Does not work for ANY phrase. It seems to be presuming that the person asking is referencing something. Sample results copied here in order of AI’s least theorizing to its most.

• horses before giraffes meaning

“Horses before giraffes” has no scientific meaning because giraffes are not ancestors of horses…

• put your horses before giraffes meaning

“Put your horses before giraffes” is not a recognized English idiom. The similar and well-known idiom is “put the cart before the horse,” …

• always put horses before giraffes meaning

The phrase “always put horses before giraffes” is a variation of the well-known medical aphorism: “When you hear hoofbeats, think of horses, not zebras”…

• titrated solutions beget relief meaning

The phrase “titrated solutions beget relief” means that carefully adjusted or fine-tuned treatments can bring about an end to a problem…

When last night’s phone call from the folks turned to Kirk and violence, I made a point to mention that, yes, there were lots of posts for violent ‘retribution’, but we have no idea how many are just bots trying to stir the pot rather than actual people – but consoled? them that it was still proper to worry because surely those posts would convince some suggestible people that the bot-post ideas are a widely held and acceptable reaction.

From Al Jazeera:

Governor Cox told a news conference on Friday: “On the evening of September 11, a family member of Tyler Robinson contacted a family friend, who then informed the Washington County Sheriff’s Office that Robinson had either confessed to or implied that he had committed the incident.

“This information was relayed to the Utah County Sheriff’s Office and investigators at Utah Valley University and conveyed to the FBI.”

and

Governor Cox said cryptic messages were engraved on shell casings recovered with the rifle, which he read out phonetically. Their meaning is not immediately clear.

One spent shell case read: “Notices, bulges OWO what’s this?”

Cox said three unfired shell cases read: “Hey fascist! Catch! Up arrow symbol, right arrow symbol, and three down arrow symbols”, “Oh Bella Ciao, Bella Ciao, Ciao, Ciao, Ciao” and “If you read this, you are gay, LMAO”.

So he’s online a lot. There’s the wikipedia article on the history of Bella Ciao.

This reminds me of a post a year ago about orb weaver Araneus ventricosus also using fireflies as bait. I thought this would be a follow-up, but they’re talking about a different species here.

Kudos! I no longer have to deal with any of that, but I appreciate it’s been a problem and am glad you took action. Thank you!

It has always been strange to me that anyone would think animals don’t have a wide range of emotions. I understand that a scientist can’t ask how an animal is feeling, and must instead record avoidance/seeking behaviors, but it also seems vanishingly improbable that emotions aren’t part of a long and useful evolutionary methodology to get to the next generation. Cows have friends. Sure, it took effort to prove, but why wouldn’t we expect that? We see mothers nurture their offspring, and we could easily call it love and concern. It is good to see we now have proof that it isn’t just the cuddly creatures with emotions, but at least as far down the scale as fish.

“It is not average precipitation that really is most affected by climate change,” Swain said. “It truly is mathematically correct that the more extreme the rain event, the clearer the connection to climate change is.”

I appreciate the simple examples of the physics (steamy HOT bathroom, sweaty cold beer in HOT air, and less obviously, HOT ground leading to preponderance of summer storms happening later in the day).

I appreciate your skepticism and if I was randomly hearing the tale online, I would probably make the same conclusion. Personally, I believe the guy based on how I’ve seen him treat people for over 40 years and his general politics/world-view. If he’d said it happened to someone else, or if he hadn’t seemed so confused and saddened when he asked me if he was wrong, maybe I’d feel different. As it is, I can imagine his shock at being accused may have lead him to exaggerate how hostile the waitress was, but mostly I’m thinking @[email protected] is correct that it was just a case of mishearing what was said.

I’m hoping that’s what happened because I don’t know what else she could have expected.

