Birds in the genus Turdus totally deserve the name. They’re like:

• “Look! Cat food! Yummy!”
• “Why are there cats here? FLY AWAY!”
• “Why is the air solid? Perhaps if I hit it over and over I’ll fly past it!”

Every single time this happened I managed to save the turd (they should be glad one of my cats is senile and the other overweight), but then the laundry room is full of turd turds and feathers and my cats spend hours looking for the missing bird.

(inb4 yes, “thrush”. Fuck it, I’m still calling them “turds”. Turdus rufiventris, aka rust-bellied turds.)

Numbers are all made up stuff, and they’re all the same. Here, lemme prove it; let a=b, and…

a² = ab             // multiplying both sides by "a"
2a² = a²+ab         // adding a² to both sides
2a²-2ab = a²-ab     // subtracting 2ab from both sides
2(a²-ab) = 1(a²-ab) // isolating (a²-ab)
2 = 1               // dividing both sides by (a²-ab)

From there you can prove any number is any number. 36=36 or 36=8 or 36=π.

Guys, please don’t call anything after Zirconium or Niobium. We need the names for the future Russian hacker groups Snugly Bear and Hugging Bear.

On a more serious note, someone is developing an operating system codenamed Boron.

Now I regret following it with only two points, instead of three. LLMs love listing threes.

I typically used the em dash only when writing professionally, but because of this AI thing I’m doing it in general, just to see how it turns out. (So far it’s a good way to sniff out assumers.)

a ‘product of its time’.

Something like this, indeed. Or more like a product of the situation, plus a few laws - like network effect (the value a user derives from the OS depends on the number of users using it).

Note that not even the devs are to blame for this; it makes sense someone releasing commercial software would focus on the 70% (Windows), sometimes on the 15% (Mac OS), but almost never on the 4% (Linux).

It does, but this is a vicious cycle: small market share → devs don’t release Linux versions for their software → the software ecosystem is fragile → users who’d rather use Linux still need to use Windows → small market share. Anything countering any of those “links” weakens the vicious cycle, including Microsoft pissing off some Windows users; that’s why the penguin gets smug, because they know “Winrows is now an Agenric OS lol lmao” means slightly higher Linux market share.

It’s like one of my cats. When she’s doing something silly, and I grab the phone to take her pic, all I get is a picture of her butt. Because to observe something you need to interact with it, and when I interact with her she collapses into the “I wants buttslaps!” state.

And before I watch it, she’s in a superposition of states. Much like Schrödinger’s cat. However her states aren’t dead vs. alive; they’re “sleeping”, “licking her own buttocks”, and “ruining my Christmas decoration”.

Your typical Linux user gets really smug when learning about dumb shit Microsoft is doing with Windows. Just like that penguin in the OP. Because that dumb shit is making plenty Windows users consider ditching Windows for Linux.

One of those things is to force-feed AI into the users. Exemplified by Microsoft seeking to transform Windows into an “agentic OS”. People who don’t know how those systems work don’t want it; and people who do, even less.

“Windows is now an agentic OS”.

In the specific case of clanker vocab leaking into the general population, that’s no big deal. Bots are “trained” towards bland, unoffensive, neutral words and expressions; stuff like “indeed”, “push the boundaries of”, “delve”, “navigate the complexities of $topic”. Mostly overly verbose discourse markers.

However when speaking in general grounds you’re of course correct, since the choice of words does change the meaning. For example, a “please” within a request might not change the core meaning, but it still adds meaning - because it conveys “I believe to be necessary to show you respect”.

And AI sucks at that. If you interpret its output as a human-made summary, it shows everything you shouldn’t do — such as conflating what’s written with its assumptions over what’s written, or missing the core of the text for the sake of random excerpts (that might imply the opposite of what the author wrote).

But, more importantly: people are getting used to babble, that what others say has no meaning. They will not throw it into an AI to summarise it, and when they do it, they won’t understand the AI output.

I don’t see a big deal given

1. What matters the most is not the words within an utterance, but the discourse conveyed by that utterance. [Translation: how you say it matters less than what you say.]
2. Word usage is prone to trends. Not just slang. Easy come, easy go.

What I am concerned however is that those chatbots babble a bloody lot. And people might be willing to accept babble a bit more, due to exposure lowering their standards. And they kind of give up looking for meaning on what others say.

Point still stands; the same “customers” of Vanguard and Fidelity own a huge chunk of both Google and Microsoft.

The one from my childhood is almost identical to this one, plus the three weights from the video pelespirit linked. Even the “IIII” instead of “IV” for the four*. I have no idea on its geographical origin, but it still exists — I saw it last week, now it haunts my brother-in-law and nephew my sister inherited it.

*something I’d only understand years later - “IV” is for Jupiter (IVPITER). Just a bit of respect for the old gods that survived.

Unlike “cuckold”, “chupim” isn’t really sexual. It’s mostly that sort of person who wants everything, but never gives back.

For example. You and your brother got each their own toys. If you play with his toys, he throws a tantrum: “THEY’RE MINE!”. If you don’t let him play with your toys, he also throws a tantrum: “WAAAAH YOU’RE SELFISH!”. That’s a chupim.

This. Plus what @[email protected] added.

Good communication should be approachable, succinct, complete, and accurate. But those four things are mutually exclusive; if you focus too hard on 1+ of them, the others get worse. With jargon being a tool to make things more succinct, at the expense of approachability.

(Weirdly enough, I noticed this once I tried to make a Fediverse poster.)

In South America too, although they’re shiny cowbirds instead. Their parasitic behaviour is so famous that, at least in my Portuguese dialect, their local name “chupim” is often used to refer to people who take advantage of the others’ goodwill.

I’m so fucking glad those birds don’t exist in South America. Because this is one of the sounds I hate the most.

When I was a child, my home had a cuckoo clock. Already centennial back then. Noisy and loud. And it made that “cuckoo!” noise once 1AM or 1PM, twice 2AM or 2PM… can you picture the bloody hell that shite was at midnight???

…okay, the birds have no fault for that. But I’m still glad they don’t exist here.

Both are owned by the same corporations (Vanguard, BlackRock, Fidelity, State Street, Geode…), who’ll win either way. Until the bubble bursts, that is.

Ouch. That’s awful.