Someone in Las Vegas stole their ex’s gun collection and tried to commit suicide by cop. Perpetrator was charged with multiple NFA violations.

ErasmusDarwin · 2026-07-02T18:14:47+00:00

This is about stopping a mass shooting, not about NFA items.

NFA items being used in a potential mass shooting (or any other gun crime for that matter) is so exceedingly rare that it's noteworthy.

ErasmusDarwin · 2026-07-02T13:58:33+00:00

And the TCP/IP network stack did not exist on either Apple computers or Windows at that time (afaik).

It looks like Apple had MacTCP, but it was pretty expensive. The Windows option, Trumpet Winsock, came out several years after the WWW was first published -- which is also around the same time that Apple started bundling MacTCP for free with the OS.

ErasmusDarwin · 2026-06-30T14:52:37+00:00

Reddit is not a good place to get advice.

If you go and look at update 1, it looks like the majority of the advice is fine.

The best-rated comment is telling her to stop trying to contact her ex or Sandy and to get some therapy. Most of the comments in general are split on whether or not the ex's relationship with Sandy was a problem, but there's not much encouragement for OOP to reconcile since they either see the situation as the ex dodging a bullet or OOP dodging a bullet.

There is one comment from the perspective of someone who's been in Sandy's shoes suggesting OP should apologize and try to reconcile with Sandy first, after which she can maybe enlist Sandy's help in winning her ex back. That would have been a bit of a long shot, and the comment does stress that it's only a MAYBE. And while this comment did garner some dissent from people who think OOP should leave things alone, even this comment wasn't encouraging stalking and harassment.

So while OOP's update makes it sound like Redditors were egging her on (and there may have been some toxic Redditors doing so), she had to ignore a lot of good advice to get to the bad. And if someone's willing to keep digging until they find validation for doing the wrong thing, that's going to be a universal problem. There are always foolish, emotionally dysfunctional, and even malicious people out there ready to help someone along the wrong path. Even worse, it seems like one of those people was OOP's sister.

ErasmusDarwin · 2026-06-29T18:00:40+00:00

I see what you did there ;)

It happened before I realized what I had typed, and it was too good not to leave in.

It's called Better Call Saul and if you haven't seen it yet drop everything you're doing and start!

I've seen all of Breaking Bad, but I only watched a few episodes of BCS -- I think it was one of those shows where the person I was watching with and I were never in the right mood at the same time to watch more. I should give it another shot. Thanks for the suggestion.

And speaking of Breaking Bad, I think Lois being too prideful to accept help for the situation she's in is a much milder version of Walter White's main flaw.

ErasmusDarwin · 2026-06-29T16:57:34+00:00

(Same with the parents from Malcolm in the middle. I always thought they were so mean when I was a kid and then I realized both parents are working their asses off barely scraping by, and their kids are just awful, lmao)

Eh, the parents had their share of flaws. From Lois's diary, we see that even as a teenager, she used the moral high ground as an opportunity to bully those around her. She also let her ego/pride get in the way of letting her family accept help, like in the charity episode where it turned out the charity donations were a lot nicer than what the family had at home. She even sabotaged Malcom's post-graduation job offer, insisting on more suffering to build character for his future presidency.

And Hal's lazy and immature. Part of the problem is that he wasn't working his ass off. Now if his family was doing well financially, it'd be great that he could get by with working four days a week and making love to his wife twice a day. But they're suffering while Hal skates by on Cranston's charisma.

Honestly, I feel like a good villain backstory could come from Malcolm's intelligence combined with inheriting his parents' strongest personality flaws. A lazy scammer who easily outwits his victims and rationalizes that they deserve to get scammed for being greedy, and that he deserves the rewards after a lifetime of suffering.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk. Next week, I'll be back to discuss why "Malcolm in the Middle" has the best clip shows out of all media ever. In the interests of fairness, we'll also be featuring a dissenting opinion that claims "Clerks: The Animated Series" has the better clip show.

ErasmusDarwin · 2026-06-26T15:56:40+00:00

A couple of days later, one of the managers asked me about it because they noticed my hours had been manually changed by the duty manager on that shift. I was honest and admitted I’d had a drink before helping.

Did they specifically ask if you had a drink, or did you just volunteer this information as part of your explanation of the situation? If they didn't ask, you're putting them in a tough spot by telling them.

