fiat_lux 🆕 🏠

Fair. In my case I wish someone had not overlooked the systemic inflammation (from a different condition that has been recently correlated with OA, somewhat unexpectedly) and the malmechanics I was experiencing, so that I might have avoided some of the further issues, but, so it goes.

I manage to shift some of the chronic pain, but sadly society really likes to build worlds that have only one blessed way of doing certain things, which makes it impossible to shift more consistently. So I will have to mostly content myself with smugly sore.

Given you appear to be a doctor though, I do have one favor to ask. If you ever get a flexible kid with crepitus come through your doors, maybe add a CRP test to their blood work, just on the off-chance and even if only for the chain of evidence.

So when people told me as a kid not to worry about my crepitus, they were in fact completely wrong? If so, I’m feeling vindicated but also sore, but that’s better than only sore.

He actually said the phrase “ensure a fair deal for working people”. Who thought it was a good idea to put that in the speech knowing he was going to be fully dressed in the spoils of exploitation? You’d think they’d at least temper it with the comparative term “fairer” if the more sensitive wardrobe option was truly off the table.

Or if you didn’t file 5 years of tax returns - even if you’ve never lived or earned income in the US.

This caught an acquaintances of mine who was accidentally born in the US when their mother went into early labor. They found out about both the rule of the land and the exit tax when they were an adult when their application for citizenship in a different country was rejected for already being a dual citizen of the US.

Total speculation on my part. They could have blasted that cash on orgies for all I know.

Oh, that percentage is the year on year change, not a return on investment. So 2025 financial year they reported roughly -30 million cash from investments, this year is roughly -267 million, so they reported a loss of (267-30) / 30 = ~7.78 times as much money against the scope of the category “investments”.

You’d expect to see the percentage go below zero when you buy more stocks / bonds or securities than you sell or which mature, or (I think) when you take money gained from an investment and then put it towards another investment or other cash category, so it’s not necessarily a really bad thing for a company to have a negative number there. It just means they’re either shuffling it internally or committed to spending it. The size and timing of the change is what is unusual.

There are all sorts of rules and tricks in this shell game though, I couldn’t say with any certainty where that money went, or if it ever really existed at all. I just see a pattern of companies with big negative short term investment cash flows and layoffs that correlate maybe too well with the Bitcoin dump at the end of January.

I think the “original” money is still mostly from their 2021 IPO, so “leveraged” was the wrong word, my brain is a mess today.

But, they certainly look like they either ate up to a quarter billion loss on crypto gambling, or shuffled the money from that column into a different part of the books to pay for AI, or spent that money on other new investments. I don’t think it could be entirely new investments because they’ve never even hit one billion in annual revenue, their net income has never been positive, and they’ve had no new acquisitions over the last couple of years. The new CFO in January move also points at a big financial fuckup being the reason.

No surprises here. Their cash flow suggests they were heavily leveraged on crypto (Edit: or other unusual spending, the crypto part is speculation, they officially claim to have no crypto), -776% y/y change for investments in 2026. Not as bad as their 2023 -1,023%, but their new CFO has an uphill battle ahead of her.

I can see them being on the 2027 casualty list. They’ve been pushing AI hard internally the last year or so, which caused me some issues at my workplace after their misplaced confidence led them to call out my niche as an “opportunity” they had “mostly solved”. Spoilers: They hadn’t then, visibly still haven’t now, and will have less chance doing so by adding more AI because it is particularly terrible at this niche.

I’m not sure I understand. Peripheral hallucinations are a recognized type of hallucination, and hallucinations can involve anything from shadows or flashes of light through to full vivid imagery. It only requires perceiving anything that isn’t really there and but it feels real. The patterns or colors you see when you close your eyes are considered hallucinations too.

We had slightly different readings.

As he was writing he became aware that he was being watched, and a figure slowly emerged to his left. It was indistinct and on the periphery of his vision but it moved as V.T. would expect a person to. The apparition was grey and made no sound… V.T. was unable to see any detail and finally built up the courage to turn and face the thing. As he turned the apparition faded and disappeared.

He experienced a visual disturbance in his periphery manifesting as the false perception of a person. Even without it being interpreted as a person, that’s a textbook mild hallucination.

