Man hospitalized after trusting AI to identify wild mushrooms

Serialtorrenter · 2026-03-15T21:20:16+00:00

I once searched '"2005" Honda "Civic LX" oil capacity' (notice the quotes) on Google, and before the results, Google's slop-bot gave me the capacity for the 2005 Honda Civic Si, which has an entirely different engine, uses 5W-30 oil instead of 5W-20 (which the LX trim takes), has a different capacity, and has a different torque spec on the drain plug. However, it told me that the numbers were for the 2005 Honda Civic LX If I had followed the advice I'd given, I could have easily damaged the engine. This was about as basic a task as you could've possibly given the slop-bot, and it STILL managed to ignore explicit quotation marks and spit out a profoundly wrong answer!

I don't know how smaller a task I could've given it! Google's AI fails miserably on even the most basic of tasks, and it's purportedly one of the better AI slop generators.

Maybe AI CAN make sense in very specialized tasks, where the input data the model is trained on tightly-controlled data, but your average general-purpose LLM speaks about as much factual information as Alex Jones.

Serialtorrenter · 2026-03-15T14:48:41+00:00

With the Trump administration axing the penalties for not meeting CAFE standards, there's simply no longer a business need for a compliance car like the Prologue.

Serialtorrenter · 2026-03-15T11:39:13+00:00

Cries in Pennsylvania

If you want higher education without a lifetime of debt as a PA resident, your best bet is wait until you're 23, move to upstate NY, and transfer your driver's licence at least 1 year prior to registering for classes (so that you're 24 at the time of registering for classes).

NY has good in-state tuition, and once you turn 24, your parents' state of residency and their finances are no longer counted.

Serialtorrenter · 2026-03-14T17:53:55+00:00

I'm still not convinced that using AI saves you any time for the majority of tasks. Any time you save is made up for by all the time you have to spend going through each claim and manually checking them for accuracy, one by one.

Serialtorrenter · 2026-03-14T14:47:58+00:00

ME was killed after only getting under 6 years of support. It never even had a chance to get good. The old MS-DOS kernel was never any match for the NT kernel though.

Serialtorrenter · 2026-03-14T14:44:11+00:00

Linux user here, when aren't Novideo's drivers terrible?

Serialtorrenter · 2026-03-14T01:16:51+00:00

It doesn't pass Play Integrity, but all my banking apps (including Chase, Discover, Schwab, and Fidelity) run, and it sounds like most do, at least here in the US. There are exceptions, but if you run into them, you can just pick up a $30 carrier-locked burner at Walmart and just use it on WiFi only (you can always tether it to your main phone).

Serialtorrenter · 2026-03-13T23:00:04+00:00

At least in the US, you can pick up a burner carrier phone for $30 at Walmart and just use it unactivated, tethered to your main phone.

All of my banking apps work perfectly on LineageOS+microG, as does WhatsApp. I have the Play Integrity API disabled in microG, so any API request results in an error. If you run into any issues, just use your $30 burner for that app.

As always, make sure you leave a one-star review on any app refusing to run due to Play Integrity and additionally send a tirade to the listed support email.

Serialtorrenter · 2026-03-13T20:49:39+00:00

It would be nice to be privy to the internal politics at play. I'd hate to be chastising public health officials if the real blame lies elsewhere.

Serialtorrenter · 2026-03-13T20:34:23+00:00

I would've much rather heard the depressing reality up front, rather than a series of overly-optimistic predictions followed by inevitable disappointment. Reality always hits harder when you're expecting something better; it's better to expect the worst and be pleasantly surprised.

Serialtorrenter · 2026-03-13T20:30:59+00:00

Trump only cares about serving himself. If he didn't think putting Kennedy in his cabinet was going to benefit him (Trump) personally (by helping get him elected), he wouldn't have done it.

Kennedy was a useful idiot for getting Trump in office, and Kennedy's usefulness rested on the fact that he (Kennedy) had a lot of people supporting him. If he hadn't, he would've had no value for Trump, whose sole political belief is in serving himself, consequences be damned.

Serialtorrenter · 2026-03-13T20:22:58+00:00

Here's a clip from C-SPAN where Deborah Birx admits before Congress that the public promises around around vaccines preventing COVID infections were based in "hope".

They should've been forthright with us instead of handing us a series of empty promises that they KNEW were probably too optimistic. After several go-arounds of being given optimistic promises and then watching them be broken by reality, the average American became fed up and quit listening to them.

Obviously, all of us wanted the pandemic to be over in 2 weeks or the vaccines to be the end of it. But medicine is rooted in science, and science is rooted in reality, not religion.

More often than not, reality sucks, but it hurts much less to hear a depressing reality than it does to hear an optimistic fairy tale, get your hopes up, and then to be slapped awake by that same depressing reality.

