Beware of the Google AI salesman and its cronies
[…] we spent weeks conducting research into air purifiers we reviewed (including models that don’t exist) to determine whether Google Search results and AI Overviews are leading consumers to good advice.
It turns out this rabbit hole is deeper than we thought, with ramifications that span major Reddit communities and could be leading you to scams and defamatory hallucinations.
a relatively easy answer for now:
Does One Line Fix Google?
tenbluelinks.org
or just use another damn search engine, i guess.
via Cory Doctorow (again)
It Awaits Your Experiments.
Because now it’s 2025, and he fucking did it. The Xenotext is live and glowing in Deinococcus radiodurans: iterating away inside that immortal microbial bad-ass that feeds on stainless steel, that resides inside the core of reactor no. 4 at Chernobyl, that does not die in the explosion that disintegrates the Space Shuttle Columbia during orbital reentry. Christian Bök did not give up. Christian Bök did not fail. Christian Bök is going to outlive civilization, outlive most of the biosphere itself.
Wednesday, April 16, 2025
Rational Astrologies and Security
In 2003, [Bruce] Schneier coined the term security theater to describe security measures that provide the feeling of improved security while doing little or nothing to actually achieve it.
[…]
There is another non-security way that designers can spend their security budget: on making their own lives easier. Many of these fall into the category of what has been called rational astrology. First identified by Randy Steve Waldman, the term refers to something people treat as though it works, generally for social or institutional reasons, even when there’s little evidence that it works—and sometimes despite substantial evidence that it does not.
via Cory Doctorow
Saturday, December 7, 2024
This Strange Moment
A message to you from the fleeting present.
For when this moment passes (and it will pass, as all things do), every effort will be taken to erase it from memory, to exclude it from the official record.
Thursday, November 21, 2024
Practice of neurosurgery on Saturn
The practice of neurosurgery on Saturn is almost identical to the one practiced on Earth. Because the art of practice of Medicine was transferred by homo sapiens sapiens “exearthed” 30 years ago from Earth to Saturn.
[…]
These cases give us the means of reflection to improve the practice of Neurosurgery.
A Deadhead Sticker on a Cadillac: Don Henley’s ‘The Boys Of Summer’ at 40
Instead of the counterculture being a metaphor for lost love in ‘The Boys Of Summer’, therefore, the lost love is a metaphor for the counterculture.
