@grammargirl It looks like they are still accepting requests… I got email back from them telling me to fill out the order form, which I am doing. This is as of noonish Wednesday May 7.

@AmenZwa I don’t disagree, but they’re not so common these days… besides the one I have, I haven’t come across any in decades!

@AmenZwa I learned on a slide rule! I don’t have that one anymore, but I do have one somewhere…

I’ve seen a small postscript program (and it wouldn’t be hard to recreate from scratch) that prints out a slide rule…

In case you missed it, which you probably did because the larger news outlets we’re all used to looking at don’t give this type of thing coverage.

The SAVE Act, Which Could Stop Millions of Women From Voting, Is ‘Dead on Arrival’ in the Senate |
https://www.glamour.com/story/the-save-act-which-could-stop-millions-of-women-from-voting-is-dead-on-arrival-in-the-senate

We are the great majority of the country, especially at this point. I'm gonna fuckin act like it.

I am with our beloved, sweary Ogre in saying: These mofos are going DOWN.

"Unfortunately for Republicans, their momentum is fading. They are running out of time to kill this country before we push them out of power and then put them in prison for the rest of their lives. They grabbed for the brass ring and they still might get it. But it’s a lot harder than they thought it was going to be and if (when) they fail, they lose EVERYTHING." -Justin Rosario

https://opinionatedogre.substack.com/p/end-of-the-line-there-is-no-post

Headline on CNN just now: “Several movie studio and streaming industry executives believe the president hasn’t thought about the ramifications of his proposal” — wait, whaaat?!? Such a galaxy-brained stable genius could possibly have failed to consider some slight third- or fourth-order effect of one of his ideas??? That’s just crazy talk!

@knittingknots2 The only use case I can come up with for these AIs is “here’s a large pile of unstructured data, can you find this type of information in it”. If it can find that, with pointers which you verify, you’re better off; if it can’t, you’re no worse off. Everything else is at best unreliable; the only reliable thing they do for you is make your mental muscles flabby.

Tech Companies Apparently Do Not Understand Why We Dislike AI

It's becoming increasingly apparent that one of the reasons why tech companies are so enthusiastic about shoving AI into every product and service is that they fundamentally do not understand why people dislike AI. I will elaborate. I was recently made aware of the Jetbrains developer ecosystem survey, which included a lot of questions about AI. After I answered some of them negatively (and possibly…

http://soatok.blog/2025/05/04/tech-companies-apparently-do-not-understand-why-we-dislike-ai/

If as President you answer “I don’t know” when asked if you’ll follow the Constitution, you have violated your oath of office and should be removed.

@pencilears Yeah, I saw that… Hope your friends will be ok

@pencilears Hmm, I don’t think that’s necessarily universal… I would have to characterize myself as such a dork (I guess “hate” is a pretty strong word, but I got no time for that kind of stuff), but I also am supremely unimpressed by chatbots… “confident bullshit generator” is what I mostly see. 🤷🏻‍♂️

[Update: thanks to multiple people I have all the info I need, and more]

Manual #wheelchair users, how often are you replacing bearings? What else is wearing out? What brands (of parts) are working for you?

@Liuzesen Oh my goodness, who said anything about permission?! I certainly don’t believe any AI needs my permission to think, or not, but equally I am not required to acquiesce. You clearly don’t actually want my opinion, so… have a wonderful evening and life

@Liuzesen No and no. Regarding the second, I believe it’s trivially no, because I think that lots of non-human creatures think — many birds, other primates, wolves and dogs, octopuses, etc. These thoughts are probably different than ours, and in some respects they may be simpler, but I have no doubt that thought is there. You may perhaps be intending to ask, does thought require biological brains to emerge? I think that answer is also no, but that is unproven.

Hmmmyes… well… I think I may say without fear of contradiction that this experiment was not a complete failure, that in fact further experiments along these lines may prove worthwhile… yes. Indeed…

😝😋😋😋 my taster and I agreed that they are extremely delicious; the only bad part of the experiment was the 2/3 scaling!

Next experiment in #solarcooking is brownies. 2/3 scale recipe, because I wasn’t sure if it would all fit into the oven, and it baked for about 1.5 hours instead of 30 minutes; other than that, no changes to the recipe. They have to cool a bit, but they look and smell pretty good 😋

@eric Do you seriously not know? I don’t want to assume either way… but it’s “if you know you know”. I felt I had to answer that way 😊

A couple of recent birds seen on hikes, for your Sunday afternoon viewing pleasure