And BTW, to all the people obssessed with "paleo" / "cave men" diets and think that means "meat":

While there certainly were (just like today) some hunter-gatherer societies (such as in the high arctic) that got most of their calories from meat, the average hunter-gatherer got the majority of their calories from plants. But not highly bred high-calorie plants, but rather high-fibre wild plants, meaning that they had to eat significantly more of these fibre-loaded plants. Your average hunter-gatherer ancestor ate way more fibre than a person eating a "modern" diet today eats.

A proper "paleo" / "cave man" diet isn't a high-meat diet - it's a high fibre diet.

No, the last fad was antioxidants. Bodybuilders being obsessed with protein is entirely different from maxing protein in normal consumer food products (even things as non-protein-related as water itself)

Do be careful with that. Do remember that inflammation isn't inherently bad. Inflammation is the activity of the innate immune system, doing things like fighting/preventing disease and cancer surveillance/attack. Just shutting down inflammatory reactions (for example, long-term taking prednisone or an equivalent steroid treatment) can certainly make you feel great, but can significantly shorten your expected lifespan.

Don't get me wrong, if you have a chronic inflammatory disease, it absolutely needs treatment, and the medical system is often pathetically bad about treating them. Chronic inflammation itself can even lead to cancer, such as lymphoma. But you need to find a targeted way to control your specific condition. For example, if you have say Sjögren's with small fibre neuropathy, an appropriate treatment might be IVIG or something like HyQvia or Hizentra - not broad-based immunosuppression. Unfortunately, such treatments are expensive, and doctors often resist prescribing them, or patients end up in insurance-denial hell.

They really haven't. Nutrition science has been a process of refinement as we've learned more over time. E.g.:

"Fat is bad"
"Saturated fat is bad, non is good"
"Saturated fat is bad, monounsaturated is good, polyunsaturated is bad. Oh, and trans fat is really bad."
"Well, among the polys, omega 3s are good, others are bad"
Many refinements later: "Concerning this specific fat molecule, the health impacts are X, except there's evidence that people with Y genetics have Z impact..."

The earlier statements weren't wrong, they were just overly broad.

This is part of why I had the new "ultraprocessed" label. We've been working so hard to separate out what specific things are causing what impacts, and then they just leap backwards and lump everything back together again : Homemade doughnuts deep-fried in coconut oil and lard: "not ultraprocessed". Store whole-grain bread: "ultraprocessed". Such a moronic grouping. Yes, the average of the ultraprocessed category is worse than the average of the non-ultraprocessed category, but that says nothing about individual foods. It's also a back door for anti-tech/anti-science woo to sneak into food science.

The issue is that this is only relevant to sustenance farmers, people with certain diseases, and alcoholics.

It's almost impossible to end up with an essential amino acid deficiency eating any "normal" modern diet. Even a vegan eating junk food is going to get sufficient quantities (they're going to suck at bodybuilding, but they're not going to get deficiency symptoms). There's too many staples that go into modern food. Nobody eats "only corn", "only wheat", "only potatoes", "only soy", or whatnot; it's always a mix. And there's no need to get everything all at once within a single meal - it's fine for it to be spread out not just between meals within a given day, but across multiple days.

Yeah, even on a vegan junk food diet, it's almost impossible for a modern person to not get all the amino acids they need, for the simple reason that there's not just one plant used in vegan junk food - corn, wheat, potato, soy, etc - and together, even if their protein is watered down with a lot of carbs and fat, any realistic mix still hits sufficient levels of essential amino acids, as the required amounts of each to avoid deficiency aren't huge.

Vegans have other actual things to worry more about. B12, for example, requires fortification or supplements (the body stores years worth at a time, but eventually you will run out if you don't consume it). Iron is highly likely to be in the low-but-acceptable to deficient range if either the diet isn't specifically high-iron or supplements taken. Some other minerals are real but lesser risks than iron as well. Etc.

Re: protein, they're surely talking about "in a modern diet, without disease, alcoholism, etc". Of course people in sustenance diets can readily end up with protein deficiency. Some diseases can cause it, and severe alcoholism can lead people to it as well. But a "normal" person eating any "normal" modern diet doesn't really need to think about whether they're getting enough protein.

Now, deficiency aside, people working on muscle building do need to actually think about what they're eating. But again most go too far - benefits taper off after about 1,6-2,2g/kg-d. There's some uncertainty about these figures, and it's possible that there may be some benefit to somewhat higher protein intake, but there's no benefit to living off of an extreme protein diet like some do.

Yeah, the grocery stores in Iceland stock huge amounts of "Collab" sparkling water, whose main selling point is that it contains "marine collagen". Aka fish skin. People are buying fish skin soda. En masse.

This world is insane.

They pay me in honeycomb!

Adoption is a function of existing adoption and existing availability of resources.

Extremely good OS' and truly amazing computers have failed, not because they were too expensive or had issues, but because they were perceived to be unpopular OR simply lacked enough software that could run on them.

