Fuck, this is hilarious!

Those are used with urine, not blood. Urine is yellow-ish, but since it’s just a drop, it doesn’t stain the strip; instead, the blue tip changes colour as it reacts with the glucose in the urine. Then you compare that coloured tip with a chart, and you get an idea of the concentration of glucose in your body. Picture related:

I remember seeing those bottles in my bathroom all the time as a kid (my sister is diabetic).

These almost look more like ph or ketone test strips…

It is roughly the same idea as the one behind the litmus test for pH, indeed. The difference is which substance you’re putting there (Benedict’s reagent vs. pH indicators) and which substance you’re testing for (glucose vs. H₃O⁺ / OH⁻).

If you’re talking about strips that look like this:

I believe that most brands use Benedict’s reagent: copper sulphate, sodium citrate, sodium carbonate. It interacts with reducing sugars (like glucose) and the colour goes from blue to light green to green to brown-green to brown-red, depending on concentration.

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The only time that I remember dreaming with my phone, I was trying to turn it off, while its real life counterpart rung furiously.

I’ve dreamt some times with my desktop though. Such as:

• my cat pulling out the mouse from my computer, sitting in its place on the mousepad, and then meowing loudly (she does this a lot when she’s play-hunting)
• throwing potatoes on the screen, so I could get some French fries in return
• keyboard gardening: the keys were subbed with small pots full of dirt, some with small versions of plants. A lot of them were pepper plants and I was trying to cross-breed them.

Shinji, from Evangelion.

He’s 14. His mum is dead. His dad is a piece of shit and a manipulative bastard, who sees him as nothing but a pawn. “Emotionally traumatised” doesn’t even start to describe him. He’s pressured to pilot a mecha and if he fucks things up people will die, he knows that they will die, and that it’ll be his fault.

And yet people expect him to be assertive or to not have meltdowns? Come the fucking on.

I’m almost 40. More than a decade ago I used to live on my own, then decided to move back with my mum. It was better for both - splitting expenses, keeping her company, splitting tasks, so goes on.

Kind of. I live with my mother so the house expenses are shared - sometimes I’m short on money and she covers it for me, sometimes it’s the opposite.

Sometimes either of us cover my sister’s financial arse too, even if she doesn’t live with us.

This screams FAITH (Filthy Assumptions Instead of THinking) from a distance, on multiple levels:

1. Assuming that the current machine learning development will lead to artificial general intelligence. Will it?
2. Assuming that said AGI would appear in time to reduce power consumption. Will it?
3. Assuming that lowering the future power consumption will be enough to address issues caused by the current power consumption. Will it?
4. Assuming that addressing issues from a distant future means that the whole process won’t cause harm for people in a nearer future. Will it?

Furthermore, Gates in the quote is being disingenuous:

“Let’s not go overboard on this,” he said. “Datacenters are, in the most extreme case, a 6 percent addition [to the energy load] but probably only 2 to 2.5 percent. The question is, will AI accelerate a more than 6 percent reduction? And the answer is: certainly,” Gates said.

The answer addresses something far, far more specific than the main issue.

If I may, here’s my alternative solution for the problem, in the same style as Gates’:

Kill everyone between the North Pole and the Equator.

What do you mean, it would kill 85% people in the world? Well, you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs, right? Nobody that I know personally lives there, so Not My Problem®. (Just keep Japan, I need my anime to watch.)

…I’m being clearly sarcastic to deliver a point here - it’s trivially easy to underestimate issues affecting humankind, and problems associated with their solutions, if you are not directly affected by either. Gates is some billionaire bubbled around rich people; this sort of problem will affect the poor first, as the rich can simply throw enough money into their problems to make them go away.

Jet lag is the hell of a drug. And not a fun one.

More like the straw that broke the camel’s back. And a sign that Microsoft’s behaviour is still the same as it was in IE times.

I know that this expression desensitises people to something serious, but it describes Microsoft - the “it”/corporation - perfectly: rapist mentality. It shows how eager Microsoft is to disregard consent, users saying “no, I don’t want it”, and to force itself over the users as long as it gets some benefit out of it.

Including new obnoxious advertisement slots into an already released product - one that you paid for - is only a result of that mentality.

Is it? [coherent]

Yes when it comes to the relevant info. The anaphoric references are all over the place; he, her, she, man*, they all refer to the same fossil.

*not quite an anaphoric reference, I know. I’m still treating it as one.

I can only really guess whether they’re talking about one or two subjects here.

It’s clearly one. Dated to be six years old, of unknown sex, nicknamed “Tina”.

Why does it show someone cared for the mother as well?

