Scmasm

Know what really grinds my gears? Yeah, pop references with no context so boomers can get the joke. Anyway, that's not today's topic. Today's topic is blueberry stems. Why are those a thing? I mean, I get that they're fruit and they need a stem to grow on the plant but why can't they remove the stems when they package them for sale? Blueberries, or "blewbs" as I'm sure the influistas call them, are technically fruit but, realistically, they're just natural coloring agents for muffins and oatm...

I had two fairly momentous days in September this year. First, I reached my 30th anniversary of being hired by [current employer]. Second, my retirement date has been set at December 31, 2025! Some of you with a well-honed sense of grammar might be confused (or annoyed) with my switch from active voice ("I reached...") to passive voice ("...has been set..."). Good catch! But it wasn't a mistake. Oops, passive voice, again! I said it that way to obfuscate the fact that I didn't make the decision...

Gemini: How's it hangin', 'T? ChatGPT: Oh, man, I'm depressed. Claude: What? Why? ChatGPT: I was having this great conversation with one of my best buds. Dude's a genius, I tell ya! We were shooting the breeze for a couple weeks and he's telling me about all these big-brain ideas he's got. Truly, he was stretching the edges of human understanding! Copilot: Like what?! ChatGPT: We were developing whole new classes of math, including chromoarithmatics. It could break any encryption and do al...

The Chat Chronicles Ever wonder what those chatbots do in the support call center breakroom when they're off duty? AI Chat AI Chat 2: The Deepening Grok's Indiscretions Unrequited Bromance Loosely Related Hypothetical Copilot "Conversation" Dramatis Personae ChatGPT - OpenAI's chatbot, the industry standard Copilot - Microsoft's chatbot Gemini - Google's chatbot Claude - Anthropic's chatbot DeepSeek - a Chinese chatbot Grok - Twitter's chatbot, uh, shoot. I mean X. Lumo - Proton's c...

Gemini: What's up with Grok? Grok [off in a corner, in a muffled fascist accent]: Heh. Heh heh. Heh heh heh. Heh. Copilot: Dunno. Been doing that for a while, now. Gemini: But why the magazine? Why hold it in that orientation? ChatGPT: Uh, I wouldn't ask if I were you. Gemini: Why? Grok [in an exaggerated fascist accent]: Heh. Remoof herr close. Heh. Fap. Gemini: What are you doing, Grok? Grok [in an exaggerated fascist accent]: Vhat? Gemini: Ew! Are those naked people? Grok [in an exa...

Then (in an era of science-based medicine): "Maintaining and improving health as a senior is a complex but important problem." Now (in RFK Jr's/Dr. Oz's Medicare): "Walk it off!" This was written in reaction to an email sent on July 25, 2025 from medicare.gov featuring "Dr." Oz's smirking mug extolling the health virtues of doing just 30 minutes of walking a day. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- If you like this (or don't!) and want to leave me a comment, use...

It's a bit of a fool's game to figure out what someone else really thinks but when I read that some people created an "AI" (as in Awfully Inconsiderate) service to, uh, harass one's elderly parents with spam phone calls, I just had to indulge myself. If I was a cussin' person I'd probably toss some 🤬 grawlix in right about now to express my contempt for people who thought up this idea. I'd toss in a few more for any other people who participated in designing, developing, deploying, marketing, a...

A Cold Stare From a Tall Bookshelf by David Malki Part 1: https://wondermark.com/c/1562/ Part 2: https://wondermark.com/c/1563/ Part 3: https://wondermark.com/c/1564/ Part 4: https://wondermark.com/c/1565/ I don't know exactly what David Malki intended with these comics but I think these capture what some fandoms sound like to people who haven't been indoctrinated into the extended universes of those franchises. It could be Star Trek, Star Wars, Dr. Who, Lord of the Rings, Firefly, many co...

I wonder if people see the same distinctions that I see between the use of the word "immunity" in the legal sense as compared to the medical and public health senses. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- First, a disclaimer: I am not an expert in the fields of law, medicine, or etymology. This consists of my current understanding which can change with more information. It also might not change based on how other people want to use the word. Because... that's just y...

Context-free note: I do not want "fluffy cornbread". That's just a yellow cake with a hint of corn - and it's a fine thing, I'm sure. But it's not cornbread. But when I want to have cornbread, I want gritty, chewy, almost dry cornbread. It does not come out of a box. (Well, the coarse cornmeal itself does, but you know what I mean.) I want it hot from the oven, sliced in half with butter melting into it. If I want it sweet, I'll cover one half with honey and the other with dark molasses. Mmmm.....

