Come now! It is clear that the sarcasm indicator wasn't suggesting that the government didn't really announce that. The sarcasm was in the invocation of governmental authority, which is thereby implied to be ill-founded and not worth listening to.

Glad it was clear to you.

I felt it useful to provide a reliable source for such an outrageous national position. Lest some think it exaggeration or twisting of facts for humour or effect. It's not. Yikes. :-)

“NOW Foods, which makes and sells supplements itself, bought 25 vitamin C gummy brands off Amazon and paid an accredited lab to test them. They published the results last week. Twelve had almost no detectable vitamin C. Five claimed 1,000mg or more per gummy and contained under 2mg.”

Yikes. And Vitamin C has to be one of the cheapest active ingredients going, so imagine the incentive to skip “real” ingredients. o_O

On the other hand from my ad hoc reading over the last few years, Now itself seems pretty good, they're relatively cheap and seem to contain what they claim in tests.

Well, NOW is doing well enough to have an arena in Hoffman Estates (former Sears Centre). So I guess there's plenty of money to go around.

“Many parents say that, thanks to the hoax, their children now feel confused about historical facts, the Nanjing Daily reported”

Great, lets make this useful … this specific nonsense will settle down and be proven to be a hoax and/or misinformation. An important component of parenting today is to raise kids who take claims presented on the internet with a large grain of salt. Rather than contrived examples in critical thinking exercises they might get in class or a textbook, parents now have a perfect, real example here to show their kids that online nonsense can look authoritative and be very widely believed, and yet still be false. Shields up. Less time online for kids. And don’t outsource your critical thinking to the online majority or to AI!

404media is paywalled for this article now.

Here’s Tom’s version:

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

That article is blocked, telling me: “This post is for paid members only”

So I posted this version from Tom’s.

The submission with 323 comments is recent enough that it's still accepting comments. You could add your link there.

Good call. Done.

Submitting this 6 days later is a bit much.

Also lots of previous discussions to even that:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49310725

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49068738

His trebuchet launched a 4 gram projectile at 776 miles per hour.

That's obviously extremely lightweight for trebuchet payload, but for comparison, his projectile is approximately 62 grains so approximately twice as heavy as 30 grain high speed 22LR rounds. And approximately 1.5 times as heavy as 40 grain subsonic rounds.

What does grains mean in this context?

It’s a super old unit of measurement for mass [0], idea being that a “grain” is a single seed of wheat etc.

1 gram is a little over 15 grains, and there are 7000 grains per (avoirdupois) pound.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grain_(unit)

It's a unit of mass used in the firearms world

325 mg aspirin pills were originally 5 grains. A carat was 4 grains. The unit was used by apothecaries, jewelers, and bullet makers.

The more important point, I think, is that it means that the trebuchet is lethal with similar range to a handgun.

another way for america to avoid the metric system at all costs

No it's an old unit that's stuck around in the firearm world in basically every country. EU bullet makers specify their bullet weights in grains too.

Yes, and I'd include Cory Doctorow in the list of Canadians paying attention and writing about it.

Back to 2024: "Holy CRAP the UN Cybercrime Treaty is a nightmare"

https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-07-23...

I'm not being flippant but I think part of your answer is in the first two words of the title.

IME while LLMs may help delivery utility in a finished work, humans often value the absorption, mastery, style, or constraint of performing a mundane activity hands-on and brains-on.

Fast forward... all the computer I need is now in my bag or pocket or least within the room.

So what I'd enjoy on my wrist is an entry-level Seiko (or other) quartz with nothing but: 1) analog hands, and 2) a vibrating Bluetooth notification of incoming phone calls or maybe messages.

I know know, the second one is a swamp that Seiko doesn't want to wade into.

Aside from shallow, uncritical notes, consider that annotating in a margin is evidence that a reader is actively engaging with a text.

Very often when I write in margins it's to question or argue against what's written (e.g. "really? what about ...", or "no, contradicts ...") which, to me, seems in line with the dialectic process Socrates promoted. Multiple sides, truth-seeking.

Sure, having a spacious notebook on the side is even better. But it's the same goal, isn't it? Engage more deeply with a text and encourage questioning as you read it, while it's still fresh.

Sometimes you have the drastic misfortune of someone totally off the rails writing crazy crap in it though, or a 3 year old experimenting with crayons. Not what the Stephenson article is about, but that sucks.

Amazon's used prices are usually set by booksellers that base their prices on stuff like this for some books... When you get to like old cheap paperback romances though, or that .01 plus shipping, you might or might not.

I would be pissed if I expected a clean, un-scribbled-on book I wanted and it was represented as such, but got that.

Buying a used book sight unseen from Amazon or from a reseller who doesn’t have a reputation for reporting used condition reliably … that’s a buyer’s choice. It’s not left to (mis)fortune.

Anyways, my point was to counter the parent post’s claim that notes in margins are shallow or unsocratic. Some are, some aren’t IME.