Tootfinder

LLMs never make mistakes or hallucinate, as this presupposes they actually know what they’re doing—they don’t: they have no concept of what words mean.
They don’t even deal with language, as they generate chains of big numbers based on statistical correlations.
The resulting transformation into human-readable text is always only a statistical approximation of what a real answer could maybe look like.
By sheer chance sometimes LLMs are even correct (usually for trivial things); however above a certain length of answer it is always wrong.

When people say "Thank god!" I often answer "You're welcome".
(There are situations, to be avoided, in which such an answer might invite a physical confrontation.)
(Although there have been times when I looked like Moses - long beard and hair - and stood on the beach in Santa Monica with a wooden staff trying to command the Catalina channel to part, I hew to the position that if there were to be a god it would be in each individual creature, not in some bu…

Reminder that you can respond to just about any statement with either "not with that attitude" or "that's what they want you to think," and if you're pressed on who "they" are you can reply with "don't ask questions when you're not prepared to deal with the answers"

How does Ukrainian culture survive war? One Austrian foundation has a long-term answer: https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/26/how-does-ukrainian-culture-survive.html

Republic of Ireland <--> Clarified blue porn
-- anagrama

Day 30: Elizabeth Moon
This last spot (somehow 32 days after my last post, but oh well) was a tough decision, but Moon brings us full circle back to fantasy/sci-fi, and also back to books I enjoyed as a teenager. Her politics don't really match up to Le Guin or Jemisin, but her military experience make for books that are much more interesting than standard fantasy fare in terms of their battles & outcomes (something "A Song of Ice and Fire" achieved by cribbing from history but couldn't extrapolate nearly as well). I liked (and still mostly like) her (unironically) strong female protagonists, even if her (especially more recent) forays into "good king" territory leave something to be desired. Still, in Paksenarion the way we get to see the world from a foot-soldier's perspective before transitioning into something more is pretty special and very rare in fantasy (I love the elven ruins scene as Paks travels over the mountains as an inflection point). Battles are won or lost on tactics, shifting politics, and logistics moreso than some epic magical gimmick, which is a wonderful departure from the fantasy norm.
Her work does come with a content warning for rape, although she addresses it with more nuance and respect than any male SF/F author of her generation. Ex-evangelicals might also find her stuff hard to read, as while she's against conservative Christianity, she's very much still a Christian and that makes its way into her writing. Even if her (not bad but not radical enough) politics lead her writing into less-satisfying places at times, part of my respect for her comes from following her on Twitter for a while, where she was a pretty decent human being...
Overall, Paksenarrion is my favorite of her works, although I've enjoyed some of her sci-fi too and read the follow-up series. While it inherits some of Tolkien's baggage, Moon's ability to deeply humanize her hero and depict a believable balance between magic being real but not the answer to all problems is great.
I've reached 30 at this point, and while I've got more authors on my shortlist, I think I'll end things out tomorrow with a dump of also-rans rather than continuing to write up one per day. I may even include a man or two in that group (probably with at least non-{white cishet} perspective). Honestly, doing this challenge I first thought that sexism might have made it difficult, but here at the end I'm realizing that ironically, the misogyny that holds non-man authors to a higher standard means that (given plenty have still made it through) it's hard to think of male authors who compare with this group.
Looking back on the mostly-male authors of SF/F in my teenage years, for example, I'm now struggling to think of a single one whose work I'd recommend to my kids (having cheated and checked one of my old lists, Pratchett, Jaques, and Asimov qualify but they're outnumbered by those I'm now actively ashamed to admit I enjoyed). If I were given a choice between reading only non-men or non-woman authors for the rest of my life (yes I'm giving myself enby authors as a freebie; they're generally great) I'd very easily choose non-men. I think the only place where (to my knowledge) not enough non-men authors have been allowed through to outshine the fields of male mediocrity yet is in videogames sadly. I have a very long list of beloved games and did include some game designers here, but I'm hard-pressed to think of many other non-man game designers I'd include in the genuinely respect column (I'll include at least two tomorrow but might cheat a bit).
TL;DR: this was fun and you should do it too.
#30AuthorsNoMen

Usually the answer is staring at you, mostly for a couple of years. I run around in niri, river, what have you.
And then i open my sway session, with all tools by @… , known to me from his Archlabs days and now on Slackware.
And it gives me exactly everything I want and need 😂 Merry Xmas, Piotr!

The chat interface was a marketing bet. Selling #AI as if it is not auto complete. It still is.
"#ChatGPT shifted the user’s relationship to text, moving the prompt from a ‘piece of writing for the model to finish’ to a ‘question calling for an answer’."

What Was ChatGPT?
A Chatbot Optimized for Social Distance Three years after the launch of ChatGPT, we can finally speak in hindsight about what it was and how it came to be. Its meteoric rise shocked the world, gathering more users in less time than any product launch in history. But that specific

Here’s my 35th “Long Links” outing, curation of long-form offerings, which assume that nobody has time to read all this stuff but one or two of the pieces might brighten your day. This one is mostly political but some of the politics are from France and China. Plus a way-cool analytical history of blogging and a section labeled “wonderful things”.

Getting all the battery banks charged up and ready just in case we lose power this weekend.
#scwx #preparedness