This is a joke of course; if anything important hinges on physically fighting robots, we've already lost.

So, robots are becoming a thing

At what age do cats learn that doors swing outwards, and you should stand to the side rather than in the way of the door? Or are they just surprised every time for their entire lives.

RT @robertskmiles: @ESYudkowsky Eliezer you can't just drop a line like. "AI companies are here to eat chip and lie, and they're experienci….

Like, I run a bare-bones system with very little on it by default. Keeps things fast. I basically just told my system "Hey fyi, printers are a thing that exists, so, think about that", and then everything just worked perfectly with no interaction required.

RT @robertskmiles: @GaryMarcus Ok, that is pretty funny

Claude says to use the CUPS Admin Panel. This fails, but. fair; CUPS isn't installed. I run one command to install CUPS, and one to start it. Immediately all the printers on the network show up in chrome's printer dropdown, and work perfectly. 2025, year of the linux desktop?.

An astonishing turn of events: At a co-working space, I need to print something. Next to the printer is a three page doc that only mentions Macs. I'm running Manjaro Linux and have never tried to print from this machine. So this is going to be my whole day.

Or like, for aluminium it's 0.9J/g°C. So "This heatsink weighs 10g, so if this component dissipates 1W, it'll start off heating it up by 1 degree every 9 seconds".

Like, ok this kettle is 2kW, holds about 2 litres, it'll go from room temp to boiling (100-20=80 degree change) in 80*4.2s=336s= ~5 and a half minutes.

So everyone knows the specific heat capacity of water is ~4.2 J/g°C, but I never found it that easy to use. Just realised you can re-arrange as "A 1 kW heater will raise the temperature of 1 litre of water by 1 degree C every 4.2 seconds", which feels much more useful/intuitive.

Ok! I finally had an idea for a tweet stupid enough to not get a load of positive engagement. I've been searching for the nadir and I finally found it, turns out it's "cow orking". Good to know.

What exactly is 'orking', and how do you do it to a cow?.

Like I bet the web browser on the early Kindle was some engineer saying "You know, this thing is basically a standard Linux machine, it can do whatever. and we already depend on a browser engine for the store UI. give me half an hour".

Sometimes an engineer says "Hey I could also make the product do X, do we want that?", and sometimes a manager tells an engineer "Hey you need to find a way to make the product do X", and as a user you often can really feel the difference.

They're partway there already.

Amusingly I couldn't get 4o to generate this for me, it just returned an empty response, I think it got tripped up by the prompt injection text! o3 could do it though.

The arms race never ends

We've now been deliberately listening in while walking around. So far 1 conversation about an office(?) and 4 about dudes.

Been in NYC for a few days now and so far this city doesn't pass the Bechdel Test. Loads of women, but every conversation I've overheard has been about relationship problems with some guy.