IIRC from an ornithologist talk, owls have such good evolutionary advantages (eyesight, hearing, silent flight), they don’t have to be “intelligent”. The rest of the raptors are generally considered more “intelligent” for seeking, stalking, and catching prey.

And an airport! I was going to comment about that too, but then realized I have seen neighborhoods like that, nestled between a refinery and warehouses, or between an ababdoned steel mill and a river. I could only imagine what living next to a refinery does to one’s health…

Good engineers will produce more good code, because they ask the right questions, know what good looks like and check the output.

Best code is the code that is never written in the first place. But that concept is difficult to explain and measure for management purposes. Just because “AI” can automate well-structured, tested boilerplate for “good” developers does not mean all that boilerplate should be there.

Instead of headlights 2 feet off the ground, now we have overpowered searchlights (brighter = safer, amirite?) mounted 4 feet high, guaranteed to blind pedestrians and any shorter vehicle’s driver.

Not just mechanical stress, but sugars and carbohydrates in those foods feed the bacteria in the mouth, whose byproducts damage the enamel. Few people are blessed with teeth that withstand it, or mouth flora that is non-damaging, but there is no natural selection for that… Because we have dentistry, thankfully.

“The future” being 59,000 years ago! Neanderthals drilled cavities to treat a toothache

Cautiously optimistic about this one. $500 for a niche Linux phone that works as a phone is fair.

And color LED notifications! Why did we ever get rid of those?

Yes. Visit reddit’s /r/dumbphones for repeated absurd requests on a phone that can support all of the apps necessary, but automagically prevents one from installing social media apps or browsing the web.

“We installed postmarketOS on some older hardware, look, we are saving the planet!”

I am being facetious of course, but it would be great if manufacturers+google opened this up to everyone.

Did not watch the video, but really enjoyed Everyday Utopia - feminist views on labor and family, arguments against current values/ideas of nuclear family, good historical anecdotes, and very little negativity.

Sounds a bit like Bad Mojo, but it was a PC game.

Love the simplicity and pragmatism of both protocol and gemtext markup (not so sure on TLS requirements though). I even use gemtext to write pages for my web site / gemini capsule.

Saving this to repost as response to ignorant “Apple invented smartphones” / “there were no smartphones before iPhone”

Read about it when playing with Gemini (the protocol, not Google garbage), but just like Twitter, did not find a good use for it. Saw maybe one page promoting it.

Barbarian had a joke with landlord getting excited about such “additional square footage”.

pushing the same product with minor updates for greater costs

Works for smartphone manufactuters though

The article says “…had professors assess whether responses might mislead or confuse students.”

professors flagged AI responses as pedagogically harmful only 3.5% of the time, compared to 12% for peer-written answers.

Which makes me think that real people came to some conclusion, sometimes biased or wrong, but AI could have produced inconclusive inflated perhaps-maybe-sometimes text (which it would be good at) 96.5% of the time. Response not being harmful doesn’t mean it’s good.

Don’t worry, we’ll blame teachers for this too. Or make them responsible for controlling it in some ridiculous way.

Isaac Asimov’s future of angry men yelling at uncooperative robots is almost here.

XMPP/Jabber protocol has been used by WhatsApp, and then closed off from the rest of the network. Theoretically, it could be inter-operable.