Maxi Heitmeyer provides the first interesting cause, reason, and justification for brain rot due to doomscrolling that I have come across. But it's not an easy read.

I would really be pleased to read a logical summary of this article!

Go to a bar (in America). Sit on a stool. Say "hello" to the person next to you.

It bears remembering that all of this was reported by a group of Haitians in Brooklyn who publish and staff the Haitian Times.

They deserve recognition for maintaining the standards of good journalism in what is, by any measure, a difficult era.

Posts like this are why I read Hacker News.

My Egg McMuffin will never look the same!

Agreed. And the nice thing was that they weren't just illustrations, they were metaphors, even allegories, on human and computer engagements

Today's link is an update to an article first published some time ago

https://www.worksinprogress.news/p/fixing-retail-with-land-v...

There's a healthy number of comments on SlashDot: https://slashdot.org/story/26/01/26/1637238/fixing-retail-wi...

The comments open up a Pandora's Box of many valid complexities. All indicative of why it has become so difficult to get things done these days.

This hack has completely disrupted my afternoon! Perhaps even forever after.

Draw a millipede as a dog:

Gemini responds:

Conceptualizing the "Millipup"

https://gemini.google.com/share/b6b8c11bd32f

Draw the five legs of a dog as if the body is a pentagon

https://gemini.google.com/share/d74d9f5b4fa4

And animal legs are quite standardized

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_l...

It's all about the prompt. Example:

Can you imagine a dog with five legs?

https://gemini.google.com/share/2dab67661d0e

And generally, the issue sits between the computer and the chair.

;-)

This is basically the "Rhinos are just fat unicorns" approach. Totally fine if you want to go that route but a bit goofy. You can get SOTA models to generate a 5-legged dog simply by being more specific about the placement of the fifth leg.

https://imgur.com/a/jNj98Pc

Asymmetry is as hard for AI models as it is for evolution to "prompt for" but they're getting better at it.

haha fair point, you can get the expected results with the right prompt, but I think it still reveals a general lack of true reasoning ability (or something)

Or it just shows that it tries to overcorrect the prompt which is generally a good idea in the most cases where the prompter is not intentionally asking a weird thing.

This happens all the time with humans. Imagine you're at a call center and get all sorts of weird descriptions of problems with a product: every human is expected to not expect the caller is an expert and actually will try to interpolate what they might mean by the weird wording they use

The math was beyond me. So, I asked Gemini 3 for help. I share what they replied to my many questions here:

https://gemini.google.com/share/1a6663a83898

Schrodinger and Penrose: pro. Einstein: con.

My favorite part is the debate between His Holiness the Dalai Lama and President Donald Trump on Maria Strømme's interesting effort.

Nearly sixty years of coding under my belt here.

The OP proposes a valid and reasonable pattern.

Nonetheless, not all of us are so wise.

There are dozens of frustrating all-nighters and near all-nighters in my timeline.

And, dotted in and about, there are those several times when, half-asleep, you press the enter key, look up and gasp "OMG, it's working!"