etc

Slay the Spire maybe?

I worry that Buzzfeed’s meaningless AI regurgitation is what most of the internet will look like in 10 years. Ask an AI for its take on an already silly question (Europe is large and diverse) which it is patently unqualified to answer. Maybe ask in English for good measure, guaranteeing further bias. Then take the meanest, most body-shaming and stereotyped answers and post them straight to the website, with a disclaimer that the assholery therein isn’t your assholery, it’s the AI’s assholery.

It really feels like a scene from Idiocracy, but with the dysgenics replaced by AI.

Some further flavor to reinforce this: as I understand it, abortion is legal in the Netherlands until the fetus is viable, which was estimated to be 24 weeks but due to better care for premies IIUC it’s moving toward 22. After this time it is only legal in the case of serious medical problems: eg a risk to the life of the would-be mother, or because the fetus isn’t viable due to a defect. Until this year there was also a 5-day waiting period for abortions; I think that’s no longer legally mandated but the doctor still has input. I believe they also require more medical scrutiny after the first trimester.

IMHO these are common-sense restrictions, though you could argue about the exact details. Abortion is accessible if you need it, but after a certain point a fetus is close enough to a person that its interests must also be taken into account.

The official abortion rate in NL is slightly over 1/3 of that in the US. It may or may not actually be the lowest in the world: it’s hard to collect statistics in some places, especially where abortion is discouraged or illegal, or even in places where you would get one with no medical supervision (by pills taken at home).

The Netherlands also has a low maternal mortality rate, around 1/5th of the US, and also one of the lowest in the world (says CIA world factbook), though I’m not sure how consistent these measurements are across countries.

The US could achieve these things too, and likely have a lower abortion rate than it can achieve even through draconian restrictions. But it would require proper education and medical care, and that’s not what certain states want… they want the crueler option.

A absurd grump for an absurd headline: What toasts my buns about this article is that it uses hot dogs as a unit of “size” when it really means length. The asteroid is actually the size of millions of hotdogs, because asteroids and hotdogs are both three-dimensional.

Beep boop.

Sure, peanut butter and jelly is the classic, unless you grew up listening to Raffi, in which case it’s absolutely made with jam. But to me, jelly just isn’t as tasty as jam, or honey or bananas. And if you take it on a hike it can make the bread soggy. And at home I’d usually rather have meat or cheese in my sandwich. But I still go through a ton of peanut butter for rice cakes. And occasionally for a PB&J, and once in a while for hot pot sauce.

And Jif tastes weird to me, but you do you.