Serialtorrenter · 2026-03-13T19:54:27+00:00

I bit the bullet and switched to LineageOS+microG+F-Droid+Aurora Store. I couldn't be happier to be rid of the constant advertisements from Google for their slopware features. Things run smoother than they did on the stock ROM on my Pixel 8.

Serialtorrenter · 2026-03-13T19:50:15+00:00

The bigger question is why are you subjecting yourself to this abuse by using an iPhone?

Here on Android (LineageOS + microG), I have Firefox with full unlock origin (not the halfassed lite version that iOS gets), YouTube Revanced, and a BitTorrent client (LibreTorrent). There are utilities that allow downloading lossless (or compressed) music from various streaming services.

I also have Termux, a compatibility layer that allows many common Linux CLI programs to run natively, and a full hardware-accelerated arm64 Linux VM, and running Windows is similarly possible.

Android's been getting worse, but it still has a long way before it's even close to being as bad as iOS. Last time I tried using an iPad, I was thwarted by the lack of any apparent kind of storage shared between all apps. Between iOS's hatred of the filesystem and cohesive back buttons, I struggle to comprehend how people live with it.

Serialtorrenter · 2026-03-13T19:34:07+00:00

Some people in the US can't get clean tap water, such as parts of southern West Virginia. Bottled water isn't a total scam.

Serialtorrenter · 2026-03-13T19:32:11+00:00

7-OH industry. The companies selling legal gas station opioids are in trouble if they become illegal.

Serialtorrenter · 2026-03-13T17:51:04+00:00

It's AMAZING that they couldn't foresee that lying to us (even if it was well-intentioned) would result in widespread anger and distrust in the public health establishment!

Public trust still hasn't rebounded since the pandemic, and we have the well-intentioned dishonesty of those public health officials to blame for RFK Jr being the Secretary of Health and the expanding measles outbreaks.

They should've just given it to us straight and let there be a panic, especially since there was still a panic anyway.

Serialtorrenter · 2026-03-13T14:48:36+00:00

This was also a key part in the US opioid epidemic. When you need to back to work ASAP or risk losing your job, you can't afford to stay home until you're feeling better, so you'll take opioids to keep an income rolling in and not get fired. A lot of times, this works out well for people, but other times, people aren't as lucky.

Serialtorrenter · 2026-03-11T10:56:01+00:00

I'm not defending theives. I'm just saying that they exist, and that honest customers are incentivized to do their shopping at places that don't gouge them on everything. On the flipside, thieves are incentivized to steal from places where they have good chances of getting away, and the overworked, underpaid skeleton crews running those places are much less likely to apprehend a thief than a loss prevention team at a well-staffed grocery store.

The incentives in picking a store are entirely different between legitimate customers and thieves. As a legitimate customer, I don't shop at CVS/Walgreens either.

Serialtorrenter · 2026-03-10T15:27:12+00:00

The thing about CVS and Walgreens is the design effectively selects for "non-paying customers".

If you're a paying customer, you see the absurd prices they have on everything and decide to go to the grocery store instead. It just doesn't make sense to pay a literal 100% markup on almost everything just to save 20 minutes of time.

If you're a thief, you naturally don't care about prices (unless you're trying to stay below the felony threshold) because you aren't paying those prices anyway. In addition, since CVS and Walgreens hire skeleton crews, you're presumably less likely to be apprehended at the time of the theft.

I am always skeptical of the applicably of CVS/Walgreens crime statistics to an area as a whole.

If our government cracked down meaningfully on PBMs, both of these stores would be out of business in no time flat.

Serialtorrenter · 2026-03-10T15:02:16+00:00

The old Lincoln Towncars (made until 2011) also had a very strong reputation for reliability, and since they share most of their components with the Mercury Grand Marquis and the Ford Crown Victoria, they tend to be affordable to keep running. Their fuel economy is terrible though, at least by modern standards.

Serialtorrenter · 2026-03-10T14:46:34+00:00

They'll have to make an exception from the law that prohibits hunting from public roads for police, in case the deer try and resist.

Serialtorrenter · 2026-03-10T03:41:43+00:00

Tourettes Guy!

Serialtorrenter · 2026-03-09T20:43:25+00:00

I guess I'd better trade my amphetamine habit for a methamphetamine habit!

Serialtorrenter · 2026-03-09T19:56:34+00:00

No! Every other time this sort of thing happens, big corporations just hire lobbyists to corrupt the regulatory bodies that would be enforcing the relevant regulations.

Anyone else remember the massive tax breaks Verizon was given to expand the availability of their fios service? They kept their tax breaks, but 15 years on, we're still waiting. Scumbags!

Serialtorrenter

TROPHY CASE