The term absurdist pro-wrestling term "kayfabe" appears to be an attempt to pretend there are adults in the room in these situations.

We've seen from the last years that's itself a deception to allow the right wing intelligentsia to excuse the erratic choices and profound damage to US international power.

Its an extension of the old Soviet propaganda tool "if everything is a lie, anything can be true".

Sagan comes in with a great quote -

The problem is summed up by Carl Sagan: “Every time he [von Däniken] sees some­thing he can’t understand, he attri­butes it to extraterrestrial intelli­gence, and since he understands almost nothing, he sees evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence all over the planet” (Playboy 1974:151).

Unfortunately its true of so many people, and the information revolution we were all promised seems to have made it worse, not better.

Around a decade back, I and a bunch of colleagues explored these theories and despite knowing they were all bunkum, the sheer entertainment value they served was gold.

Think of it like Marvel universe stuff.

We'd go on long walks and let our 'what if' imagination run wild.

This also applies to certain "conspiracies."

In both cases, it's their God of the Gaps.

(Not to be confused with the Boss of the Ross. Or Hermes. Or Nike.)

One of the problems is we do have massive gaps. Mainly because we have no written records from the Stone Age, and barely anything from certain other cultures. Von Däniken exploits that.

Conspiracies are wonderfully self-reinforcing: anything that doesn’t support the conspiracy is clearly the work of the conspirators hiding their existence.

The problem is that does happen in real life. Intelligence services and organised crime work actively to hide their tracks. As do corrupt officials and some of the military.

We live in a society where corruption is rife and ordinary people are largely excluded from most major institutions ... That is the atmosphere that breeds these things.

My favorite way to cut apart those two is to ask: How many people need to keep a secret, how long and how perfectly would they need to succeed, and what motive do they have to do a good job?

That's a fair question, but we do live in a surprisingly secretive society. I think that shifted over a lot during the Cold War period. It became acceptable to hide large sections of public spending from the public.

We also live in a corrupt society and occasionally that emerges as a scandal.

Certain secrets are kept better than others. Now and then real conspiracies do become public knowledge like the Tuskegee Experiment or Scientology's infiltration of parts of the US government.

Weird critique from Sagan, who wrote a bestselling novel based on the idea of contact with extraterrestrials.

The explanation is in the word "novel": it's a fictional book that is explicitly presented as fictional. Fiction means "made up", not claimed to be based on facts.

Its completely trivial to export orgmode to markdown either as a process or just whenever you copy to the clipboard.

Completely trivial isn't a big barrier to interoperation.

Sure but each "completely trivial" step adds complexity to the overall process, which makes it brittle.

I'd rather just write in markdown than have to spend hours upon hours reading the awful emacs docs. I have a thousand things to do and no time.

Org might be better, but it's not better enough.

So this seems like a bit of a half measure in the sense that it doesn't provide client side build?

With guix I can bit for bit reproduce with my client machine the upstream binaries.

This seems flawed to assume that google's servers are uncompromised, its vastly better to have distributed ability to reproduce.

https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Invoking-guix-chall...

It does provide client side build, see the bottom shell snippets.

There is no real code here, its all a stub.

No prompts, no functions, nothing in the github repos.

https://github.com/pranav-deshmukh/blender-mcp/blob/main/add...

For context this is the original keybase guy coming back to make a workalike opensource version -

https://blog.foks.pub/posts/introducing/

I simply wouldn't use this as is but I would like it if it was a uv plugin, poetry seems like a dead end in 2025 to me.

The alternative to radiation is mixing less poop into your meat etc.?

You understand that the majority of "food science" is designed to allow increasingly lazier and sloppier food handling and allowing it to still be palatable/not kill too many people right?

Don't fall into the "lower cost" idea either, being lazier and sloppier means higher corporate profits and not lower consumer prices (for worse food).

Compare the grass fed/ranged (produced on farms 1/10th the size of the US equivalent) BigMac in Germany versus the one you get anywhere in the US, which do you think is healthier and tastier? They are basically the same price to the consumer mysteriously...

This is the ignorance I was talking about. There are many reasons to irradiate food besides substandard handling. For instance, potatoes can be irradiated to inhibit sprouting, increasing how long you can store them. And imported fruits can be irradiated to prevent the spread of insects and other pests (without needing to use far riskier pesticides.)

You proved my point actually.

Neither of those things is actually useful as an eater of food?

You want less fresh food and from sketchier sources yet you think those are virtues?

They are useful to people who buy food (who hasn't had some potatoes sprout in a cabinet?), and to society generally. Insects are a fact of fruit, to call that "sketchy" is just ignorant.

