Exactly .. the whole premise that you can accurately guess calories from a photo of a plate of food is bogus.

Of course in simple cases of easily recognized food, that don't vary too much, you may be able to come close, but even for something like a hotdog and fries, how big is the dog, how heavy is the portion of fries?

How is a photo going to tell you whether those carrots are just loaded with butter, or also a massive amount of sugar (an Anthony Bourdain pro-tip for delicious restaurant type carrots).

Just because you CAN ask an LLM anything, doesn't mean that you SHOULD.

He's trying, maybe badly, to get ahead of the story and control the narrative.

The fact that he's willing to admit, so soon after it's public release, that Google's Gemini 3.0 is better than their own GPT 5.1 is a bit surprising though.

Having played with "Gemini 3.0 Pro Thinkiing" at the surprisingly generous usage limits of the free tier, I have to say, even as an LLM cynic that initial impression is very good.

Compared to what was available before, it is quite impressive.

The negative feedback is prompted by the fact that AI is constantly being shoved into every one of our orifices 24/7 by every vaguely tech-related company as if it was the second coming of Jesus. To justify that amount of social pressure, it would indeed have to be quite a bit better than it actually is, and that's why people aren't impressed.

Again, you're being willfully obtuse by taking a "very loose definition" of what (or, rather, does not) "probably" constitute "ultra processed" and attacking on the details. Everything on your list (again, other than coffee and tea, along with some spices) has been "produced at home" for millennia, and the things on your list that haven't don't have anything to do with whether they could be, but only the geography of where they could be. Just like your follow up "but I don't have land" bullshit.

"Milk" is not an ultra processed food (or, rather, it doesn't have to be). Something containing "red dye #5" is. You need a factory and a complicated supply chain for the red dye #5, but not for the milk. See how easy that was?

With regard to your follow up WRT cheese, come the fuck on. Cheese is nothing more than a way of preserving milk. You can make some in your home today, and the knowledge required to do so can be obtained by watching a five minute Youtube video. Really, five minutes. That's all. Will you have Le Grand Gruyere? No, you'll have farmer's cheese, or ricotta, or mozerella, or maybe a nice gouda if you're feeling frisky and want to wait a bit.

The 17th Amendment called. Use code "1913" to retrieve your message.

You mean, why does Linus keep agreeing to be interviewed, and then reply to straightforward questions with the obvious answers?

What would you rather he do? Refuse to be interviewed, or maybe make up unexpected answers just to be edgy?

Most of your list could be "produced at home" by most people. Tea and Coffee are the largest problem on the list, but the only reason is geographic and not "processing" related. I'm pretty sure you know that, though, and are being purposefully obtuse for some reason.

Lincoln was a Free Soiler. He may have had a moral aversion to slavery, but it was secondary to his economic concerns. He believed that slavery could continue in the South but should not be extended into the western territories, primarily because it limited economic opportunities for white laborers, who would otherwise have to compete with enslaved workers.

From an economic perspective, he was right. The Southern slave system enriched a small aristocratic elite—roughly 5% of whites—while offering poor whites very limited upward mobility.

The politics of the era were far more complicated than the simplified narrative of a uniformly radical abolitionist North confronting a uniformly pro-secession South. This oversimplification is largely an artifact of neo-Confederate historical revisionism. In reality, the North was deeply racist by modern standards, support for Southern secession was far from universal, and many secession conventions were marked by severe democratic irregularities, including voter intimidation.

The current coalescence of anti-science attitudes and neo-Confederate interpretations of the Civil War is not accidental. Both reflect a willingness to supplant scholarship with narratives that are more “correct” ideologically. This tendency is universal—everyone does it to some degree—but in these cases, it is profoundly anti-intellectual: inconvenient evidence is simply ignored or dismissed. As in the antebellum South, this lack of critical thought is being exploited to entrench an economic elite. It keeps people focused on fears over vaccinations or immigrant labor while policies serving elite interests are quietly enacted.

Has anything actually stored hashes in /etc/passwd in the last thirty years?

"Yo, dawg..."

It's different from humans in that human opinions, expertise and intelligence are rooted in their experience. Good or bad, and inconsistent as it is, it is far, far more stable than AI. If you've ever tried to work at a long running task with generative AI, the crash in performance as the context rots is very, very noticeable, and it's intrinsic to the technology. Work with a human long enough, and you will see the faults in his reasoning, sure, but it's just as good or bad as it was at the beginning.

Much as I agree with you from a moral standpoint, from a legal standpoint it is not as cut and dried as you make it out to be.

If you want to make the argument that "data about you" is "your data" that's fine, but the presumption here is that it's the airline's data, and it is offering it freely (as in speech, not as in beer) to the government. Where is the fourth amendment implication? It is not your "house, person, papers, or effects," it is the airline's and they're happy to let the government sort through it.

Sigh. No it isn't. The airline is not a provider of medical services, it is not regulated by HIPAA.

While I agree that this is not something I want the government to be doing, what part of a database maintained by the airlines constitutes your person, house, papers, or effects? If the government demands access that would be one thing, but if the airlines say "hey, wanna buy our data?" and the government says "hell yeah" that is something else.

Correct. This is why I don't like the term "hallucinate". AIs don't experience hallucinations, because they don't experience anything. The problem they have would more correctly be called, in psychology terms "confabulation" -- they patch up holes in their knowledge by making up plausible sounding facts.

I have experimented with AI assistance for certain tasks, and find that generative AI absolutely passes the Turing test for short sessions -- if anything it's too good; too fast; too well-informed. But the longer the session goes, the more the illusion of intelligence evaporates.

This is because under the hood, what AI is doing is a bunch of linear algebra. The "model" is a set of matrices, and the "context" is a set of vectors representing your session up to the current point, augmented during each prompt response by results from Internet searches. The problem is, the "context" takes up lots of expensive high performance video RAM, and every user only gets so much of that. When you run out of space for your context, the older stuff drops out of the context. This is why credibility drops the longer a session runs. You start with a nice empty context, and you bring in some internet search results and run them through the model and it all makes sense. When you start throwing out parts of the context, the context turns into inconsistent mush.