many (e.g. bears) have internal parasites that’ll kill you dead

Hence his infamous brainworm, though tragically he survived it.

It didn’t. It was terrified, in horrible pain, bleeding out, and just trying to defend itself.

I assume the system is working properly and 25% of drivers just drive as erratically sober as the other 75% blind drunk.

And that’s among the ones who managed to get to the study. The percentage would be higher if it took into account the ones who got lost or crashed on the way.

Back then 640KB was supposed to be enough for anyone.

It wasn’t.

HIMEM. SYS, if I recall correctly, allowed you to tell DOS to load as much as possible of itself (and maybe even some drivers?) into “high memory” (within the first, and probably last, megabyte, I believe) if it existed and the processor was at least a 286, freeing more of those precious 640KB for programs to run in (DOS by default didn’t give them any means of addressing any more memory, even if it existed).

There was also expanded memory (EMS) and, from the 286 on, extended memory (XMS), different, incompatible, methods of addressing memory above that first MB (up to a whopping 8MB with EMS and an absurd 4GB with XMS), and depending on what the program you wanted to run required you had to choose one or the other (which became much easier once the memmaker utility came along).

Then true 32-bit software able to access the whole 4GB address space in 386s and later came along, and all that became ancient history, until we started needing more than 4GB and had to move to 64 bits.

The rules mistakenly assumed that politicians would always be intelligent people with the interests of the nation in mind.

They didn’t account for people voting for moronic crooks who openly intended to pillage and rape the nation for their own profit.

To be fair, miasma theory made sense and was completely logical, before microscopes.

They knew about actual lethal gases, and ones that had different effects on the body. They knew there were gases they couldn’t yet detect, as they were still discovering new ones. They knew rotting stuff produced all kind of gases and stenchs.

Hell, the theory is still pretty much valid for radon, though for reasons they couldn’t have possibly imagined.

And at the same time, the idea that animals could get small enough to be invisible, and to invade the human body, was absurd.

It came as quite a surprise when the microscope was invented and every single drop of water turned out to be a whole ecosystem teeming with life, and we turned out to be precariously balanced colonies of microscopic cells, also inhabited by a whole bacterial ecosystem teeming with both friends and foes.

And then came viruses, which are downright absurd to the point that we’re still figuring out where they fit in the tree of life, and whether they’re alive or not.

And prions, which are the stuff of horror science fiction yet completely logical when you think about how proteins work, and how easily they might sometimes not.

Miasma theory wasn’t correct, sure, but it was definitely simpler, and made much more sense than the mess reality turned out to be.

Yes. This guy literally eats roadkill. And brags about it.

Personally I find all celebrity biopics disgusting.

Hey, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story is a classic and a masterpiece, I’ll have you know.

Netscape? We didn’t have Internet when I grew up.

I had to learn from magazines how to configure autoexec.bat to load DOS in high memory, and ask me on boot if whatever game I wanted to run needed extended or expanded memory, and which drivers (mouse, joystick, sound card…) not to load in order to leave enough precious kilobytes of memory available for the game to fit in…

AGI might or might not be inevitable, but LLMs are very evidently not a path leading to it.

If someone really believes AGI is possible and will solve everything, they should be the first waging active war against this generation of “AI”, though at this point it’s almost certainly too late already.

The future has been murdered for short term profit, and once the bubble pops it’ll take ages before anyone invests in anything remotely related to AI again, despite LLMs having absolutely nothing to do with AI.

Not that investment would do any good during the dark ages that are to come while we sift through the remaining slop to try to find any remaining fragments of actual information, science, and culture.

It’s also easy to imagine not sticking your dick in crazy, John, and yet here we are.

Sacrebleu!

How are we supposed to prove we’re old enough…? By pasting in the whole Vaporeon copypasta…?

Their capability to drop off a Wendy’s (or a McDonald’s in Trump’s case) is not (yet) in question.

Their capability to keep it supplied is.

(Specifically their capability to make sure the money intended for that purpose is sufficient and ends up fulfilling that purpose, instead of lining some parasite’s pockets.)

There’s a species of bee that makes honey out of meat (carrion).

I’m quite certain they wouldn’t touch that thing, whatever it is.

And he’s going to bankrupt it.

Turns out Mark Watney jokingly calling himself a space pirate¹, bragging about having colonised Mars, and the like, was one of the most realistic things in The Martian.

1. In the book. In the film he never lost communication with Earth after reactivating Pathfinder, so he had permission to commandeer the Ares IV MAV, and it wasn’t an act of piracy.

In the same vein, Catalonia. The “principality" for sure, with Northern Catalonia (currently in France) and the western strip (currently in Aragon, Spain), with or without Aran (if we can decide our future so should they, though an independent Occitaine is probably a pipe dream, so I’d be partial to a confederation if it’s fine by them), open to a confederation with the rest of the Catalan Countries (Andorra, the Balearic Islands and Valencia) if it’s fine by them; the people in L’Alguer (currently in Sardinia, Italy) should be able to decide if and where they want to fit in.

Also Scotland, though they’re not split.

Any nation without a state that wants to have one (and would have the means to survive as one, but there are some pretty small states out there and most of the ones that aren’t sinking under the sea seem to be doing fine), really.

It’s not AI, it’s LLMs.