Budsofstone @budsofstone@computerfairi.es

biden, during his farewell address: “an oligarchy is starting to form”

okay internet explorer personified, its already here

@woe2you @dalias @altruios @tante Disclaimer: I say that working for an AI company. I get to see firsthand how utterly useless LLMs are at their job, whether it's commercially available ones or ones that we train on our own hardware. They can't even produce buggy code correctly. The only useful AI stuff we sell is bespoke tools designed and trained specifically for and with our clients' data. None of it is LLM based.

Last August, Lynch (who had emphysema) said he might never direct again because of the "let it rip" covid unmitigation strategies adopted by governments everywhere.

Wondering how many mourners would willingly, and without prompting, wear a mask around people suffering from Long Covid, respiratory illnesses, or other immune dysfunction, out of respect for their struggle, instead of placing the entire burden on vulnerable disabled people.

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/david-lynch-age-movies-emphysema-smoking-b2591296.html

#DavidLynch

Support your local libraries.

Wow! Biologists seem to have discovered an entirely new kind of life form. They're called 'obelisks', and you probably have some in you.

They were discovered in 2024 - not by somebody actually seeing one, but by analyzing huge amounts of genetic data from the human gut. This search found 29,959 new RNA sequences, completely different from any known. Thus, we don't know where these things fit into the tree of life!

Biologists found them when they were trying to solve a puzzle. Even smaller than viruses, there exist 'viroids' that are just loops of RNA that cleverly manage to reproduce using the machinery of the cell they infect. Viruses have a protein coat. Viroids are just bare RNA - it doesn't even code for any proteins!

But all known viroids only infect plants. The first one found causes a disease in potatoes; another causes a disease in avocados, and so on. This raised the puzzle: why aren't there viroids that infect bacteria, or animals?

Now perhaps we've found them! But not quite: while obelisks may work in a similar way, they seem genetically unrelated. Also, their RNA seems to code for two proteins.

Given how little we know about this stuff, I think some caution is in order. Still, this is really cool. Do any of you biologists out there know any research going on now to learn more?

The original paper is free to read on the bioRxiv:

• Viroid-like colonists of human microbiomes, https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.01.20.576352v1.full

I see just one other paper, about an automated system for detecting obelisks:

• Tormentor: An obelisk prediction and annotation pipeline, https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.05.30.596730v1.full

There's also a budding Wikipedia article on obelisks:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obelisk_(biology)

Stay tuned!

reform

#unix_surrealism #technomage #fosschild #comic #reform #mnt

Protip: do not trust any privacy/anonymity product or service unless the people behind it are explicitly, vocally antifascist.

If they just use vague language about freedom and privacy, and are ambiguous/ambivalent about what the intended purpose is, they're cryptofash.

A pro tip for dining in America.

You can always tell if a place is amazing if white English speaking folks are a minority

#links2gang #links2 #unix_surrealism

two hackers encounter a relic of an ancient past

stanley lieber (https://stanleylieber.com) said this to me once during a heated debate on the best web browsers (mothra v links2). The quote stuck with me ever since.

#unix_surrealism #internet #links2gang #comic

Hilarious XScreenSave privacy policy

https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/google.html

#Android #Alphabet #Google #Multimedia #Linux #POSIX