This does not show lack of coherence. Instead it shows the same as the “is it?” from your comment: assuming that a piece of info is clear by context, when it isn’t. [This happens all the time.]

That said, my guess (I’ll repeat for emphasis: this is a guess): I think that this shows that they cared for the mother because, without doing so, the child would’ve died way, way earlier.

That all reads like bad AI writing to me.

I genuinely don’t think so.

Modern LLMs typically don’t leave sentence fragments like “on the territory of modern Spain. Years ago.” They’re consistent with anaphoric references, even when they don’t make sense in the real world. And they don’t screw up with prepositions, like switching “in” with “on”. All those errors are typically human.

On the other hand, LLMs fail hard on a discursive level. They don’t know the topic (in this case, the fossil). At least this error is not present here.

Based on that I think that a better explanation for why this text is so poorly written is “CBA”. The author couldn’t be arsed to review it. Myself wrote a lot of shit like this when drunk, sleepy, or in a rush.

I’ll go a step further and say that the author likely speaks more than one language, and they were copying this stuff from some site in another language that has grammatical gender. I’m saying this because it explains why the anaphoric references are all over the place.

The article is coherent (it conveys the relevant info without contradicting itself) albeit poorly written. Most likely the result of someone getting really sloppy while writing it, perhaps sleep-deprived. But it doesn’t read like AI stuff, nor a translation - cue to “Cova Negra cave” (lit. “Black Cave cave”).

If I were to watch Dragon Ball Z now, I’d probably drop the series. I still remember it fondly, but it’s too slow.

The first two seasons of the Pokémon anime aged well for me. Individual games, too. But the series as a whole felt from an “I know all 386!” to “…it’s a Tentaquil”.

Chrono Trigger went from “it’s okay, it’s fun” to “…I spent my whole life underrating it, didn’t I?” So did Final Fantasy VI.

Same deal with Dostoyevsky. I guess you need some maturity to understand things.

Baudelaire, though? Hard pass.

I still love 1984 and Animal Farm, but I want to drown 90% of the muppets talking about them.

I can’t stand Legião Urbana any more. Pink Floyd on the other hand aged well, so did Nenhum de Nós.

To be honest I was never too much into movies. There’s one or another thing that I like (Modern Times, 8 1/2, The Shining), but it’s mostly unchanged.

Those mistakes would be easily solved by something that doesn’t even need to think. Just add a filter of acceptable orders, or hire a low wage human who does not give a shit about the customers special orders.

That wouldn’t address the bulk of the issue, only the most egregious examples of it.

For every funny output like “I asked for 1 ice cream, it’s giving me 200 burgers”, there’s likely tens, hundreds, thousands of outputs like “I asked for 1 ice cream, it’s giving 1 burger”, that sound sensible but are still the same problem.

It’s simply the wrong tool for the job. Using LLMs here is like hammering screws, or screwdriving nails. LLMs are a decent tool for things that you can supervision (not the case here), or where a large amount of false positives+negatives is not a big deal (not the case here either).

could you say that town is homelessnessless?

Has. The word is legit, but it would be an adjective because of the last -less there, so:

• That town has homelessnessless.
• That homelessnessless town is nice.

You could convert it back into a noun, through zero derivation; for example “homeless” is an adjective too, but people can say “the homeless are hungry”, as if it was a noun. But it sounds weird in this situation, I don’t know why.

Because English is half a dozen languages wrapped in a trenchcoat?

A language is not its vocabulary; that’s like pretending that the critter is just its fur.

English vocabulary is from multiple sources, but that is not exactly unique or special.

All languages are the result of the collective brainfarts of lazy people. English is not special in this regard.

What you’re noticing is two different sources of new words: making at home and borrowing it from elsewhere.

For a Germanic language like English, “making at home” often involves two things:

• compounding - pick old word, add a new root, the meaning is combined. Like “firetruck” - a “truck” to deal with “fire”. You can do it recursively, and talk for example about the “firetruck tire” (the space is simply an orthographic convention). Or even the “firetruck tire rubber quality”.
• affixation - you get some old word and add another non-root morpheme. Like “home” → “homeless” (no home) → “homelessness” (the state of not having a home).

The other source of vocabulary would be borrowings. Those words aren’t analysable as the above because they’re typically borrowed as a single chunk (there are some exceptions though).

Now, answering your question on “why”: Norman conquest gave English a tendency to borrow words for “posh” concepts from Norman, then French. And in Europe in general there’s also a tendency to borrow posh words from Latin and Greek.

My orc did get hungry a few times, but on a lighter side the range of available food is larger than the other races. Kobolds? Poison resist! Tripe? Nom nom nom. That dead pet? Waste not, want not. Goblin? What’s up with cannibalism, meat is meat!