Sprouted potatoes is a sing its time to get some new ones... you want to eat horded 6 month old potatoes glhf

I don't eat fumigated strawberries so replacing fumigated strawberries with irradiated strawberries is... not useful?

This is a case where the science evolved to justify a pre-decided narrative. This was absolutely necessary for an unsustainable food industry in an overly financialised nation(guess which). Don't waste your breath arguing logically. Just try your level best to ensure it doesn't occur in your local food economy, for the near future. Eventually, the GMO folks will reap.

If the potatoes last longer without going bad, then there's no reason to replace them prematurely. You have a predicted narrative that any preservation method you aren't comfortable is intrinsically bad because it lowers food quality, but I can guarantee you there are countless other forms of food preservation you have no problem with.

It comes down to superstition.

European consumers seem to not want factory farms that produce such low quality food that it needs to be CRISPRed (as is the case with this story) just to be kept alive long enough.

I also am in that camp, I don't want to eat pork raised in unsanitary conditions and then sold to me at top dollar (because lying/obscuring about sourcing).

Then you should want regulations about how the pigs are raised, not banning the use of CRISPR.

> Then you should want regulations about how the pigs are raised

We have those. EU animals have "five freedoms".

As an EATER of food what is the benefit of CRISPR/GMO?

There answer after a good 40 minutes of searching is... nothing.

It's a technology 100% in service of being lazier/sloppier for industrial scale food production and in service of IP restricting the food supply in favor of shareholder X or Y.

"but we can make tasteless US tomatoes on even more inappropriate cropland!"

...

Great for my stock portfolio to screw over developing countries but useless for me as a first world eater of food.

No proof of existence of a benefit.

Uh. Healthier animals.

This specific approval is for a gene therapy to prevent PRRSV infection - a major porcine virus and one that regularly infects pigs in the EU.

It has nothing to do with mistreatment of animals or factory farming.

poor husbandry is the primary objection to US food products

the chicken has to be chlorinated because it has literally been produced covered in faeces

this would seem to be enable it to become even worse

So don't import US food products if it scares you. That's a separate issue from whether to allow CIRPRed livestock.

Again, this disease regularly affects pigs in Europe and causes immense animal suffering.

> So don't import US food products if it scares you.

this is exactly the position of the EU, UK governments

and is one of the few policies that is universally supported by their populations

The EU and UK both import food from the US.

Some US food products are banned for concerns about safety, but they're hardly unique - the US also bans some food products from the EU and UK that are considered unsafe in the US.

None of that has to do with whether or not countries should allow CRIPRed livestock to be raised domestically.

no GM crops, no milk with growth hormone (nearly all of it), no beef with growth hormone (nearly all of it), no chlorinated chicken (nearly all of it), no washed eggs (nearly all of them)

and now pork will end up on that list too

> None of that has to do with whether or not countries should allow CRIPRed livestock to be raised domestically.

I couldn't care less if US'ians want to eat shit (here, literally)

I would never ask any of these questions of an LLM (and I use and rely on LLMs multiple times a day), this is a job for a computer.

I would also never ask a coworker for this precise number either.

But it's a good reminder when so many enterprises like to claim that hallucinations have "mostly been solved".

I agree with you partially, BUT

when are the long list of 'enterprise' coworkers, who have glibly and overconfidently answered questions without doing math or looking them up, going to be fired?

My reasoning for the plain question was: as people start to replace search engines by AI chat, I thought that asking "plain" questions to see how trustworthy the answers might be, would be a good test. Because plain folks will ask plain questions and won't think about the subtle details. They would not expect a "precise number" either, i.e. not 23:06 PDT, but would like to know if this weekend would be fine for a trip or the previous or next weekend would be better to book a "dark sky" tour.

And, BTW, I thought that LLMs are computers too ;-0

I think its much better to help people learn that an LLM is "not" a computer (even if it technically is).

Thinking its a computer makes you do dumb things with them that they simply have never done a good job with.

Build intuitions about what they do well and intuitions about what they don't do well and help others learn the same things.

Don't encourage people to have poor ideas about how they work, it makes things worse.

Would you ask an LLM a phone number? If it doesn't use a function call the answer is simply not worth having.

First we wanted to be able to do calculations really quickly, so we built computers.

Then we wanted the computers to reason like humans, so we built LLMs.

Now we want the LLMs to do calculations really quickly.

It doesn't seem like we'll ever be satisfied.

Ask the LLM what calculations you might or should do (and how you might implement and test those calculations) is pretty wildly useful.

These models are proclaiming near AGI, so they should be smarter than hallucinating an answer.