Extremely bad OS' and truly awful computers have succeeded for the opposite reason.

Linux has an extremely good architecture, at least for machines that are mostly operating with CPUs. When most of the work is done by the GPU, it's less obvious that Linux provides the necessary mechanisms to manage resources and abstract away the hardware specifics. That doesn't mean I expect Linux to start fading, but I don't think a centralised OS is necessarily where things will go. However, the reason it hasn't done better so far is simply because potential users and potential software houses had a negative view of it (even though actual users were almost invariably loving the system).

Windows is crashing now not because it is a slow, bug-ridden piece of spyware (which it is, but users have never cared about that in the past), but because it is perceived in increasingly negative light.

They can get vertical samples from space and the ground. What they can't get from space or the ground is how the internals of a system evolve.

The problem with "models" in the abstract is that there are a lot of them and some of the time the thing you want is to know the same point relative to the system and not to the mudball.

Lots of people have gut feelings about AI, positive or negative.

Most of the AI research I can see people doing is focusing on single-element problems (such as finding counter-examples to a mathematics hypothesis) or solving very simple engineering systems (at most a dozen or so components). Most of the benchmarks are even simpler (write a short story at the level generally asked in English classes of primary school kids).

As a result, I think that people have developed either a very cynical outlook or a very optimistic look. Neither of these is entirely realistic, for the simple reason that no actual useful problem fits any of those descriptions.

Digging much deeper, I'm finding that when problems get into the hundreds or thousands of elements, even ChatGPT Sol 5.6 and Claude Fable 5 struggle badly to keep track of accurate relationships, let alone any level of detail.

If you want to solve a relatively simple coupled system (whether to use solar panels or direct solar heating, and which side of the house to place them), I'm sure AI is fine. If you want AI to write a five hundred word story detailing a conversation between Kim Possible, Rufus, and a smoked herring, I'm sure it could cope. Just.

If you want it to do anything hard enough that a human could do with an assistant, the tests I've been using (meaningful rather than synthetic problems) suggest you've developed a fantastically expensive blue smoke generator. We are going to need to see the inference engines developed for previous generations of AI, and the reasoners developed for the semantic web, and perhaps tools that haven't begun to be imagined yet, before AI can do anything non-trivial.

It is plausible we're in a bubble. And there's some evidence for it. That companies can just add the words "AI" to something to get investment is a serious sign. But the revenue situation, while weird, is not by itself definitive. Anthropic even made a profit in Q2 this year https://aitoolsrecap.com/Blog/anthropic-first-profit-2026-revenue-breakdown . Now, there's enough weird accounting going on, and circularity within the various companies, that interpreting that as a definite, genuine profit is something I'd be hesitant to do, but from all the public information it does look genuine.

There are two, related issues. First, if a "bubble" keeps going on for long enough, it stops being a bubble because society just reorganizes around it. For example, there's a decent argument that the industry was in a bubble since the 1930s (or even earlier) but that we reorganized cities and infrastructure to support it. And then when there was finally, almost a hundred years later, a danger that that bubble was going to pop, as it really had deserved to decades before, we had the auto-bailtouts (which were not just in the US, but also included the UK, Russia, France, Germany, Italy and others). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008%E2%80%932010_automotive_industry_crisis. There's a related saying which generally comes up in the context of people thinking of short-selling: "Markets can be irrational longer than you can be solvent." Second, even when a bubble does burst, the tech itself may still grow or be highly useful. When the train bubble burst in 1873, it was devastating, but by most major metrics of the industry (amount of track laid down, number of stations, estimated number of people-miles traveled per year) numbers barely dipped or kept going up. Similarly, when the dot-com bubble burst some specific things did get really damaged (with some early fiber optic being just abandoned) but by and large, the internet continued to grow to the point where it ended up more ubiquitous than even boosters in the late 1990s would have predicted. So a bubble bursting doesn't mean that LLM based AI is goes away.

n general, when there's an optimization process involved where one is minimizing stress or something else, hexagons often show up. In fact, hexagons are more often in nature than square patterns. One nice example is Giant's Causeway which has large hexagonal basalt columns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant's_Causeway (although a few columns have seven or eight sides). But neat to see another example, on another world no less. (We have on big hexagon on Saturn already.)

A balloon is not static, it moves with the atmospheric system it is in. Ergo, it tells you how that system evolves. A drone cannot do this.

A drone can stay put, relative to the ground, telling you how a location's atmosphere evolves. A balloon cannot do this.

These are solving completely different types of problem.

You could, of course, construct a hybrid, as balloons are traditionally single-shot. If a balloon carries the measurement gear and a drone capable of carrying that same gear PLUS a deflated balloon, then you can have something that operates as a balloon until it reaches some pre-set location, whereupon the balloon's gas is released and the drone flies the ensemble to a collection point.