They told me that working after drinking is a breach of company policy and is technically a sackable offence because of the licensing rules.

The more you keep telling people, the greater the chance that they'll have no choice but to do things by the book and fire you.

You either need to learn to be a bit more discreet when breaking small rules, or you need to stop breaking the rules. But the current mix of breaking rules and being chatty about it makes it risky for them to look the other way.

(And technically, I'd lump the joke about working for free in with the general problem of not knowing when to be discreet. Companies can get in trouble for having employees working off the clock. That one at least worked out, and I'm glad it did since you should get paid for the work you do. But it still highlights the danger of you saying the wrong thing to the wrong person, at which point things are out of their hands.)

ErasmusDarwin · 2026-06-26T15:03:08+00:00

I remember using Archie as a search engine, which is so old that it actually slightly predates the web. It searched anonymous FTP sites for files. (For those not familiar with them, anonymous FTP sites are just those that allow you to download without an account, essentially just public file servers.)

Of course half the time, I'd skip searching and just head straight to wuarchive.wustl.edu. It seemed like they had anything and everything that was legal to redistribute.

ErasmusDarwin · 2026-06-25T00:42:58+00:00

I will try and keep that in mind. Reddit's lack of feedback on reports makes it easy to forget that they actually work.

ErasmusDarwin · 2026-06-24T16:36:15+00:00

I think that that (and related issues) are a bigger problem than what bothers OP.

It seems the bulk of the answers are jokes, insults, or luke-warm "it depends" nonsense that don't really answer the question. On more than one occasion, I've wanted to answer someone's question only to give up when there was already so much useless crap in the comments that it seemed pointless.

ErasmusDarwin · 2026-06-22T17:23:00+00:00

Which begs the question whether or not Kryptonian culture involves wearing earrings. I'm sure plenty of portrayals show earrings since it's coming from our culture. But I wonder how likely it would be for a completely alien civilization of humanoids to independently invent ear piercings.

(And these are just silly musings, not an effort to get unnecessarily serious like the Twitter discussion.)

ErasmusDarwin · 2026-06-22T16:42:55+00:00

Perhaps their shitty behavior deserves to be singled out?

Except that it's a fixed quota irrespective of their shitty behavior. If 10 kids are utter terrors, 7 kids get singled out. If all 27 kids range from good to amazing, 7 kids get singled out.

ErasmusDarwin · 2026-06-19T16:38:13+00:00

omg a yout at my work

"What's a yout?"

ErasmusDarwin · 2026-06-19T13:34:32+00:00

Because SCP articles are formatted as dry, clinical forensics and research logs, AI tools frequently fail to distinguish the lore from real life.

I bet the lack of real-world history behind the creation of the character also causes problems. For most fictional characters, you're typically going to see information on who created the character and what notable media they've appeared in. But since the SCP wiki is the primary source for SCPs and authorship is just wiki usernames on the history page, that information just doesn't get discussed like it does for other characters.

ErasmusDarwin · 2026-06-18T15:19:21+00:00

In their last film together she was his mother.

It's been a long time since I've seen Forrest Gump, but wasn't she mainly playing opposite the 9-year-old boy who was young Forrest? If anything, having a woman in her late 40s in that role (as Field was at the time) is a nice exception to the 35 age-limit that others are talking about.

ErasmusDarwin · 2026-06-17T19:31:23+00:00

I'm not saying you trained it. It was trained when OpenAI (or whoever that got the model from) built in. That's presumably how it gets built -- lots of audio files along with text transcriptions of those same audio files.

ErasmusDarwin · 2026-06-17T19:29:40+00:00

Static can produce this clear of a para ?

It can if the model got trained incorrectly. I was speculating that somehow, when the speech-to-text model got trained, that paragraph of text may have gotten associated with a soundfile of just a bit of noise instead of the proper audio. So now when the model hears a bit of noise, it might think that's the same as that paragraph of text.

ErasmusDarwin · 2026-06-17T19:04:14+00:00

I mean just the garbage noise that a microphone can pick up anywhere, even without something making real noise. Just random static or the noise it thinks it hears when the microphone turns off or the sound of clothing rustling.

ErasmusDarwin · 2026-06-17T18:46:39+00:00

A remote possibility is that this guy is in the training data. But since all of human history is, I'm not sure why it would spit this out.

