It’s interesting. There’s a lot of talk about how chatgpt makes people lazy, but honestly I think Google killed the “read the manual” ethos.

Back in the day when you couldn’t just search for everything, you needed enough understanding of the manual to find anything in the index.

So a key part of figuring anything out was reading at least the start of the manual.

Now, fuck it, you just type into Google and try to guess enough context to understand what’s going on.

Hexbear is already flooded with beanis posts.

Looking forward to seeing beanis everywhere in the next version of Facebook’s LLM.

Garmin sends all your health data to the cloud and the app won’t work without an Internet connection.

On the plus side, they’re not part of the Google/Apple/Samsung data ecosystems, and I don’t think actually they do anything with the data, beyond computing statistics for you.

Depends how much you’re prepared to trust them I guess.

Depends.

You can argue that it’s basically art/political speech. You’ve done it to draw attention to flaws in the approach and to highlight how ineffectual the current system is, and that if you actually wanted to do make fake IDs you’d take a much less high-profile approach. As such, there’s no actual criminal intent required.

Don’t know if a judge would buy it though.

Ok, but one of the most important use cases is non-local access.

If I’m at home I can just go to the door.

Go on, drop a rocket on Zuck’s Bond villain hideout.

Let’s see what happens.

To be fair Berlin is 100x better than the rest of Germany.

You absolutely can’t use LLMs for anything big unless you learn to code.

Think of an LLM as a particularly shit builder. You give them a small job and maybe 70% of the time they’ll give you something that works. But it’s often not up to spec, so even if it kinda works you’ll have to tell them to correct it or fix it yourself.

The bigger the job is and the more complex the more ways they have to fuck it up. This means in order to use them, you have to break the problem down into small sub tasks, and check that the code is good enough for each one.

Can they be useful? Sometimes yes, it’s quicker to have an AI write code than for you to do it yourself, and if you want something very standard it will probably get it right or almost right.

But you can’t just say ‘write me an app’ and expect it to be useable.

Commercial versions of these systems exist in the UK.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jun/06/shopper-facewatch-watchlist-39p-paracetamol-london

The Gdpr makes these things harder to do, but not automatically illegal.

Surely you have noticed that there is a lot of criticism of the GDPR and EU tech regulation.

Yeah, and some of it is even true.

So a random person on Reddit claimed there’s about 800 million possible uk mobile numbers, some people have multiple numbers so ballpark 80 million active phone numbers. This gives around a 1:10 chance of picking an active number at random. If there’s actual patterns in the numbers this could be even more likely.

What’s interesting is this won’t have been a realistic sounding number.

Company lines typically start 0300 or 0800 but mobiles are 07… Something.

So if it was just hallucinating, it did so badly.

Also, I want it to go to people outside my org that I email back, not random spammers and salespeople.

For some reason, the only option is to use people in my addressbook which doesn’t auto populate and I never use.

You know open-source doesn’t mean publicly available. It means the person, or in this case the US government, that brought the software should have free access to the source code to edit and distribute it as they like.

So yes, the military should use something functional equivalent to open source to prevent vender lock in and to allow for external audits. They probably shouldn’t give it to Russia or make it freely available online though.

BMI works quite well for typical people.

Either you do so much more exercise than everyone around you that it’s not a good fit for you, or you should take it as a warning sign.

If you think it’s muscle and not fat, there’s another test that you might like to try instead which is the waist to hip ratio. https://www.healthline.com/health/waist-to-hip-ratio

But if you want an honest appraisal of your fitness, just do a fun run. The shortish runs round a park with a bunch of normal people. Either you can keep up without killing yourself and everything is fine, or you’re not as fit as you think.

If LLMs just copied stack overflow they’d respond to every question with “Closed as duplicate. Question already answered.”

How have you managed not to get fibreglass on your skin when handling it?

I used to install it professionally, and even with goggles, a mask, and overalls tucked into your socks and gloves, that shit gets everywhere.

Quentin. Lennon. Benedict. Pletemony.

They said they would remove all encryption rather than installing a backdoor.

It’s good that this attracted some attention, but they still agreed to removed all the protections the UK requested.

What is a game that wouldn’t be solvable if you removed most of the pieces and positions?

I mean, yes. Any game with only a small number of possible moves can be solved with brute force trial and error.

All unsolved games must have a “sufficient amount of positions” that brute force isn’t an option, and enough complexity that there’s not a cute maths trick to solve it despite the number of moves.

Chess is one of these unsolved games.

Mostly.