In Korea a very large study has recently been published that seems to show a remarkable correlation between various cancers and having had COVID vaccines. For example men had a 68% higher chance of prostate cancer if they'd been vaccinated. (That means for every 100 unvaccinated prostate cancer patients you'd get 168 vaccinated prostate cancer patients.) Um, breast cancer risks also increased. Maybe that is where mine came from? I cannot say. I will say next time the government says I have to take an mRNA vaccine or suffer penalties, I'll tell them to stick their privates into a pencil sharpener.

{^_^}

Play loud baroque music on your own device. Experience suggests you'll soon have the car to yourself.
{^_-}

"There remains a false narrative that the possession of these nuclear weapons is actually making us safer when they're not." I, please do get rid of those pesky nukes. Declare them weapons of mass destruction and outlaw them. Do it now. Hurry up. I'm old enough that my plans to dominate the world need help. Once you have divested yourself of those weapons that leaves my super secret stash the only nukes in the world. I can pull them out, demonstrate one on some big city, London maybe? Nah, Chicago - no historical artifacts comparable to London there. Yes, Chicago it is. I demonstrate my heartlessness there and tell the world, approach me on bended knee or more shall die. I'll rule the world yet! Yaaaahhhhh hhhhhaaaaaaahaaaaaaaaa!

{O,o}

If Americans grew wings we could all fly where we want to go. And that probably is more likely than cleaning out garages.

{O.O}

... think it was an alien probe?
{O.o}

When everybody has their own super intelligence perhaps we should consider the ending sentence in "Farewell To The Master," 'Gnut replies, "You misunderstand, I am the master." ' You can bank on me not naming mine Gnut, not that it will materially matter.

{^_^}

Yeah, I know that is dangerous activity; but, indulge me, please.

What is it that Captchas are trying to stop? Is it really "automation" vs "real people" or is it related to something practical like drain on system resources that comes with automation banging the open ports at speeds you and I cannot imagine? The resource related reason makes more sense to silly old me. So, what would I do to detect resource robbers from more legitimate uses human manual or human directed single accesses? I'd burn a few cycles on the resource hog's machine with a complex javascript, perhaps do a brief bit of mining. Two or three seconds of that while the Captcha is putting itself together is a resource burn on the endless supply of search engines and AI training runs. The trick is to figure out the maximum burn the r-hogs will tolerate. Maybe you should double it? Then build that into your captcha building on the challenge page. The r-hogs go away. The smart ones log your machine as annoying. And your machine stays open for legitimate uses.

Does that sound close to the truth to you or am I just another old fruitcake on the net who likes the thought of r-hogs paying for access via a little bitcoin mining.

{^_-}

Gee, with cataracts turning blue into a sort of bluish muddy gray the casino lights might lose their effect. Think I'll still get 'em replaced with IOLs.

{^_-}

to live with human beings might be more predisposed to understand our lives if they "grew up" in a humanoid form.
With that thought in mind, text only ASI terrifies me.

{^_^}

There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in the selection and use of the appropriate tool. This proposal is the antithesis of that ideal. It is using a nuke to swat a fly. It works; but, at what cost?
{O.O}

I get sad when I watch a country commit suicide by stupid decision. It's made worse this time because it shows China won't have to invade. They just have to be patient and wait for Taiwan to finish it's protracted suicide. Then it can simply move in with no guns or any fuss at all.
{o.o}

Is it possible to enshittify something that is already shit?
{o.o}

The phrase "without compromising quality" in regards to scholarly papers sets a particularly low bar, Scraping under the bar in the social sciences may require a superfluid.

{^_-}

These ultra-smart appliances bother me conceptually. The more "stuff" in a product is not just more function. It is more failure. So maybe smart should be left to those things that are designed to be smart, like humans. Leave dumb for refrigerators,

Note that the "smart" usually involves logging into, in this case, the Samsung Cloud service. The smart is not resident in my equipment. It has to log in to become smart. This has a downside. Everything eventually dies, even mega-corporations such as Samsung. All it takes is the cloud services at Samsung to die and I cannot log into my bloody refrigerator? I hope would not have to log into the cloud to open the door. Either way, though, the refrigerator can be effectively taken away from me by an external failure due to the cloud complexity, and snooping, involved. I can imagine how I'd feel kicking myself around my dark house the night Samsung Cloud vanishes, even if only for hours.

Please let me run my OWN bloody cloud that has no phone homes built into it.

{^_^}

"Obviously a war with either China or Russia is not desirable for planet Earth."

I have two observations for you. First both Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin have a vote in whether there will be war. Second as I read the evidence neither one is afraid of what the results of said war would be. (Hint, there are not enough nukes in the world to turn even a modest size country like Iraq into a glassy lake. I did the arithmetic on that while Shrub was in office. Israel maybe. Iraq, no. And that math presumed it was pool table flat with no mountains or the like.)

{^_^}