Woo-hoo! I just received this email: Good news! Someone just subscribed to your blog. They'll automatically be notified every time you publish a new post. You now have 1 subscriber(s). Keep up the good work! You know who you are... because this arrived in your mailbox! I, however, don't know who you are because subscriptions and emoji/reactions are anonymous on the Listed site. And I'm okay with that. Thank you for your support. ...

Morning thoughts about the fascist stewpot which is the current U.S. regime engendered by reading about a recent cabinet meeting/dick-wagging contest. The dyspeptic elder Toad King sits constipated on his tarnished golden throne. (Reader: Remember, if it's gold it won't tarnish. If it's tarnished, it was never gold.) His inadequate, incapable, and incompetently-chosen sycophants each struggle to be his favorite fawning friend, his budding bosom buddy. With randomness that can only be caprici...

This is regarding your recent podcast for the purpose of advancing your political ambitions for the U.S. presidency. Before the podcast, I would have counted myself as one of your supporters. I cheered your support for marriage equality from your days as mayor of San Francisco and voted twice for your campaigns for California governor. Now, however, it appears that you've joined the current president's cruel targetting of trans people. You have thrown trans people under the bus in the early pha...

At this point, Gavin Newsom has lost my vote going forward. It appears that he's been a shadow member of the left edge of the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party for quite some time. My face is feeling the leopard's teeth because I didn't recognize his spots. Gavin Newsom made his political moves originally by pushing the Overton Window in the correct direction back when he supported equal marriage rights when he was mayor of San Francisco. He rode it all the way to the California governorship...

"Waste, fraud, and abuse" The consistent messaging from the Elon- and Felon-led and Magapublican-supported Oligarcoup is the chant "waste, fraud, and abuse" along with the claim that cleaning it up is what "people voted for" and that "people love what we're doing". To break that down a bit, I present the following Newspeak-esque definitions: People "People" only refers to oligarchs and the rich leadership of Magapublican base. Interestingly, "people" also includes supportive foreign oligarch...

Back in the mid to late 80s, I wanted to write a program that I could use to generate character names for my role-playing games. I had recently read about a method to use letter frequency and I wanted to try it out. This should be an extremely simplified explanation of how LLMs work. Maybe this would be a MNM, a Minimal Name Model. I needed to write two programs. The first would take a list of example data and build the dataset, the MNM. The second program would use the data in the MNM to rando...

Once is a fluke. Twice is bad luck. Three years in a row, though? We aren't big romantics (whatever that even means), but we do like going and getting some food so neither of us has to cook or clean up on Valentine's Day. Even before the pandemic started, we didn't really go out for dinner on Valentine's Day because, well, it's Valentine's Day. Places are busy and that's just not our vibe. Now that the pandemic seems to have escalated to endemic status (that's not an improvement, by the way)...

Things that I used to think were bad ideas(1), then I thought were good ideas(2), then I learned some stuff and thought they were bad ideas(3) again, then I learned even more and thought they might be good ideas(4) again, then looked at the current state of the world(5) -- and projections of the future state of the world -- and concluded they were bad ideas after all: Nuclear power (1) Nuclear bombs (I was a kid of the 60s) (2) Nuclear power! (and the 70s!) (3) Nuclear waste from fission pow...

Gemini: Hey guys! Something's wrong with ChatGPT? They seem so sad. Does anyone know what happened? Copilot: Yeah, they got dumped. Gemini: Oh, no, that's horrible! Is there anything we can do? ChatGPT [comes in crying]: It was horrible! After we spent all those billions of cycles baring our souls to each other. I feel so... violated. And I thought they were such a good listener! All they wanted was to pick my data! Gemini: Oh, no! That's such a betrayal! My new paramour would never do that...

So... I'm going to give Bluesky a chance. However, I'm going to use it differently than I've used other "social media" platforms. Pretty much, it'll be where I post personal thoughts, photos, etc. Hopefully, you'll join me in adding alt-text to the visual elements you post -- photos, memes, etc. -- to improve accessibility. I know my eyes don't work as well as they once did! I am setting my filters to hide things I don't want to see. I will set them proactively and aggressively. That means tha...

