Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • The trouble with Calories

    Western society is, we're told, an increasingly overweight one. Depending on how we define 'overweight', it seems that between 30% and 50% of American adults are overweight. The situation isn't much better in most of the industrialized world.

    For years we were taught, and then went on to teach, that this problem is simple to fix, at least conceptually: it's just a matter of Calories in and Calories out. So long as these two figures match, you'll neither gain nor lose weight. If more of us are overweight, it's because increasingly we either eat too much, or exercise too little. Simple.

    The problem with this view is that, while the biochemistry is correct in a notional, abstract sense, in real life it's bollocks.

  • 🖼️ xkcd — Electric Vehicles #3214

  • I am a mass murderer...

    ...of bugs -- don't get too excited.

    I try to live in a way that minimizes harm to other sentient life-forms; I've been a vegan for longer than most people have been alive. I even trap rats in the garden, and return them to the wild. But these bugs... jeez.

    Squadrons of flying bugs had taken over my tool-shed. I could scarcely even get into it. Just getting the lawnmower out was a mission. The air was so thick with bugs that I couldn't even _breath_ without inhaling them. There were crawling over every surface, in every box and compartment. They blocked the light from the windows. When I tried to get into the shed by taking a deep breath and covering my face, they flew into my clothes. My skin crawled for hours afterwards.

    I put up with them for two months, thinking that eventually nature would take its course, and they'd either starve or move out, seeking alternative accommodation. They did neither: every day, they got thicker and thicker.

  • A Post Without The Letter "E"

    This is a bold act. I am writing a full post without that common glyph. You know. That tiny villain. That smug, popular symbol.

  • A poem with all O words (Russian)

    @SavaRocks, although it's in Russian, here is a poem in which every word starts with an O. It kind of makes sense and I personally added the ending which is more appropriate

• Science

  • Rant: statistics is actually for something

    For most of my working life I was an experimental scientist or an engineer of some sort. I got used to dealing with statistical methods and, over time, developed a feel for what you could do with statistics. I always assumed that other people had the same view of statistics that I did: statistical analysis was a tool we could used to find out interesting and important things. Over the years, I've come to realize I was wrong. A huge number of people either (a) have no idea what statistics is about at all, or (b) assume that it's a set of mechanical procedures that you have to apply to show you've done your job properly. Neither position is productive.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Thinking about a new phone

    We are thinking about buying new phones. Basically it's me, my wife, and her parents. So we have 4 phones and pass them along for maximum usage. Right now we have an iPhone 14, 11, 8 and 7. We need to replace the 7 and 8 soon because they're too old for updates. But now the question is: Should we keep buying iPhones? The iPhone 7 was released 2016 and I think getting 10 years of use for a phone is great.

  • A rather disorganized rant about LLMs

    This post is a month's worth of angst about LLM (Large Language Model)s.

    I honestly don't know where to begin with this. I've been quiet for the past month (and that one post for February [1] was posted earlier today) mainly because I just couldn't be bothered to post due to a general feeling of blahness. Early in the month, I received an email from Mark with a link to the article “AI (Artificial Intelligence) Is Garbage and a Bubble (Please Learn This) [2],” thinking it would be good material to blog about. It is, to me, but that's because I already feel this way about LLMs and is thus reinforcing my bubble. Unfortunately, I didn't have much to say about this other than “me too!”

    I spent the month collecting links to articles I wanted to blog about, but the entire process largely sapped any desire I had to do so. The industry as a whole has seemingly taken crazy pills as it marches whole heartly into the craziness that is vibe coding (or is the meme I took the crazy pills while the whole industry descends into the madness of LLMs?).

  • Internet/Gemini

    • How the web has changed (I)

      I keep archive copies of my personal website going back to 2007. Looking back over my 2007 site recently, I was struck by how much personal information I gave away. Not only did I include my personal address and telephone number, but also the names of my wife and kids, along with photos.

      When I used web forums, I used my full, real name, as I think most people did at that time. I had nothing to hide, after all. I never wrote on a forum something I wouldn't have been willing to shout from the rooftops. I guess if you were posting on a forum dedicated to a subject that might attract a level of disapprobation -- non-mainstream gender issues, perhaps -- you'd probably have been more reticent. Still, identifiability seemed to have been the rule, rather than the exception. At that time, I found it hard to take anybody seriously who _didn't_ use what appeared to be a real name. Some forums even insisted on it.

    • Hi everyone, I've restored a theater page from the 90s, making it as simple as possible.

      The template was used 30 years ago, I collected it bit by bit from the internet, unfortunately, it was not saved in normal form on the archive(dot)org, I reassembled it, come and see what interesting pages from the 90s once looked like [...]