The article is a bit sensationalist, but I think it’s the first time for this species.

Dunno, weed on steroids being even more proficient at outcompeting local florae?

I can see why we primates* would have a taste for alcohol: boozy = fermenting = full of sugars = nutritious. It works fine if all alcohol we see is “in the wild”. But once you learn to farm and ferment, everything goes downhill, because you’ll have a lot more alcohol available than just a bunch of overripe berries.

So it’s a lot like a sedentary lifestyle, junk food, attention economy, etc. Our instincts working against us, because they were shaped by a different environment.

*I’m not even sure if it’s something as recent as primates. Other tetrapods seem to really like booze too, as this rather cute video shows. Elephant, birds, hogs, everyone gets drunk.

Their pupils are vertical slits so they can let more or less light in, depending on the surrounding light. Note how they pupils dilate by a lot when in the dark, but if your cat is lazying under the Sun the slit gets really narrow.

Those two are hilarious!

I don’t know the rootstock variety’s name; I got the seeds from my BIL’s neighbour, he calls it “ball pepper” (it is not Catalan ñora) or “tree pepper”. The fruits are round, 3~5cm large, red, medium heat.

The grafts will be:

1. Dedo-de-moça - C. baccatum, medium heat, finger-shaped, ~8cm large. Kind of a default pepper where I live, but it has a nasty tendency to die in winter (like mine did).
2. Yellow bell pepper. Market stuff.
3. Chocolate-coloured habanero. Hot as hell, but the strain I got is bloody delicious.
4. Biquinho - C. chinense, no heat, drop-shaped, ~1cm tiny. Extremely fruity.

The first three are part of a breeding project of mine. I want to create two new varieties:

• a yellow jalapeño-like: large, low heat, thinner than a bell pepper. Mostly for stuffing and pizze. It’s a rather simple dedo-de-moça x yellow bell pepper hybrid; I actually got the seeds for the F1 already, I’m just waiting the weather to get a bit more stable to plant them.
• a large and extremely hot pepper for sauces. Preferably finger-shaped and brown (for aesthetics). It’ll be probably a hybrid of the hybrid above, plus habanero.

I’m also considering to add the rootstock to the breeding, since it’s a hardy plant with high yield and it survived winter just fine.

Yes, but I think the ones you’ll see past the bubble burst will be a bit different. For example, incorporating the current attempts of natural language processing, even if in a simplified way.

I use those quotation marks because IMO they’re better described as large token models than large language models. They have rather good morphology and syntax, but once you look at the higher layers (semantics and specially pragmatics) they drop the ball really hard. Even if those layers are way more important than the lower ones.

For a rough analogy, it’s like a taxidermised cat - some layers (the skin and fur) are practically identical to the real thing, but it’s missing what makes a cat a cat, you know? It’s still useful if you want some creepy deco, but don’t expect the taxidermised critter to ruin your furniture or to use your belly as sleeping pad.

I shouldn’t be talking so much about taters. Someone will eventually realise I’m too emotionally invested into food 🤣

Completely off-topic, but in the meantime I’m trying to graft an orange sapling into a lemon tree. Kind of hard to get the timing right, too; I need the tree to get a branch with just the right thickness, so it’s like “too thin [next day] too thin [next day] fuck, now it’s too thick!”. Same deal with my pepper plants.

That’s interesting. Is its meaning similar to the one the AI outputted?

It’s doing better but not by much, though. It shouldn’t be speculating as much, given the lack of info on the potential saying.

A family saying or regional expression

Speaking on that I tried a few sayings from other languages. It seems to be hit-and-miss:

• “Bread is bread, wine is wine” (Italian) - recognised properly as similar to “call a spade a spade”
• “A good fish swims thrice” (Polish) - recognised properly as a recipe-like saying (the fish swims in water, then butter, then wine)
• “Do you think mango core is soap?”, “Mango core is not soap” (Portuguese; specially common in Brazil) - it failed really hard. The rhetorical question / saying roughly means “this is blatantly absurd, why are you denying the obvious?”, or perhaps “cut off the crap”. But here’s the output:

Wow, his potato parable actually makes sense - unlike Gemini’s couple therapy take. (The character in question isn’t even a therapist, but a lawyer!)

Do you want my guess? The current “fight” will go on, until the AI bubble bursts. None of the current large token models will survive; they’ll be simply ditched as “unprofitable”. Instead you’ll see a bunch of smaller models popping up, for more focused tasks, being advertised as something else than AI (perhaps as a “neural network solution” or similar).

So Grok, Gemini, GPT, they’re all going the way of the dodo.

That’s just my guess though. It could be wrong.

Username checks out.

How often do you “flush out” the bugs?

Linux is only a kernel. It isn’t a full operating system; it’s only a small (albeit central) part of one. Everything else is components like the GNU utils, X and/or Wayland, so goes on. That’s why some people call Debian, Fedora, Arch etc. “GNU/Linux distributions”, to highlight that those components are damn important.

Android uses the Linux kernel (or a modification of), but it lacks practically every single other thing you’d see in a common GNU/Linux distribution. And applications are incompatible - you can’t run Android applications in, say, Debian, nor vice versa.

And, more importantly, Android lacks what makes GNU/Linux worth using: commitment to free and open source software (FOSS).

Sure, you can fork Android. Some already did it; it’s called GrapheneOS. But when people say they want a “Linux phone”, they mean they want a phone version of a GNU/Linux distribution, because of that commitment to FOSS. You don’t get it from Android.

Yup, pretty much. And the field is full of red herring terms, so they can mislead you into believing otherwise: “hallucination”, “semantic” supplementation, “reasoning” models, large “language” model…

And it was really, really invested on the lie, to the point it argued why potatoes would be more active!

After some search, I actually found the prompt and output; I asked Bard (before Google renamed it to Gemini) two years ago, in Portuguese. I’ll provide both the original and a translation; emphasis mine in all cases.

I got it, but only through AI mode:

This extension (Chrome version) might be useful for you. Easier than adding “fuck” to the search, and it doesn’t mess with the results like “fuck” does.