fernly

Taiwanese researchers found that a carbohydrate-binding protein (i.e. a legume lectin) from lablab beans effectively blocks the infections of influenza viruses and SARS-CoV-2.[60] Researchers from Finland and USA found that extracts from chewing gum manufactured from lablab bean seeds had broad-spectrum anti-viral properties, likely due to the binding action of Flt3 Receptor Interacting Lectin (FRIL) on viruses; the anti-viral effect was similar to that of purified FRIL

Comment · 3 months ago

Relevant: A San Francisco company is advertising humanoid robot housecleaning services[1]. However those 'bots require local supervision and a human controller watching through its video feed.

Presumably that company could use the Gemini Robotics product to eliminate the remote controller.

[1] https://www.tau-robotics.com/

Comment · 3 months ago

I've done, and still do, regular blogging. I have a domain, and everything I post is mine. However it can't be "indieweb" because I used Wordpress. Hence my current blog is dependent on a corporation, as were a couple of older ones that were built in Blogger (and still exist, last updated nearly a decade ago).

That dependency is because isn't feasible for me to own my own server. If I did, it would either be virtual, in amazon's or microsoft's cloud, or it would be real hardware but still in some corporate server farm. It just wouldn't be practical for me to own (and maintain) a physical server with an UPS and permanent uplink to the net.

Comment · 4 months ago

Says, not inflation-adjusted. With reason; adjusting those 1960-1980 prices for inflation would make the graph a lot taller.

Pricing "per GB" before 1990 is unrealistic, though; nobody thought in GB or purchased GB quantities, or conceived of GB systems. I remember a moment circa 1973 when I saw an IBM CE about to do an upgrade on a 370 system at Cal Berkeley. He had a box with several carefully-packed, large circuit boards. "So, is that a megabyte?" I asked. "Yup, that's a meg."

Comment · 4 months ago

Per Wikipedia, it "is a colorless, odorless, non-flammable, and non-toxic gas."

When used as a contrast agent for ultrasound, it "has been used to examine the vascularity of tumours" -- which would be similar to its use in the OP. Then "[i]t remains visible in the blood for 3 to 8 minutes, and is exhaled by the lungs."

So -- not collected and excreted by the liver, as I at first thought.

Comment · 6 months ago

Ken Shirrif recently published a survey of the "system/4 pi" family of which this is a member:

https://www.righto.com/2026/03/ibm-4-pi-computer-history.htm...

Comment · 7 months ago

From the Conclusion section of the PDF[1],

"Multimodal AI systems are increasingly deployed on the assumption that their benchmark performance reflects genuine visual understanding. Our results fundamentally challenge these assumptions. Across every model-benchmark pair tested, the accuracy that frontier models achieved without any access to images exceeded the additional accuracy they gained when images were provided. Moreover, a text-only 3-billion-parameter model, trained solely on question-answer pairs stripped of images, outperformed all frontier multimodal systems and human radiologists on a held-out chest radiology benchmark. Taken together, these results demonstrate that high benchmark accuracy does not reliably indicate visual understanding."

Basically, they are so good at extracting clues from the text of the questions, and extrapolating from them, that they proceed to answer _as if_ they had an image to view. With confidence, of course.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.21687

Comment · 7 months ago

HTML/CSS components were not available to Guido in 1988. It was in 1989 that Tim Berners-Lee defined the first version of HTML[0] and CSS was proposed five years later[1]. In 1988 Guido would have known about the Mac (1984) which he cites, and the X Window system, which was 5 years old.[2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML#Development

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSS#History

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System#History

Comment · 8 months ago

Not that hard if you are in young to middle years and have any job experience. I asked Perplexity "If an American citizen, a trained engineer with some experience, desired to work abroad in the EU or an English-first nation, what are some good websites to check?"

I suggest you do the same -- the reply lists a dozen promising sites.

https://www.perplexity.ai/search/if-an-american-citizen-a-tr...

Comment · 9 months ago

Set aside the effect within Wikipedia and consider the larger picture, millions of people generating text with LLMs and at least some of that text being accepted as correct by millions of readers.

The WikiEdu article clearly demonstrates what everyone should have known already: an LLM has no commitment to the truth. An LLM's only commitment is to correct syntax.