Sheryl from what I remember of my brief stint working at a pet store hamsters aren't the best starter pets even though a lot of guides say they are.

They are fragile...not as fragile as a chinchilla but still tiny bones so they need gentle handling. They are nocturnal so they will be up moving around at night and sleeping lots during the day. They also need daily handling and interaction ...some more than others. Dwarf hamsters really need that otherwise they get bitey.

Yeah, that just sounds like a whole other level of care and feeding (literally) that maybe is a lot to take on right now. I mean, no kids or hamsters over here, but it just strikes me as potentially fraught.

Happy birthday, lisah!

erika has earwormed me with the Simpsons birthday song.

Folks, I'm full on boggled at how quickly AI is moving and I'm not getting the impression that people understand how profoundly it's going to change everything.

I've got one (admittedly quirky/weird) friend who's already deeply into a relationship with her chatbot, which she has trained up to her tastes. Extra weirdly it can call her on the phone and they can talk.

I'm seeing credible animations done from prompts, and it's harder to spot the obvious AI glitches (It's figuring out fingers!).

Forget about the movie Her, it's moving directly to Ryan Gosling's holo AI girlfriend in the Bladerunner sequel.

People will be able to generate their own alternative slashtastic version of a season of Supernatural by basically wishing it into existence. It will take no particular expertise to populate bespoke porn with your neighbors and coworkers. That Dark Mirror episode USS Callister is about to happen everywhere.

And there are no guardrails on any of it.

The implications are huge, but more stunning is that it's already here. It's not over the horizon.

Thanks for the birthday wishes, everyone!

There are no safe guards and more and more industries want to use AI for things. Like AI being used in health insurance or worse AI being used to give medical advice by tele health...which right now is only an idea. And AI glitches (hallucinates) and comes up with weird answers that can cause problems.

Like suggesting super glue on pizza because it regurgitated some joking reddit comment.

And there was another AI that was Rick Rolling people. Not intentionally...it just scraped enough data from the Internet that had enough RickRolling that the algorithm spit it out.

I seem to recall there was an eating disorder organization that replaced human phone councilors with AI. AI, trained on the internet as it was, started giving anorexic teens diet tips, to help them lose more weight.

AI is running into a recursive garbage in-garbage out problem. It’s largely trained on web scraping, but now a lot of Google search results are AI generated. So it’s creating its own reality, and the hallucinations, rather than getting fixed as AI develops, are getting worse.

I follow the stock ticker NANC, which is pinned to the reported investments of Democratic congresspeople. As of this morning, their top investment is NVIDA Corp., a chip manufacturer whose price has soared due to its product being widely used with AI. So don’t expect any legal guardrails for AI anytime soon.

I created an AI bot last year. Y’all could go to Poe, an AI aggregator, and create your own. There’s nothing like creating an AI bot to remove most respect for them.

Assembly not required - IKEA is going to start a marketplace for second-hand furniture of theirs - so you can buy assembled pieces and don't need the little wrenches.

IKEA is going to start a marketplace for second-hand furniture of theirs

So...Craigslist?

Craigslist around here has gone very downhill, and I can no longer find a critical mass of Used IKEA (I guess it's all on FB Marketplace or something), so I welcome our new Used IKEA overlords.

There was a news story - from Sweden a couple of years ago - that someone called the police because of yelling, swearing, things going bump in the night - and when they checked it turned out to be. yes, IKEA assembly. So it sounds like it's as bad for Swedes as for Americans.