Piero Bosio Social Web Site Personale

@Salty @dacig The direct synthesis of starch via this pathway IS NOT A BIOFUEL. It's direct chemosynthesis. An entirely different category of thing.

@dacig @Salty Starch, however, is *useful*. It fixes atmospheric carbon, is stable at ambient pressure/temperature without compression, is a dense energy store, and can be turned into hexoses or fed to animals or single-celled organisms. If you can make it using PV panels on agriculturally marginal land (eg. in deserts) that's a huge win.

@ratsnakegames

Start here: https://accelerating.org/articles/comingtechsingularity

Then continue (jumping forward 30 years): https://www.dair-institute.org/projects/tescreal/

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY:

The singularity has been cancelled.

What we're getting is wall to wall spam generators, optimized for passing the (modified) Turing test and convincing gullible humans that they are "intelligent".

Instead of the singularity, we are getting the spamularity.

@jbenjamint @HighlandLawyer @fesshole @Illuminatus @bjn Yup, and they had some kind of ongoing name war happening: there was this one chippie out west called "The Codfather" …

@ianturton @fesshole @Illuminatus @jshawthorne Deep fried steak pie is a personal favourite of mine!

@_thegeoff @fesshole @Illuminatus Chippie up the road from me does the notorious Deep Fried Battered Mars Bar (with salt'n'sauce). I have never dared.

@fesshole @Illuminatus TOTALLY reasonable if by "cake" you mean haggis, or maybe pizza squares.

@elaine1helen AIs are *generative* and they're designed to generate an answer shaped object, not provide an *actual* answer.

@SteveClough Note that by that point the UK had been almost universally re-wired, and EU safety legislation required molded plugs.

@tops @mpjgregoire @jbayes I don't any more. Used to keep a couple on hand until the mid-90s.

@ErikJonker Shocking to you, I know, but I think the stuff currently sold as AI is bullshit.

@BigJackBrass They do this for books, too. 😬

@TimWardCam @swetland The house I grew up in was only rewired with modern sockets and ring mains in 1974. Before then it was all round-pin sockets (two sizes, small ones for lamps only).

@statsguy I can't remember when I last wrote a cheque, either!

@mpjgregoire @jbayes They didn't fit plugs because doing so would have cost them money *and nobody else was doing so*. Plugs were sold separately to consumers. Every corner shop sold them!

@jdrm @Sie @nygl Congratulations, you've discovered the thread about what happens if you ask various LLMs how to correctly wire up different types of mains plug (starting with British ones: all the suggestions are an electrocution hazard) …

@dearlove Also how to correctly address a letter (both on the envelope and in writing the contents). Reading a clock face and tying your shoelaces was supposed to be covered before primary school, though (by parents or kindergarten).

@swetland The UK had regional plug variations until the 1920s/30s and then a huge push to standardize and rewire the nation from the late 1940s onwards that took decades to run to completion.

@cjwatson @lispi314 I haven't needed it in a couple of decades either, but still, I know how not to kill myself (get @feorag to do it for me).