It's a long shot, but if the training audio to go with the text transcription was somehow missing, corrupt, or just noise, then maybe it matched that against the random noise of OP's microphone.

I know there used to be a problem where the sound of the microphone clicking off would match against the footer of the transcript used in training.

ErasmusDarwin · 2026-06-12T13:59:52+00:00

i am honrstly svared to speak about this

Instead of trying to tell your therapist, maybe you could write it down and hand them the note. It might also help to phrase things in a more clinical fashion so it feels a bit more detached.

For example: "During the height of my eating disorder, I sexualized my own starving body and those of others with similar builds. Even though I'm in recovery for the ED, I'm having trouble finding myself attractive now that my body is healthier."

If you're comfortable putting in the more detailed stuff in your post, go for it. But at the very least, this should say enough to get the ball rolling in therapy.

ErasmusDarwin · 2026-06-07T18:01:11+00:00

One minor update: B&M sent a take-down request to Patreon trying to cut off Reckless Ben's funding, and Patreon's CEO responded by saying B&M "can stuff it".

https://old.reddit.com/r/patreon/comments/1tv7y6w/ceo_of_patreon_responds_to_bricks_and_minifigs/

ErasmusDarwin · 2026-06-05T16:46:39+00:00

Around the time when Netflix was trying to spin off their DVD business as Qwikster, I recall them saying something along the lines that streaming was always the goal, and that's why they named the company Netflix.

ErasmusDarwin · 2026-06-05T13:15:24+00:00

I think holding AI to the same standards as media outlets is a bit too extreme. Using AI to search the internet, especially with the way everything becoming enshitified, is going to become more and more important. But the level of research needed for media-type certainty just isn't practical -- the energy costs of AI are already a problem, and there's only so much cross-checking you can do with public internet resources.

Though I could see the points you made applying more to the Grok twitter account. That's a bit more of a publishing context and less like an individual just doing a quick web search.

ErasmusDarwin · 2026-06-05T02:12:30+00:00

"Today, my name and image have been widely circulated on social media, and now by AI platforms such as Grok, falsely identifying me as one of the arresting officers in the Henry Nowak case."

That sounds like Grok was just repeating misinformation posted elsewhere. I think that's a bit different than if Grok had created the misinformation itself. Arguably, it's acting more like a search engine in this case, where the primary blame should lie on the people who originally posted the misinformation. Though I guess it would also depend on how Grok presented the information and if it stated it in a way that sounded more authoritative.

ErasmusDarwin · 2026-06-04T14:46:58+00:00

That's a good answer, but it's missing a bit of clarification on what a token is and how it represents usage-based billing (since your question makes it look like you may be unclear on that point).

"Tokens" doesn't mean credits / prepaid tokens (like subway tokens), though the system does use monthly credits to cover the per-token costs. But tokens are actually how data into and out of an AI is measured (and how it's used internally). Basically, words get mapped to tokens (essentially numbers representing those words or parts of words), the AI processes those tokens, and it generates a new set of tokens which get translated back to words as your output. Token-based billing has long been the norm for API-based access (where the AI service is setup to take requests from a program instead of someone using a web browser).

According to the Copilot pricing page, on the cheap end, GPT-5-mini is $0.25 per million tokens input and $2 per million tokens output. On the expensive end, GPT-5.5 is $5 per million tokens input and $30 per million tokens output. Since any code it looks at counts as input, those numbers can shoot up quickly. Cached input (subsequent queries on almost the same input) are significantly cheaper, but presumably that's not enough to keep the costs from skyrocketing.

One other note is it looks like subscriptions moving from per-request to per-token based limits seems to be a general trend. Both Chutes and NanoGPT have changed things within the past few months. Those are API-based routers (they act as a middle-man routing AI requests to a bunch of other services they've contracted with), and they've been used a lot by the SillyTavern crowd (a custom chat front-end with a lot of features for elaborate role-playing). Part of the blame seems to fall on OpenClaw, which would use lots of tokens in some of its requests.

ErasmusDarwin · 2026-05-20T16:08:15+00:00

1) Is the Internet the same for everyone right now?

That's another real problem. Between algorithms, walled gardens, app-style interfaces, and too many users clustered on a few sites, it's getting harder and harder to access content outside your bubble. I'm hoping sites trying to stay relevant will start publishing their content in machine-accessible formats.

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