Oblivion is just what I’m looking for
On the left, we see a potato. On the right, a slightly sharper potato. Nowhere near up to modern facial modelling standards, but improvement.
Bethesda issued the game Oblivion in 2006 (The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, to give its proper name) and they’ve issued this re-render earlier this year. The game is the same, the story is the same, the audio (including voices) is the same, it just looks better. And sure, I fell for it.
I played the original Oblivion, but I don’t remember anything about it except Emperor Potatoface here (who dies in the first fifteen minutes). Oh, and harvesting nirnroots.
This is just the sort of nonsense I’m in the mood for at the moment.
June 2, 2025 — 6:21 pm
Comments: 3
I cannot vouch for this
Epoch Times (who poached it from the AJC) says you can get up to 10% more flavor extraction from your coffee if you add a few drops of water to the beans before you grind them.
Researchers weren’t looking for that. They were trying to cut down on the amount of dust wafting around after grinding. But they discovered it made a better coffee.
I struggled to understand why. The article helpfully told me it’s called the “Ross droplet technique” and I went straight to Grok.
Grok say it reduces static electricity (you ever seen how the grounds jump onto your finger if you try to swirl the last coffee out of the grinder?).
“The technique is particularly useful for single-dose grinding and is popular among home baristas and coffee enthusiasts. It promotes a cleaner grind, reduces grinder retention (grounds left behind), and can lead to more consistent grind sizes, potentially improving extraction and flavor.”
I shall try it in the morning. Have a good weekend!
May 30, 2025 — 5:37 pm
Comments: 6
We will never understand them…
Uncle B got a fancy new cellphone today. It’s one of the Xiaomi phones with the Leica lenses. He love him some phone photography.
We’ve been laughing ourselves silly over the ringtones. All of them. All of them sound like music for a cartoon set in Peking, with titles like “young people love milk tea shop” and “doll and bear dance”.
We are never going to understand these people.
May 28, 2025 — 5:56 pm
Comments: 10
They’re still doing it
Crop circle, Wiltshire, 15th May, 2025. The barley crop was young and green, so by the time they took this picture, it was five days later and it had sprung back a lot. It was undoubtedly a lot crisper when new.
Most interesting report at the link. The farmer will let you go look if you kick £10 into his GoFundMe.
We heard a lecture once about crop circles. I didn’t expect to find it interesting, but I did. The man explained that it couldn’t possibly be done the way the authorities say it was. The men who claimed to have created at least some of them, when pressed, couldn’t actually reproduce the effect at all.
If I recall (it was a long time ago), he wasn’t claiming an extraterrestrial origin, he was just saying the government was blowing smoke up our butts to make us stop talking about it.
May 27, 2025 — 5:43 pm
Comments: 5
The roses are exploding
This one is named Gertrude Jekyll, in honor of a very famous English gardener who died in 1932. She created or collaborated on over 400 gardens in the UK. Most famously, she worked with famous architect Sir Edwin Lutyens and together they invented cottagecore.
Her brother was friends with RL Stevenson, so she was probably that Jekyll, too.
She didn’t develop this rose; is was named for her by the rose specialist David Austin (who, I have just discovered, died in 2018). He specialized in breeding old-fashioned roses.
Yes, yes…of course it needs to be in color.
May 26, 2025 — 6:23 pm
Comments: 10
I’m not sure what to say…
I really, really want to know what a public toilet looked like in 1540. Via this Twitter account.
Have a good weekend!
May 23, 2025 — 5:56 pm
Comments: 8
This might be okay…
I started training my replacement today. I think she’s going to be okay. She’s no weasel, but I think she can do the job.
She really liked my chicken lamp. This is a good sign.
The plan is, she’ll do all the boring office stuff and I’ll swan around doing interesting history stuff.
The downside? Once she’s trained, I have to do the interesting history stuff for free.
May 22, 2025 — 6:06 pm
Comments: 3
Stay away from the brown acid
I needed to find out the earliest printed reference to a certain building in the town, for work. Naturally, I asked Grok. It gave me an absolutely perfect quote from a well-known early local history book. Alas, it was a complete hallucination.
I know this because I have a digital version of the book and had already searched it for all the right keywords.
I told Uncle B and he said, “you should tell Grok it’s lying.” So I did. It apologized and gave me a genuine quote – one that I had already found for myself – that wasn’t so helpful.
It lied to please me.
Computer scientists really do call it hallucination when AI pulls information out of its butt. It’s not only a problem, it’s an increasing problem as the models get more complex.
Recent studies and reports indicate that AI hallucinations are becoming more prevalent, especially in advanced reasoning models. OpenAI’s o3 and o4-mini models, which are designed to reason step-by-step, have been found to hallucinate at rates between 30% and 79% of the time. Similarly, other reasoning models from companies like DeepSeek and IBM have also shown higher hallucination rates compared to their earlier versions.
Why, yes, I did get that answer from AI (Leo, the one built into Brave, in this instance).
This is why lawyers who use AI keep getting into trouble – AI fabricates cases. According to this tweet, the Chicago Sun-Times published a Summer reading list that was obviously AI – eight of the books on the list don’t exist.
It’s all well and good with these examples, but what happens when it’s analyzing x-rays?
May 21, 2025 — 4:02 pm
Comments: 5
Fatcat on the loose
Our cat has been AWOL for about twenty hours. Not really a big deal, except our cat is a big fat pudding and rarely strays far from his bowl. He vanishes maybe twice a year, and then he’ll saunter past the kitchen window like nothin’ at all.
Man, I can’t imagine what it’s like to have kids.
Prompt was “an editorial cartoon of a very fat black and white domestic cat with his back against a tree as though he’s hiding from someone, in the style of Thomas Nast”. Not terrible. There were several amusing variants.
———
Update: he’s home. Little bastard.
May 20, 2025 — 5:16 pm
Comments: 5
This ugly little church
…has got a complete scale model of the Sistine Chapel ceiling inside.
It was painted by a parishioner in the Eighties. I would love to know his working methods. Looking at this drone footage, it’s not a terrible copy.
Who am I to judge? My hometown had a big pink and yellow cement replica of The Parthenon. It was a favorite stoner spot, back in the day.
May 19, 2025 — 5:38 pm
Comments: 4