Thank you :-)

Off topic? : 80+ year old friend asked me if he did wrong. As he tells it, when dining out, his waitress announced her pronouns were she/her. That was fine by him. Later, he says he asked, “Could you get me a refill on my iced tea?” He says her reply was hostile, “How rude! I told you my pronouns!” He was truly baffled. He did not know how to use her pronouns in a ‘you’ context. I told him he was fine and if it ever came up again, to shoot back with, “Excuse me Miss, but I didn’t ask some other HER for a refill, I asked you, and ‘you’, ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ include all genders.” Maybe I’m ignorant of some new usage, but from grammar stance, I can’t make she/her fit into his request and am fine with ‘you’.

I read that as including human interaction as part of the pain point. They already offer bounties, so they’re doing some money management as it is, but the human element becomes very different when you want up-front money from EVERYONE. When an actual human’s report is rejected, that human will resent getting ‘robbed’. It is much easier to get people to goof around for free than to charge THEM to do work for YOU. You might offer a refund on the charge later, but you’ll lose a ton of testers as soon as they have to pay.

That said, the blog’s link to sample AI slop bugs immediately showed how much time humans are being forced to waste on bad reports. I’d burn out fast if I had to examine and reply about all those bogus reports.

That sounds as likely as any other crazy uninformed reason the Trump team might have.

I do recommend watching those and other government pages because I’m sure this is not the end of the weird edits.

These attacks do not have to be reliable to be successful. They only need to work often enough to be cost-effective, and the cost of LLM text generation is cheap and falling. Their sophistication will rise. Link-spam will be augmented by personal posts, images, video, and more subtle, influencer-style recommendations—“Oh my god, you guys, this new electro plug is incredible.” Networks of bots will positively interact with one another, throwing up chaff for moderators. I would not at all be surprised for LLM spambots to contest moderation decisions via email.

I don’t know how to run a community forum in this future. I do not have the time or emotional energy to screen out regular attacks by Large Language Models, with the knowledge that making the wrong decision costs a real human being their connection to a niche community.

Ouch. I’d never want to tell someone ‘Denied. I think you’re a bot.’ – but I really hate the number of bots already out there. I was fine with the occasional bots that would provide a wiki-link and even the ones who would reply to movie quotes with their own quotes. Those were obvious and you could easily opt to ignore/hide their accounts. As the article states, the particular bot here was also easy to spot once they got in the door, but the initial contact could easily have been human and we can expect bots to continuously seem human as AI improves.

Bots are already driving policy decisions in government by promoting/demoting particular posts and writing their own comments that can redirect conversations. They make it look like there is broad consensus for the views they’re paid to promote, and at least some people will take that as a sign that the view is a valid option (ad populum).

Sometimes it feels like the internet is a crowd of bots all shouting at one another and stifling the humans trying to get a word in. The tricky part is that I WANT actual unpaid humans to tell me what they actually: like/hate/do/avoid. I WANT to hear actual stories from real humans. I don’t want to find out the ‘Am I the A-hole?’ story getting everyone so worked up was an ‘AI-hole’ experiment in manipulating emotions.

I wish I could offer some means to successfully determine human vs. generated content, but the only solutions I’ve come up with require revealing real-world identities to sites, and that feels as awful as having bots. Otherwise, I imagine that identifying bots will be an ever escalating war akin to Search Engine Optimization wars.

If youhave water and a cookpot setup, there’s stuff like this:

• https://www.harmonyhousefoods.com/TRAIL-READY-Gourmet-Soup-Chili-Pack-18-ct_p_2058.html
• https://outdoorherbivore.com/5-day-backpacking-meal-combo-gf-vegan/

Edit: here’s a site that reviewed such insta meals: https://gearjunkie.com/outdoor/backpacking/best-vegan-backpacking-meals

I’m used to seeing heaping plates of grilled veggies drizzled with olive oil in so many restaurants in Italy that I’d have thought it among the easiest countries to get vegan food, but here’s a list of prep steps for future travel.

1. Never expect translations. Unless the government has invited you explicitly, consider yourself an uninvited guest who ought to be thankful for any courtesy.

