Welcome to the State of Ninneso!
I read several articles today talking about the much improved ChatGPT 5 model. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has claimed that it is now like having a whole team of PhDs in your pocket.
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Who is ‘Ubergeek’ Kelly Adams?
The first week of Blaugust is over, but I’m still feeling like I’m just starting this event up. So I’ll fall back on the writing prompts for the first week and talk about myself in this post rather than coming up with something new.
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Sadly disabling ActivityPub due to Discord weirdness
Weight loss via semaglutide
I decided this spring that my non-stop race towards morbid obesity needed to be addressed. I have been trying vainly for a couple of years to slow the process down by gradually increasing my activity levels and making a comically unsuccessful attempt to reduce my calorie intake. But it seemed as if my own willpower was insufficient to the task: the numbers on the scale kept going up. I made the decision to try a medical intervention via the modern ‘miracle’ of GLP-1 agonists.
This is my (hopefully succinct) story.
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AI may soon be worthless…
I read an article today over on The Register about how AI may be entering its ‘model collapse’ phase. The basic idea is that more and more of the content that AI ingests to produce its models is, in fact, AI generated. This means that, at its best, AI’s responses will decrease in quality. This sounds very bad, and very predictable.
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Always in focus VR/AR? Maybe coming soon
I am interested in virtual and augmented reality technologies. But I have fairly bad eyes with a complicated prescription, and these technologies all cause me some (quite literal) headaches as well as nausea. That limits my interest to the theoretical: I own exactly zero such devices.
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Always escape special characters…
I came across this report of a bug with iOS Messages voice transcription feature and found it to be rather interesting. Cutting to the chase: Messages will silently fail if voice transcription tries to use an ampersand (“&”) as part of a proper name.
The example that started the investigation was a message containing “Dave and Busters”. This is the name of a U.S. restaurant chain with the proper name “Dave & Busters”. The Apple transcription feature smartly applies the correct trademark name using the ampersand, but Messages silently rejects the message containing the “&” as invalid XHTML.
Oh dear, Apple: that is embarrassing. But also all-so-human.
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Life is a treadmill…
Irene and I are not people who exercise much. Yet over the years we have collected a stable of expensive exercise equipment, the primary purpose of which is to collect dust.
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Screenshot
Fuse go ‘boom’
I have a healthy fear of high current electrical equipment. Anything over an amp and I’m looking for a way to disconnect the mains and insulate myself. I don’t mess with microwaves or the internals of old CRTs without serious trepidation.
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