Man, Google AI is the gift that keeps on giving (stupidity)

Some background on this comic:

Transcript:

Reaction to this cartoon baffled me.

Although for the most part I think readers understood the “gag,” a few individuals accused me of having fun at the expense of hydrocephalics. Yep―that’s what they said.

I hope it’s obvious to most people that hydrocephalicus (I still can’t believe it) had nothing to do with the cartoon.

Singling out any tragic disease for ridicule would never fall within my own standards―let alone my editors.

So what do they think about Charlie Brown?

Yeah, I’d be fine with crossposting here, if that’s not seen as spammy or anything

It’s the equivalent of riding into town in a beater car. It works and gets you to where you need to be, but it’s embarrassing to be seen in.

Do you know if there’s something like this chart, but for food instead of supplements?

https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/snake-oil-scientific-evidence-for-nutritional-supplements-vizsweet/

I’ve seen that seed oils are bad. I’ve also seen people that say all oil is bad, and (without having looked into this at all), it seems like the “all oil is bad” people are probably overreacting and it’s something more specific like seed oils or something like that (though what specifically about them is bad?). It’d be nice to see a chart like above with handy links to scientific papers.

While looking this up btw, I found that Scientific American just published something today about seed oils:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/are-seed-oils-bad-for-you-debunking-a-viral-social-media-myth/

Does Green Lantern have to maintain line of sight to power his creations? Would they have to make him watch?

I wonder if it might be a kick in the pants to get us out of a local minimum. That’s probably optimistic as you point out, but what if there’s a huge shift towards better food, so that even if you’re not on it, it’s more effort to eat bad food?

Huh, just discovered that it’s now generic in Canada

Semaglutide’s patent protection expired in Canada at the beginning of 2026. (Novo Nordisk failed to pay a required patent maintenance fee.)

My understanding is that it’ll be generic in the US soon too, and any improvements are just in delivery methods (pill vs injection). I’d agree that if it is able to be locked behind expensive patents that there might not be much societal change, but if you assume that it’s as easy to get as tylenol or something, that seems big.

For more in that vein, see Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex, by Larry Niven

Thought this was a fair look at speed in both Rust and C. It doesn’t really try to answer the question, so much as examine some ways of thinking about it. For those not aware, the author is someone heavily involved in Rust, but I didn’t feel like that biased the article.

Was reminded of this essay from this post, which asks about speech synthesis.

Looking back towards excitement over stuff like Big Data, the hype wasn’t exactly misplaced, it just lacked for compute and a bit of optimization. I remember talking with a linguist probably a decade ago who said that trying to do NLU (putting aside arguments about “actual” understanding) with Big Data is like trying to build a ladder to the moon. It turns out that we can build a pretty good ladder.

The Bitter Lesson talks about speech recognition instead of synthesis, but I would guess that it’s a similar dynamic:

In speech recognition, there was an early competition, sponsored by DARPA, in the 1970s. Entrants included a host of special methods that took advantage of human knowledge—knowledge of words, of phonemes, of the human vocal tract, etc. On the other side were newer methods that were more statistical in nature and did much more computation, based on hidden Markov models (HMMs). Again, the statistical methods won out over the human-knowledge-based methods. This led to a major change in all of natural language processing, gradually over decades, where statistics and computation came to dominate the field. The recent rise of deep learning in speech recognition is the most recent step in this consistent direction. Deep learning methods rely even less on human knowledge, and use even more computation, together with learning on huge training sets, to produce dramatically better speech recognition systems. As in the games, researchers always tried to make systems that worked the way the researchers thought their own minds worked—they tried to put that knowledge in their systems—but it proved ultimately counterproductive, and a colossal waste of researcher’s time, when, through Moore’s law, massive computation became available and a means was found to put it to good use.

Also posted over in [email protected] here, since I was reminded of the essay

Some background on this comic:

Transcript:

As a reader pointed out to me, bananas don’t grow this way. The individual bananas grow upward, not downward (as I’ve drawn them here).

One side of me wants to say, “So sue me,” but the truth is, it does bug me when I make these kinds of mistakes.

I use RunnerUp from F-Droid and it works great:

https://f-droid.org/packages/org.runnerup.free/

For those that haven’t seen it:

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/does-he-bite

I just realized that the original C&H comic wasn’t this meme and someone edited it into the meme.

Great execution on a clever idea. As convenient as ipads and touchscreens can be, tactile interaction like this is probably way better for development.

Not an EE but I work with a lot of them and I think the enthusiasm rubs off on me

Yeah, I think that’s a good summary. I tried finding an article I read a while back that talked about it more from that angle, as in “Why does π keep showing up everywhere?”, but can’t track it down.

In consolation, here’s the Tau Manifesto, which talks up why τ (i.e. 2π) is the better number to use, and also a post about the evil twin of π, called ϖ:

https://mathstodon.xyz/@johncarlosbaez/113703444230936435

I wonder how the German planes were received at the time. The swastika has a long history before Nazism, but it seems heavily used by Nazis at that point:

On 14 March 1933, shortly after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor of Germany, the NSDAP flag was hoisted alongside Germany’s national colours. As part of the Nuremberg Laws, the NSDAP flag – with the swastika slightly offset from centre – was adopted as the sole national flag of Germany on 15 September 1935.

The Nuremberg Laws mentioned straightforwardly created legal dehumanization, but it wouldn’t really surprise me if a lot of people just said “not my problem” and didn’t think anything of the swastikas at the time.

I also wonder if at this point, Germany had started focusing on producing warplanes. A quick search shows this chart, which indicates that they were already ramping up for war: