lproven

Good for you.

Now, shall we discuss the ecological and commercial cost of that?

With great affection.

Mind you, when it launched, I was in my mid-teens and I believed the hype: I thought it really was CGI. Ah, innocence of youth...

Because we've spent something like 2 trillion dollars on it, as we hurtle into global climate collapse and WW3.

The real question is how useful they are

No, it is not.

and the answer "not at all" increasingly requires flat-earth levels of denial.

No, it does not.

For me, after ~25 years in the skeptics movement, I think the parallels with supplementary, complementary and alternative medicine are most useful.

I choose that term intentionally: its initials are S.C.A.M. and that's exactly what it is. As Tim Minchin and Alan Kay both noted, "we have a special term for alternative medicine that's been tested and shown to work. It's called 'medicine'."

If it worked, it'd be normal standard clinical medicine. But it doesn't work, and so it isn't.

And yet, SCAM is a multi-billion-dollar industry. People have ostensibly official qualifications like "ND", for "naturopathic doctor", even though that person is not a doctor and can't make you better from any kind of illness at all. Colleges teach it, millions use it, and yet, it does not work.

Which means we need to ask:

1. What does "It works! It's useful!" really mean?

2. How do we know it does not in fact work?

As a handy example, let's look at homeopathy.

Here's a quick list of things widely believed...

* It's traditional. It isn't. It was invented by Samuel Hahnemann in 1796. * It's a kind of herbal medicine. It isn't. One widely-used ingredient is duck's liver ("Oscillococcinum"). Ducks are not herbs and neither are their livers. * It's been proved to work. It hasn't.

We can go through the principles and prove it doesn't work even without going into a laboratory.

The principle is, "like cures like." A substance that causes symptoms like a given disease can treat that disease.

Fact: they can't.

Then we make that substance stronger by successive, succussive dilution.

Fact: it doesn't. That's why we say things are "watered down".

Succussive: you have to mix the diluted substance by banging the bottle against a copy of Hahnemann's book. Dude knew how to make money.

Fact: Dilution does not work.

That's why we call things "watered down." It makes them weaker.

Sufficiently high dilutions can be shown by statistics to have not a single molecule of the substance left, but that's OK because "water has a memory".

Fact: water does not have a memory.

We know from the principles it cannot work.

Relevance to AI: we know how the transformer algorithm works. It cannot think. Adding a few feedback loops for more plausible, but much more computationally expensive, answers does not miraculously add thinking, any more than banging a test tube of water and duck's liver magically mixes it better.

But people believe it, so it's been tested. It doesn't work. It doesn't work on people, or in vivo meaning when tested on animals, or in vitro meaning when tested in the lab on cell culture, or in silico which means in computational simulation.

*BUT!*

Most people get better from most things. This is called "reversion to the mean" and if it weren't so the first cold would have wiped out the cavemen.

What it can do, like all SCAM treatment, is make people feel better.

Being treated by a nice friendly doctor makes people feel better. It does not make them better -- it is only a state of mind.

That can sometimes marginally help gravely ill people rally, but only very rarely.

There is also the placebo effect, also much misunderstood.

This makes someone FEEL as if they'd had medicine if they think they've had medicine.

They do not get better. They just feel better for a bit. If they are ill, they remain ill. If they are dying, they still die.

But it might hurt less.

The placebo effect is very strong. Medicine from a person in a white coat works better than form the same person in street clothes.

Very big pills work better than smaller ones... but very small pills work better still, as a tiny pill suggests to people it's a very strong drug.

This is what "But AI works!" really means.

It makes people think they're doing less work -- in tests, they in fact do more, checking and fixing. Unless they don't check or fix, in which case, they are irresponsible fools.

It makes people think it can do amazing things because it can find prior art in its corpus they couldn't find -- or didn't look for, or know how to search for.

It does not save the need for skills.

Experienced practitioners can front-load the work with really detailed prompts which cover exceptions, edge cases, and things that novices don't know about. But the novices don't know that they don't know. (It enhances the illusion of competence. It helps the skilled more than it helps the unskilled, but neither realises, and it prevents the unskilled learning by trial and error. It reduces the supply of skilled workers.)

The reason AI works is the reason that people see the face of Jesus in slices of toast, as someone said recently.

nicely-done dedicated viewer

The problem is the edge cases. PDF has lots.

In $DAYJOB-1 we used PDFs as part of the official feedback process for technical documentation: subject-matter experts sent their comments as PDF annotations. Most FOSS viewers can't show them.

Form filling also is a tricky area. Conversion, searching, accessibility tools (screenreaders often can't read PDFs), comments, annotations, editing, all these and more are significant functional weaknesses for the free viewers.

That's setting aside the really fancy stuff, like 3D objects, video, media content, etc.

Even so PDF viewers are big and complicated things so smaller distros pick up tools from alien desktops -- e.g. KDE's Okular, which I find fugly but can handle comments, or GNOME's weird crippled UI in Evince or Papers, with no menu bars etc., but which is Gtk so you find it in many Gtk desktops.

It wasn't hard for the Firefox viewer to outdo 90-95% of the free viewers because the free viewers only do the dead basic stuff, and that kept Acrobat Reader alive on other OSes -- even though the last Linux one is version 9, from 2008.

they don't typically include editing functionality.

