doctor_blood

You would need to eat the seeds of SEVERAL HUNDRED apples in one sitting, and you would need to grind them up finely beforehand to get full amygdalin absorption.

We're talking about almost a cup, or 100+ grams of apple seed here.

Your body continually neutralizes cyanide with the enzyme rhodanese, so there's also no danger of cyanide accumulation from eating a few apples a day.

We had a number of ways of detecting sockpuppets, and I was part of the mod team at the time, so I could verify they were real users. The change in standards was a combination of things; the old guard, many of whom had left at that point, leaned towards computer literate STEM students who had grown up reading actual novels. In contrast, the new generation of posters was full of ESLs, nontechnical users, and people who grew up reading stories on FFN and RR; the new users were also unfamiliar with forum etiquette and acted like they were on discord. Suddenly, I was having to remind users that English was the official language of the board.

(The phone-vs-computer element also can't be discounted - it's much, much harder to do in-depth long form discussion on a smartphone. Input is a hassle, and doing a bunch of research is extremely annoying when you can't open multiple windows and an editor.)

After 2023 or so, a new problem popped up: posters would read a chapter, hallucinate a series of events that never happened, get mad about what they thought they had read, and then attack the author! Arguments born from a complete lack of reading comprehension were breaking out in all the busiest story threads, with waves of reports every time a new chapter was published. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the average IQ of the board had dropped 20 points.

There was also the monetization aspect to consider; fanfiction used to be by fans, for fans - the work of amateurs, in every sense of the word (amātōrem, 'lover'). While that certainly didn't mean everything was /good/, it at least meant it was a work born of genuine passion. The new authors treated it like a business, churning out updates every week and advertising to readers that they could read several chapters ahead on their patreon. Without even touching the ethics of the matter, you can imagine how the incentives changed the output.

I left a few creative writing forums I had been a member of for over a decade because of how much garbage was being posted. Perhaps even more upsetting than the number of people flooding the front page with reams of nonsensical AI prose was the number of people who saw nothing wrong with this and, instead, heaped praise on it and enthusiastically cried for more of it.

It was profoundly alienating to see hundreds of people liking and commenting on chapters of obviously AI-generated prose full of LLM-isms and broken metaphors and similes - and these 'authors' have the gall to link a patreon account and ask for money for this tripe!

Beneath a veneer of respectability the NYT has always been a rag. In Steven Levy's "Hackers" he mentioned MIT stidents were calling it the New York Slime back in the 70s.

For those unfamiliar, the 1875 9th ed. was known as the scholar's edition due to how many eminent persons had contributed; it's a fascinating snapshot of the late 1800s.

Other material that would be fun to put online in a hyperlinked and indexed format include geographic and medical atlases and the Baedeker travel guides.

Small world - I'm currently cleaning up scans of the EB 9th edition to put it online as a mediawiki site; I'm including all the illustrations and plates so I'm only a third of the way through.

I've been testing different OCR tools and so far I've been the most impressed with paddleOCR - it correctly split the text columns, labled the illustrations, and noted the maragin text.

Still, it's not perfect, so I'm having to hand-edit some tables. I plan to put the source pages online as well so you can switch between the scanned page and the electronic text.

"Godzilla Had a Stroke Trying to Read This and Fucking Died" is a meme frequently posted in response to incomprehensible/extremely dumb posts.

Kriss doesn't touch on the deeper issue of why investors keep giving money to people that openly advertise themselves as con artists.

I can't even stand to visit YT without the combo of Blocktube/Unhook/uBlock Origin/SponsorBlock/Return YouTube Dislike. (Some people may also find Clickbait Remover useful.)

Blocktube is a godsend; it adds a context menu for blocking videos/channels, and you can block vids/channels/comments based on a regex or keywords (e.g. transparently remove every 'minecraft' or 'roblox' vid, or remove every comment with 'Telegram' in it). It even removes vids before the DOM rendering, so blocked vids don't show up as empty title cards or blank spaces.

Unhook lets you independently toggle visibility of the home feed, the rec sidebar, endscreen recs, comments, shorts, and the unrelated BS they ad to search results. (The latest YT update lets endscreen recs slip through again; be sure to add youtube.com##.html5-video-player.ended-mode .ytp-fullscreen-grid to your ublock filter to get rid of them again.)

Surprisingly YouTube still generates a feed for every channel's video page, so I just add channels to my RSS reader for updates instead of bothering with the increasingly flaky subscriptions page. (If they ever break this or yt-dlp I'm not even going to bother with YT in the future.)

Remember when Google exec Prabhakar Raghavan (the man who previously ran Yahoo search into the ground) made Google Search worse so they could serve more ads?

This is the YouTube philosophy; make the platform worse to drive 'engagement', completely ignoring the second and third order effects of their 'optimizations'. Want to search by upload date? Sorry, we removed that! Have some slop! Want to look for a video? Here's a bunch of unrelated bullshit instead - have you tried some slop? Also, have some ads.

The experience for creators is even worse. The recommendation algorithm and monetization policies change every month and YT conveniently gets to collect all the ad money if you've been demonitized. They're shoving a bajillion AI tools down creator's throats and even editing videos after they've been uploaded.

In the end, YouTube caters to advertisers. You're just the product.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a bot shoving slop in a human's face -- forever.

Actually I would like see a post-mortem that showed where all the money actually went; they somehow spent ~85x of what RSI has raised for Star Citizen, and what they had to show for it was worse than some student projects I've seen.

Were they just piling up cash in the parking lot to set it on fire?

Today on "Hacker" News: a third of the commenters wring their hands and question the morality and legality of subverting copy protection on software almost half a century old.

I don't think the FSF foundation has been an effectibe organization for a long time, but giving money to the Linix Foundation is even worse. Look at where their money actually goes - a vanishingly small portion is actually used to improve Linux and its ecosystem.

Unfortunately there isn't much information on what texts they're actually training this on; how Anglocentric is the dataset? Does it include the Encyclopedia Britannica 9th Edition? What about the 11th? Are Greek and Latin classics in the data? What about Germain, French, Italian (etc. etc.) periodicals, correspondence, and books?

Given this is coming out of Zurich I hope they're using everything, but for now I can only assume.

Still, I'm extremely excited to see this project come to fruition!

"At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from the classic novel Don't Create the Torment Nexus"

(In Eclipse Phase, TITAN - the Total Information Tactical Awareness Network - mulched humanity when it went rogue.)