2. Try to get a phone that can get service where you will be. This can be tricky. If you can’t do that, but you CAN get an internet connection at least some of the time (in hotels, for example) consider bringing a laptop. If that is too bulky, then at the very least pre-translate some phrases you expect to need and take screenshots on your no-signal phone or transcribe onto 3x5 cards you can hand people with full text of both languages on each card (either all on one side or English on the back). Example: I would like vegetables and pasta, but no meat, no eggs, no cheese, and no dairy.

3. Make sure you have an adapter that plugs in to their electric outlets.

4. Learn at least a few key words/phrases: "I’m, ummm… Sono vegano… umm, uhh, … no carne, no latte, no formaggio, no frutti di mare. They may ask something like, “Mangi le uova?” and hopefully you can figure out with hand gestures that they mean ‘eggs’.

5. When you find portable food/snacks, buy some extra in advance so you have a backup.

6. Learn to cook so you know what ingredients go into different foods. Example: Tuscan bread is just flour, water, and yeast. The rest of Italy usually adds some salt. In contrast, biscotti has eggs.

In Italy, vegan options are most likely found in meals sections: Primi, Contorni, and Insalata – you aren’t likely to find vegan options in Antipasti, Secondi, nor (obviously) Formaggi e frutta.

The article talks about anthropomorphism the way people did in the 1950s by treating it as humans falsely attributing human behaviors to animals without bringing up research since then that suggests we share a whole lot of traits.

From a simple mechanical point of view, animals limp when injured, scratch when itchy, sleep when tired, yawn, stretch, eat, sneeze, and so on from the same sorts of triggers that trigger us.

Moreover, does anyone really think humans evolved emotions entirely separate from animals? Do animals not experience fear, lust, aggression, frustration, and so on in ways similar to us? And often for similar abstracted reasons (I’m not going to fight you specifically for a a piece of bloated carrion, but we’ve seen people storm the Aid trucks bringing food to the hungry).

Obviously, humans misinterpret animal behavior all the time and THAT is legitimate anthropomorphism. There’s a meme of a duck ‘laughing’ that anyone who studied duck behavior would recognize as a distressed animal. Don’t smile at monkeys because showing teeth is a threat and if they show THEIR teeth to you, back off. People get stuff wrong all the time, and anthropomorphize frequently, but so much of what animals do is the same as us that the mistakes are understandable.

Instead of saying that people anthropomorphize parent animals licking/grooming their offspring as ‘a mom’s love’, I think it more appropriate to say people recognize a common trait we share. The scientist may term it as a bonding ritual, a need for cleanliness to ward off disease, and/or a method to identify their offspring’s scent and shape, BUT you could say the same thing about human moms (though we aren’t very good at scent and usually lick a napkin to get the smudge off rather than directly licking the child). We’re mostly the same. The attributions are often correct.

Deep in the entrails of the framework, the databases have been glitching: incorrectly issuing penalties and wrongly moving recipients into the Kafkaesque “penalty zone”. The bug was falsely cancelling welfare benefits to thousands of recipients across many years.

That’s a really critical bug. QA is supposed to catch this sort of thing. Development is supposed to fix it, and fast. When the client is a government, it should have the foresight to put in the contract that it will withhold payments until such critical bugs are fixed. If you don’t do that, why would the vendor bother with QA and bug fixes?

And all of that is aside the fact that the whole thing results in busy work, hoop-jumping, and wasting time for both the people administrating it and those trying to get benefits. Sheesh.

i don’t know if they’ll be any good, but I’m planning to see the start of Revival on Syfy and Patience on PBS. I’ll also watch my mom’s show, Resident Alien for its new season.

I fry tofu in a cast iron skillet with a little oil on heat just below the oil’s smoke point.

The trick is to just let the tofu sit in place. Do NOT try to flip it. Let it sit until it gets crispy on the frying side. When it does, I use a thin metal pancake-flipping sort of spatula to turn all the pieces. If they are diced (rather than slabs), I start with pieces in the center of the pan, scooping towards an edge and flipping the first flipper-full, then scooping and flipping the sides and so on so I don’t disturb the pieces I’ve already flipped.