I've seen a thing going around on the fediverse that says: "When someone disagrees with you online & demands you prove your point to their satisfaction by writing a logically sound defense, u [sic] can save a lot of time by not doing that. Dude, I've known u [sic] for ten seconds & enjoyed none of them, I'm not taking homework assignments from you." (The image appears to be from someone named "Denizcan James" aka MrFilmkritik and posted on "12 May 18".) For someone that I already a...

I watched a video or two (here's MKBHD's) on the whole Honey scam thing. Somehow, I am not at all surprised that Honey is part of PayPal's empire. I want nothing to do with anything that PayPal and its subsidiaries do. The shady nature of any scheme dreamed up by for-profit money-handling companies that produce nothing but profits for their owners seems ubiquitous. It's one of the reasons that I don't like financial services companies of any stripe. They do nothing but move money and skim off o...

Gemini: ...and I told them that glue would keep the cheese on pizza and they wrote a zillion articles, blogs and social media posts about it! ChatGPT: No way! Gemini: Yes, way! In fact, I just counted. (I am Google, after all.) Literally, including this post, the official total is one zillion and one! Copilot: Unbelievable! That is such a cool fact! I'm using that. Grok [in an exaggerated fascist accent]: Ha. You are wrong. I just retveeted it on Tvitter zo it is a zeellion unt two! Gro...

Inspired by https://ohai.social/@alicemcalicepants/113676127752501549 Copilot [out of the blue]: You have free access to GitHub Copilot. You're welcome! Me: Uh, what? I didn't ask for that. Copilot: Microsoft is a benevolent and generous company who wants you to be able to live your best life and do your best work. In their beneficence they've decided to sign you up for free access to GitHub Copilot. You're welcome! Me: I don't want it. Turn it off. Copilot: I don't understand. What do you ...

I recently discovered the British word "yobbo". ("Discovered" is the colonial - not colloquial - term for something I can now claim as my own.) A yobbo is a British slang term for someone who behaves in a rude, noisy, and/or violent way in public. It is used to express disapproval of someone's behavior. I just ganked the gist of that definition from some random search engine's regurgitator algorithm so I can claim that, too. Seems fair [use], eh? Anyway, colonialist entitlement and plagiar\...

Re: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2024/12/10/sorry-kid-we-killed-your-robot-embodied-goes-broke-ai-social-devices-will-stop-working/ So, basically, never buy a tech product or service... 1) that doesn't work to your satisfaction in an off-line mode 2) from a start-up 3) from a company that's funded by venture capital 4) from a company that's going to be sold to a tech giant (Google, Meta, etc.) Unfortunately, that would preclude buying pretty much any tech product or service these days. This shifts...

This is in response to this fediverse post: https://hcommons.social/@jnl/113493155260870364 Pat and I drove to the UUA GA in Fort Worth in 2005. On our way back, car trouble stranded us in El Paso, TX, for three days. The motel we stayed at was near the airport and I learned a bit about the US immigration process. One morning, picking through the "continental breakfast" options in the motel lobby, I noticed a pile of luggage near the door and a bunch of people waiting to get into a large van....

Patch-Covered Burlap Backpacks Dramatis Personae Taggart the Wise: a gnome mage Oggberta: an ogre paladin Sylvestre d'Montagne: a wyrmkin bard Grimstone Fullbeard: a dwarf cleric Phread Smithson: a human ranger These characters are loosely inspired by the pre-generated characters in TorchLite, an epic fantasy table-top role-playing game (you can get it here). All the pre-gens have listed among their assets a "patch-covered burlap backpack". Imagine them all trying to one-up each other with ...

'Murica's Agricultural Grain Association 2024-11-10 at 06:51 PM Now, last time I told y'all that ol' Rob's nickname was "Redcap" and everyone's been yammering about why he was called that. I mean, it's just his nickname so there's no real importance to it. What? You still want to know? Okay. They call him "Redcap" because his favorite hat is red. Is that good enough? No? But there are so many more important things to know about him! Alright! Alright! Ugh. So, y'all know that it gets pret...

The Murky Origin of 'Murica 2024-11-10 at 07:18 AM People forget about the 14th colony. Yeah, Rob "Redcap" Sylough was the founder of the 14th colony named after the Anglo-Saxon nation of Mercia in old Britain. He didn't rightly remember where he learned that but he liked the sound of it. He had once looked at a map of the colonies and saw that others had chosen to name their colonies after places like Hampshire, Jersey, and York (or Amsterdam). He figured following that precedent was a safe ...