You’re spot on regarding how AI operates.

AI is stupid story time!

I recently helped a friend with a self-hosted VPN problem. He had been using a free trial of Gemini Pro to try to fix it himself but gave up after THREE HOURS. It never tried to help him diagnose the issue, but instead kept coming up with elaborate fixes with names that suggested they were known issues, like The MTU Traffic Jam, The Packet Collision Quandary, and, my favorite, The Alpine Ridge Controller Trap. Then it would run him through an equally elaborate “fix”. When that didn’t work, it would use the failure conditions to propose a new, very serious sounding pile of bullshit and the process would repeat.

I fixed it in about fifteen minutes, most of that time spent undoing all the unnecessary static routing, port forwarding, and driver rollbacks it had him do. The solution? He had a typo in the port number in his peer config.

I can’t deny that LLMs are full of useful knowledge. I read through its output and all of its suggestions absolutely would have quickly and efficiently fixed their accompanying issue, even the thunderbolt/pcie bridging issue, if the real problem had been any of them. They’re just garbage at applying that information.

Archive link for anyone who doesn’t want to deal with the “not a paywall”:

https://archive.ph/XeWFy

I would be shocked if he cared. It’s just not amongst his concerns.

I sometimes enjoy white chocolate, but admit it’s only a slight step above eating straight butter and sugar.

The ads seem to be pretty variable depending on usage so I suspect not everyone is seeing the same thing. I rarely use YouTube in any form. When I do and I’m rawdogging it for whatever reason, it seems like I get a few short ads, like 30s or less. They’re annoying but not awful.

A friend keeps YouTube running constantly on his TV in the background while he works. He gets so many ads and they’re so long! Like several minutes of ads, mostly unskippable, over the course of a 15 minute video. I don’t know how people deal with that shit.

Then you won’t believe this: it’s the Phil McGraw School of Medicine at RFK Jr. University. The dean is Dr. Mehmet Oz.

Cancer, and Wolf, refers to the old common term for cancer: wolf. It was thought to be a parasite that ate up the afflicted, like a wolf.

It’s the same as chrisomes. Infant mortality was so high, the ones who died without obvious cause just get lumped together by age group.

Chrisomes refers to those who died within the first month, during the time they’d be baptised. The baptismal cloth, the chrisome, would often be just as a burial shroud.

Teeth meant they were old enough to have one or more teeth, 6-24 months. Teething was thought to be potentially fatal because so many infants died during that period. Correlation, causation, yadda yadda yadda.

Did you ever play any of the early online 3D games where you could build your own little spaces? I remember one where you started in a central hub then could move to this endless plane of green space where people had built homes and similar. It was so empty of people yet full of random things. Nightmare material.

I couldn’t agree more. I initially went to a small community college. I took o chem twice because my first professor was so awful that the entire class would have bombed if he didn’t curve the entire course so hard that we all got Bs or above.

When I retook it at a state university, I learned our confusion was due to him having no goddamn idea what he was talking about. His lectures didn’t match the textbook, which is why we were getting marked off for what often turned out to be actually correct answers on the tests he made.

Just to preface, I’m a scientist: micro- and molecular biology. I’m not saying to take what I say as gospel, just giving context that I might know things. Sometimes.

Outbreeding depression has more possible implications than fertility decrease and infant mortality increase, entirely dependent on the heritable traits responsible for the depression effects. While the probability of persistent outbreeding depression seen in subsequent generationa would be lower due to traits subject to higher selective pressure, like increases in early infant mortality, the overall probability of outbreeding depression itself isn’t influenced post facto by its results, just its persistence.

Given we don’t know the original extent of neanderthal/human interbreeding, what we’re seeing now COULD be the “much lower percentage” you mention and still could come from multiple events. In fact, if these crosses resulted in stronger depression effects, I’d argue a greater number of crossings would be one factor behind the persistence of some genes today.

There ya go. It almost has too many squares.

Even STEM bachelor’s degrees can be a little iffy. I finished my undergrad and felt like what I truly learned was how little I knew.

I’ve tried it a few times for help with technical tasks just outside of my knowledge. It was most useful when giving me bad ideas that I argued against and, in the process, figured out better solutions.

Two ways.

First, sex chromosomes. In mammals, sex is determined by the sex chromosomes - males have XY, females XX. If interbreeding was equal between the sexes of both species, this would be reflected in the frequency of neanderthal genes on each chromosome in the current human population, but it’s more heavily skewed toward the Y chromosome than we’d expect if equal pairing was true. This suggests a higher proportion of successful male neanderthal/female human offspring.

Second, mitochondrial DNA. While genomic DNA in a sexually-reproducing species is a mix between the parents, in most mammals the inherited mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is purely maternal. This is because only the egg’s mitochondria typically survive, though on rare occasion paternal mitochondria are also passed on. There is no known existent neanderthal mtDNA in the human population. This suggests either female neanderthal/male human crosses didn’t happen much and/or didn’t often produce offspring capable of further reproduction.

Of course, there are many other explanations for all of these. These are just amongst the simplest possible options, and in population genetics, it’s not uncommon that the simplest answers are frequently correct.

Keep in mind heterosis isn’t always the result of hybridization and even then the magnitude of isolation doesn’t always positively correlate. Outbreeding depression can also be the result, increasingly so when two groups are more genetically distant or when one group is already subject to heavy inbreeding depression, as the neanderthals were thought to be.

Yes.

He’ll walk away a billionaire. He gives zero fucks.

Why does Yamaha make motorcycles and jet skis but also pianos?

And a bunch of other instruments too. I’ve played a Yamaha piano, electric keyboard, clarinet, trombone, AND French horn. They’re all just okay.

I can smell both this comment and the people that would seriously say something like this.