Not true. The original Mozilla Internet Suite was a combined browser, email/newsgroups client, and web-page editor. It was an open-sourced version of Netscape Communicator which did the same things. Seamonkey is the modern fork.

Firefox is the result of a project to cut down the Mozilla suite to something smaller, simpler and more focused, but its parent program and direct ancestor edited text, HTML, and did other read/write stuff like messaging, calendaring, etc.

The original NextBSD project was founded by Jordan Hubbard... Who also cofounded FreeBSD itself, and then years later, worked at Apple on OS X modernising its BSD base. So he should know.

A remote descendant seems to be here:

https://www.cerberus-x.com/

once I fully gave in to using AI

58 here. I won't even touch it.

It seems to be heroin combined with cocaine for programmers. Not even once.

AI: Just Say No.

Nah. Alpine, or TinyCore. Much smaller: Slackware is biiiiig.

You went the wrong direction. Go older, not newer.

After trying dozens of lightweight Linuxes with disappointing results, I downgraded my Sony Vaio P to WinXP. This has full GPU acceleration on Intel Pouslbo and for XP the machine's 2GB of RAM is spacious. Sad, but there we are.

Ditto. A fascinating read, even if I didn't understand all of it.

Another brilliant techie who became a doctor instead is Dr Cameron Kaiser -- I think he might be @classichasclass here. He runs the last AMOS system on the internet, developed TenFourFox and Classzilla, the Overbite plugin that makes Firefox talk Gopher, and much more. He also compiled the amazing Secret Weapons of Commodore site.

And the ST equivalent, STOS:

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

There's a modernised build:

https://atariscne.org/news/index.php/stos-basic-v5-5-alpha-t...

And a modern descendant, AOZ Studio:

https://www.aoz.studio/

Exactly -- not sure I have many machines new enough for this to apply to.

The machine I'm typing on is the 2nd newest in the fleet -- it's a work box -- and it's an i7-8550U, an 8th gen "Kaby Lake" chip.

Thank you!

Since I got downvoted merely for asking: apparently, "squiz" is Australian/NZ slang for a glance or quick look. I honestly didn't know there were any Amish down under.

No, not yet, but it's attracting interest. I wrote about it here:

https://www.theregister.com/software/2025/09/12/three-altern...

And now, from the last I heard, it has evolved into neither here nor there.

Minix 3 is a true microkernel Unix-compatible: it can run most of the NetBSD userland, for instance. It is probably the single most widely run Unix-like OS in the desktop/server world, as a copy runs in the hidden management engine inside every Intel CPU made in the last decade and a half or so. Whether the machine runs Windows, Linux, xBSD, macOS, it doesn't matter: deep inside it's running Minix.

But Intel committed nothing back and never even told the OS's creator. He only found out years later:

https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/intel/

"squiz"?

the Ordnung

What does that mean?

(This entire thread is very hard for this Brit to follow. So many unknown words and whole concepts.)

"TFR"?

All right. But only curbside ones? ("Kerbside" for me. "Curb" is the verb.)

A bin is any trashcan in BrEn... in your office, in your kitchen or bathroom, behind the house, whatever. So it's still not an ideal match.

You can't unilaterally say all AI blogs are low quality. That's bullshit.

Watch me.

I absolutely can and do. And pictures, and videos, and picture posts, and comics, and all image-format content.

If it wasn't worth creating with someone's brain, it is never ever worth my time to consume the prompt output.

Send me the prompt. I might look, if I'm bored.

There was an entire book about that 50 years ago, and last month someone brought that thinking and analysis to the LLM-bot issue:

EDIT: this is the one I was thinking of...

https://sinclairtarget.com/blog/2026/06/01/quality-in-the-ag...

But this is relevant too...

https://bersas.substack.com/p/zen-and-the-dance-of-generativ...

Still no: "Lord Buckethead" first stood in 1987, some 15 years before the "H'Angus the monkey" campaign in 2002.

Nope. Several decades later.

The "Boaty McBoatface" campaign was from 2016. "Lord Buckethead" first appeared in 1987, some 30 years earlier.

No. The point of the comment was to clarify the confusion that you are reinforcing.

A "bin" in BrEn does not mean a generic container: it generally means a receptacle for waste, refuse, or garbage.

I've been occasionally helping a blind friend of mine with his PC since 2005. His screenreader talks at about 600wpm or more and after 20 years of practice I can't understand it.

I speedread and can read text faster than his computer's voice -- but not by much. It is very impressive, and very hard to use.

But I am the only sighted person he's met who can use his PC. I navigate Windows mostly by keyboard, and he has no mouse. It slows me down slightly but I can still use it.

(He does have a screen on his family computer, so sighted family and friends can watch films with him. His work one has no screen.)

I have also written my own obituary for him, but I did not want to be accused of spamming HN.

https://www.theregister.com/personal-tech/2026/07/03/david-p...

Colly Myers, former Psion MD and Symbian CEO, who died in February, was his half-brother.

WTAF?

If it was true

Of course it is true. That is why I explained the length of my relevant experience.

you could explain how and why

Why bother to an annoying troll?

ELI5:

My job is to understand complicated computer stuff and explain it in easy words.

My editor's job is to write headlines that will get people to read what I wrote.

I know the tech. The editor knows the readers.