Once V.T. knew this he calculated the frequency of the standing sound wave … 18.97Hz … plus or minus 10%

Table IV on page 212 of this book shows frequencies causing disturbance to the eyes and vision to be within the band 12 to 27 Hz.

Most interestingly, a NASA technical report mentions a resonant frequency for the eye as 18 Hz (NASA Technical Report 19770013810).

He cited two sources inline with ranges narrower than 8-40Hz which indicate that vision can be affected at the same frequencies he measured in the lab. He even noted that everyone would have slightly different resonant frequencies.

No, it’s not a full research paper, but it is the citation you requested.

I believe the poster is referring to The Ghost in the Machine, Published in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, Vol.62, No 851 April 1998 (pdf)

Wrong end of the spectrum, unfortunately. You’ll have better luck with your local ham radio club.

1. If you know you’re alone at home and then hear voices, that might be one way. There are ways to distinguish the presence of people beyond sight.

2. Blindness is much more than total blindness, which only describes a minority of blind people. There are different definitions, but the World Health Organization puts the definition as less than 3/60 or a visual field of less than 10 degrees in the better-seeing eye. That basically means that if you need to be more than 20 times closer to an object to be able to see the same level of detail, or you have almost no peripheral vision, you qualify.

Anyone want to trade 20 routers for shortwave radios? I hope nobody was planning on tuning in to Voice of America tonight.

“While cavitation occurs at low frequencies and destroys both viruses and tissues through the collapse of gas bubbles, acoustic resonance operates at high frequencies of 3–20 MHz,”

Brb, making a blanket out of 802.11ah routers.

In this case because it’s ironically counterproductive. If it weren’t for the environmental impact, it might be amusing to watch him keep hitting himself.

I tried this type of prompt a long while ago to see what the “thinking” output would reveal. What happened was the agent went and “verified” it’s weightings were accurate - but having no point of comparison it obviously concluded it was correct.

However, doing that consumes a significant quantity of tokens and contributes to filling up the context window. There are two likely results to evaluating this ultimately unactionable request.

1. It will push this instruction (and the rest of the wishful thinking) off the stack more quickly - making the prompt even more futile than it already is.
2. Given some agents re-inject a summary of the original prompt periodically to prevent the stack problem, it will keep narrowing the context window - which contributes to increasing the rate of hallucination for the actually actionable instructions.

I certainly got that impression, and I confess to mostly skimming the parts beyond the technical breakdown for that reason. The conclusions he draws are arguably a bit spurious, but the persistent download and opaque opt-out are interesting facets.

Given the controversial nature of AI and the EU’s recent antitrust fines of Google, I can see this getting some legal scrutiny - just not under the legislation he cited. I’d be interested to see how next year’s Google’s DMA compliance report frames it, assuming it’s not lumped into a “confidential” redaction (which shouldn’t even be allowed in a transparency report…).

I’d say the numbers are more a bonus.

I assume they’re putting it in under the guise of various browser “features” like automatic tab grouping or something, but also using it for Google products like Drive / Docs / Sheets to have offline agentic crap in there that would be more efficiently done without LLMs. I suspect this is as far up as they can hoist it because any further would be outside the bounds of the browser sandbox, which would prevent those products from easily calling it.

But the features themselves are probably not the end goal either. The more tempting motivation is that it allows for circumventing the data center problem by offloading the compute to the client. A couple of quick updates to the ToS and I can see it being used as a mesh llm network, sort of like the “find my device” network they rolled out last year.

The article mentions eprivacy and gdpr, but I don’t think those are the most problematic here, assuming Google maintains mostly local-only compute. What I’d be interested to know is how this plays with DSA and DMA, which have more explicit requirements and more teeth.

Never hallucinate or make anything up.

I know you already mentioned this part in your post, but I’m still completely taken aback that it’s just in there like this - as though it wouldn’t be in the system prompt if it stood a chance of working.

If I were the kind of person to be shilling LLMs and posting prompts, I would still be ashamed to share this one. It’s a tacit condemnation of both the tool itself and the tool posting it.

Yeah, even there. A page loading is one thing, but browser features are somewhat independent of the content. There’s also a good chance this is being used as a hook for other Google products like Drive or Docs (which are basically websites under the hood) to allow offline file management, creation, etc.

It’s a bad choice, but it wouldn’t be the first bad choice Google has made.