This morning I was laying in bed waiting for my alarm clock, thinking "you know, that Altman guy seems to use too much of OUR (insert Karl Marx portrait here) precious oxygen. The world supply should really rather be under central control (with me as the Chairman Overseeing Oxygen) and then he can rent it from me^H^H the non-profit Collective for the few times he needs it, and at very reasonable supply and demand capitalist rates as adjusted in real time."

2.59 SQUARE kilometers. Or about 259 Hectares (which is a more customary unit in SI-speaking countries).

Quite a decent farm, where I'm from.

But: 640 acres should be enough for anyone!

You all know that even if you are an adult, it would still require you to prove your age. I'd say it is technically pretty hard to prove JUST your age - your age is inextricably linked to your identity, else it would be just a number on your say-so. Some sites now require a copy of government ID, some record your face, etc.

So most governments (as it seems this one) offer to put in place infrastructure for age verification. Great, the socnet will only get your age out of this system in exchange for your login. BUT the government will know WHO is linked to each login.

It may not be "the death of the Internet" as some others hope, but it will certainly be

The Death of the ANONYMOUS Internet.

Post something the government doesn't like? Maybe show support for a completely legal political party whose only sin is that it has less support than the ruling party? Well, bank account goes brrrr (frozen) and now you can't pay rent or transport. Now you loose your job, and soon your house, your car, your kids, your spouse. And now you will say and do EXACTLY as the government tells you.

You can't even claim "That Will Never Happen!" Because it did and it does. See China, Canada and Britain for examples. This will just make it so much easier.

You can maybe claim that it won't happen to YOU because YOU support the majority party like most other sane, intelligent, and benevolent people, and your views are all politically correct and morally without blemish, and those deplorables who disagree DESERVE to be punished. Well, I don't think I have the ability to convince you otherwise, but I can implore you to read more history. And hopefully you'll learn from that that it's ultimately not about good vs. evil but about who can gain the most power by whatever means.

One of my gripes in life is that if something "needs a generic image", it does NOT "need" it (it's generic, so it does not add any information), it "wants" it (for eye candy purposes and because of prior convention, presumably). This is of course not an AI issue, since "image for illustration purposes only" has been a thing for many years now. A niche which Getty and others stepped into and made money out of.

Of course the same sort of thing happens in other areas: "long-form" articles seem to be a thing on some web sites, and AI also excels in fluffing out text. And the newest trend is in "short" form videos that are stretched as long as bearable, so as to monetize the longer view time. AI seems to be so good at narrating at a soporific pace and fluffing up the script with superfluous and unnecessarily repetitive words, verbiage, phrasing, terms and expressions.

In an info-overload world, I surely wish for higher signal-to-noise-ratio communication (including advertising and restaurant menus). Instead we make do with good enough because that's what's offered.

Now wait until you find out how it was determined that an electron has negative charge and a "posi"tron therefore positive.

It seems now grocery chains can consider selling "single-serving" bananas that are pre-peeled in the factory then packaged in a transparent polypropylene shell for transport and shelf display.

If only there was a bio-degradable, made-to-measure, protective packaging method that kept a banana fresh, non-brown, and ready to eat for a day or so.....

Albert Einstein is often quoted as saying, "I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."

I think it has become more clear by now to the world powers that their militaries need to run on AI or be left in the ensuing dust. Same goes for economic activity during peacetime, of course.

Which leads to the realization that this will make data centers a prime target for bombing.

Yet more reason to not want to live close to one. Yeah, 10K USD would not be cutting it, for me at least.

OK, this is my personal anecdote and might or might not be related to the brain injury treatment - but I'm confident more and more red (or more accurately: various long wavelengths) light therapies will get proven in future.

So I'm a middle aged male and miss a box-jump at Crossfit one fine day. Superficial shin injury that turns out to not want to heal, turning nasty. Doctor explains as we get older, we have less blood circulation in the lower limbs especially. Sedentary IT job doesn't help either. Lots of cellulitis (tissue inflammation around the wound) and at a stage it turns septic too. Get on first-name terms with the nurses at a nearby wound-care clinic. Eventually its getting onto a month with only marginal improvement.

In the mean time, a dermatologist appointment comes up; I need some suspicious dark spot checked out. After the whole body scan, she also asks: what's going on under that plaster on your shin, and can I have a look? She suggests I come in for a few sessions with a laser she has, Nd:YAG it says on the label and apparently it emits near infrared. They use it for cosmetic purposes, to promote collagen formation and what not, but she claims it will also do wound healing a lot of good. She offers the treatment for free, so how could I decline?

So they hammer the area on my shin with the pulsed laser. When it starts to get too hot to tolerate, they press a cooled tip against the skin to cool it down, then continue, until the pre-set dose is delivered. Next day I can see with my own untrained eyes a marked improvement. I go back for 2 more sessions over the next week or so. By the end of that, the skin has closed over and I can stop wearing waterproof dressings. This was borderline miraculous to me. Too bad about the scar/reminder....

So there are a few mechanisms that are proposed to work here: the heat increasing circulation, and/or causing slight damage which triggers increased healing mechanisms on, and/or the specific wavelengths stimulating the mitochondria to make them work better, etc.

Other comments have mentioned sunlight (especially early morning or late afternoon, when UV is low and long (red) wavelengths predominate). The wound care nurses have recommended sitting in the sun too, and I am sure that might also help somewhat, but in my case the laser worked much better.

Of course all the usual disclaimers apply like me not being a medical professional, no medical advice was given, or your mileage varying.

Our team's scrum master, who doesn't know how to code, has recently become an eager AI user. First it was some python projects to collate project and process stats. Then he grabbed some user story regarding improving integration test cases for a web app, and let AI do it. All raised spirits and dopamine because of the additional productivity - until it hit the Pull Request. There we scrum slaves shot it down due to unnecessary operations based on zero understanding from the AI of the data and logic, as well as injecting substantial amounts of JavaScript code into the web app to effect certain actions - needless to say, almost impossible to understand without spending considerable man-hours to read through it line by line. On the other hand, we also used an AI to check the pull request, which wrote up a clear if verbose report with headings on all the shortcomings. "I'll get my AI guy to speak to your AI guy regarding these changes."

I strongly doubt that she read and understood all those 100K lines of code; I'll bet she just ran it and saw it works, or maybe got AI to test it. We still have the requirement in our org that the human is ultimately responsible for the code, so my approach is that it still should be readable and understandable to the meat sack dev. Your lightyears-per-gigawattage may differ.

We can eat it, but should we?

Look, if even a printer spits them out, I probably will too.

Visit https://keepandroidopen.org for the details, if you don't know about what parent is talking.

When was the last time you visited https://f-droid.org? It has a pink banner over the top, linking to https://keepandroidopen.org. The latter explains why f-droid (and many other apps) may soon not want to, or be able to, function on Android any longer.

Living fungus? Been there done that, looking at my gym clothes.

I guess the self-cleaning part is novel - mine takes forever to do that.

Sometimes I think the Internet and the world would be better off if it just didn't have content (and also no entities profiting from such content) that people in certain groups shouldn't have access to. Guess the worms are out though. Some person's sewerage is sacred to another person - to repurpose the idiom.

I find it significant in the RTO debate of late, that I have not yet heard something along the lines of "Return to office or we'll give your job to AI!" (Perhaps with the argument added that any sufficiently digital artifact-based job that can be done remotely, can also be done by LLM.)

Perhaps this says more about the current state of AI than it does about this article's topic. Or perhaps not. Thoughts?