leftzero

It seems to be a reference to the N1 rocket's track record.

The thing about LLMs is that they "store" information about the shape of their training models, not about the information contained therein. That information is lost.

A LLM will produce text that looks like the texts it was trained with, but it only can only reproduce any information contained in them if it's common enough in its training data to statistically affect their shape, and even then it has a chance to get it wrong, since it has no way to check its output for fact accuracy.

Add to that that most models are pre-prompted to sound confident, helpful, and subservient (the companies' main goal not being to provide information, but to get their customers hooked on their product and coming back for more), and you get the perfect scammers and yes-men. Auto-complete mentalists that will give you as much confident sounding information shaped nonsense as you want, doing their best to agree with you and confirm any biases you might have, with complete disregard for accuracy, truth, or the effects your trust in their output might have (which makes them extremely dangerous and addictive for suggestible or intellectually or emotionally vulnerable users).

Are haemorrhoids considered a bad omen..?

Thinking back on it, we had book stores back then, so people could have gotten encyclopedias from there, so how did encyclopedia salesmen make any sales??

If I recall correctly you couldn't buy the big encyclopaedias in bookstores (dictionaries and single book encyclopedias, sure, but not the big multiple volume ones), only through their sellers or by phone.

And they often came with a subscription to get new update appendixes and the like.

(Also most of these door to door salespeople probably also carried other products, like subscriptions to magazines and whatnot; and, an average encyclopedia being at least ten volumes, going up to twenty or so, they weren't cheap, so they didn't need that many sales.)

programmers

They don't program, therefore they're not programmers (and they'll probably never be again, since using LLMs has been proven to damage one's ability to reason and learn, probably permanently).

Vibe coders, maybe.

Victims of the LLM scam, definitely.

According to the novel American Gods it's a discreet way to dispose of the bodies.

No one expects them to be hidden in plain sight inside the klunker in the middle of the ice, no one's going to risk walking there and possibly drowning, and once it drops no one's going to dive to the bottom of the lake to find the skeletons in the old klunkers from previous years.

I still have a fondness for TARGA (.TGA) from back in the day...

I live close to the central area of an ~80,000 population city.

Looking at Google maps I've got about 10 general stores within 300 meters, probably thrice that within 500m, plus plenty of smaller specialised stores.

300 to 600m seems like a reasonable distance to walk to and back with four to six bags of groceries.

For smaller more specialised shopping trips one or two kilometres would be fine too.

Three might be a bit much, though I've often walked that to go to the cinema.

Atlanta!!!

Atlatl. Or simply spear-thrower.

It's a bit like a fing-longer, but for your whole arm, and therefore more useful.

Same principle as the sling: they make your arm longer so the "hand" moves faster when you swing it, allowing you to throw stuff at higher and more lethal speeds, and farther.

We're still quite lethal even without these tools though, just look at baseball pitchers.

Also our accuracy and reach when throwing stuff.

Especially when combined with our ability to make stuff sharp by banging it against other stuff and breaking it just the right way.

Android is the bastard that just rapes you and punches you in the face, unlike the other bastard, who rapes you and your cat and stabs you in the eye.

computers

Apple don't make computers, they make wealth extractors.