Does asking it to think step by step, or character by character, improves the answer? It might be a tokenization+unawareness of its own tokenization shortcomings
As someone who lived through the blackout it was wild. I felt back into the pre-internet, pre-smartphone era. It was pretty cool actually. The rumor mill spread so fast that Within hours the official word on the street was that we were getting hacked by a foreign military and people were joking that we had nothing of interest to be conquered xD
Might have been less fun if it had been in the depths of winter. The fact that it was a balmy sunny day in springtime made it a pleasantly novel experience, I agree. Of course, the "sunny day" seems to have been correlated.
From pleasants 20-25C to -30C in some peaks. Castilles? Snow for granted. The north? Chilly as hell. Not snowy, but the humidity fro the Atlantic will make you feel cooler than the Castilles themselves even if freezing.
Can be hard, and NOT just because of Filomena. Not all Spain it's a Mediterranean beach, trust me. Some winters in Leon can be harder than the average Winter in Poland.
How hard a Winter can be? Pick a height map of Spain... and you will deduce something by yourself.
Spain is more than Barcelona or Valencia. Both the North and the inner part of the country can have crude winters, specially in the mountains. The temperatures range between -22 and 116 Fahrenheit depending on the location. For comparison, Chicago minimum is -25 F, so even if the mean is lower there, some places can be still very cold. Is one of the most diverse countries in Europe.
TL:DR Spain is not just Andalusia, and the US is not just Texas.
Spain is like a condensed minigame map of the US. Remember when the Morrowind videogame looked megadiverse because of the mountains generating lots of different terrains and curves? That's Spain. You cross a mountain tunnel by car and your warm 28C degrees in May at Leon somehow shifted to a cloudy, gray sky with 15 degrees in Asturias in -literally, measured by clock- ~10 minutes.
You would think that you where somehow abducted and teleported from a UFO in the road. But no, it's just the rough nature.
And the Winters in Leon are bipolar being a dry, continental climate. So you can have scorching summers... and freezing winters with -10 degrees with ease.
So, yes, Winters outside the Mediterranean sea can be rough.
It was fun and exciting at first. However when phone batteries started getting low and the streetlights were still off you could see that changing. Candles and the relaxed Spanish attitude to life helped a lot :)
I didn’t even know about it until the next day - totally off grid, and starlink for internet access - and no mobile signal where we live to give it away either.
My theory is that social media simply increases the connectivity and reach (of the “rumour mill” or what have you) and thus it amplifies an existing social “failure mode”.
(That and earlier mass media was heavily moderated and regulated, while things like Facebook or twitter/X are basically a free-for-all).
Facebook/etc aren't a free-for-all, they're much worse than that - they selectively provide a stream of news designed to drive "engagement", of which angry obsession is one type. Social media aren't "platforms", they're content distributors (despite the industry's own efforts to establish use of the term "platform", which sounds far more neutral).
In Germany a few months prior saw CCC publishing a method for destabilizing energy grids using radio waves a cheap hardware: https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-blinkencity-radio-controlling-st... and presented an attack vector to which most infrastructure in Europe is exposed.
About 4 hours before the grid collapse on the 28th of April 2025 was recorded the largest purchase of Monero in the past 3 years (to remember: monero is coin of choice for special operations), making it surge +40% in 24 hours. The initial Spanish reports mentioned conflicting power information from dozens of locations at the same time which is consistent with a sequential attack using the blinkencity method so the grid itself is forced to close down.
Well, if that's really the cause, then thanks CCC, I guess. For such a serious vulnerability which is probably non-trivial (not to mention expensive) to patch, is it really responsible to give only 3.5 months of time before disclosing it (according to slide #56 https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/5f6498c074436c349716e747/..., they notified EFR about the vulnerability on 2024-09-12 and disclosed it on 2024-12-28)?
IMHO wouldn't make much a difference, the issue had been known to them for years up to that point. To a large part still exists, the Spanish grid only committed to upgrade the hardware after this incident. Even so it will require about another year to complete the upgrade over there.
I don't follow in detail the news on other European nations but haven't seen much focus on hardening their security until they actually get breached. A recent example (albeit different attack vector) would be the Polish grid: https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/01/wiper-malware-targe...
if (foo == true) { // checking foo is true (rocketship emoji)
20 lines of code;
} else {
the same 20 lines of code with one boolean changed in the middle;
}
Description:
(markdown header) Summary (nerd emoji):
This PR fixes a non-existent issue by adding an *if statement** that checks if a variable is true. This has the following benefits:
This PR does not just improve performance, it fundamentally reshapes how we approach performance considerations. This is not just design --- it's architecture. Simple, succinct, yet powerful.
They're too methodical, and duplicate code when they're longer than a single line fix. I've never received a pull request formatted like that from a human.
There is an app called Be My Eyes where blind people can use the app to be connected to someone who can see and ask questions. An example might be, “is this a red or brown sweater.”
It actually looks like it added AI functionality, so not every question goes out to a live helper, but they still do have that option.
Something like the Meta glasses could mean a lot less reliance on app that reach out to actual people, or looking for the phone all the time, for day-to-day help with things like this.
This kind of tech could be used for a lot of really good and useful things, but it's facebook so it will mainly be used to screw over blind people and anyone else who uses them by violating their privacy, the privacy of everyone in view of them, and all while shoving ads at the users. Facebook is toxic.
I have used chatgpt 5.2 thinking for health, gemini hallucinates a lot, specially with dna analysis. Never tried using the new claude even though i have access through antigravity. Might give it a try. Do you have any tips on how to approach it for health ‘analytical power’?
I just made a project, added all my exams (they were piling up, me and my psychiatrist had been investigating for a year this to no avail) and started talking to it about my symptoms.
Within a few iterations of this it gave me a simple blood panel, then I did that one and it kept suggesting more simple lab or at home tests and we kept going through them until I was reasonably certain of “something” and now that I have hypothesis I am going to a doctor. I think it’s done a great job. I also kept asking it for simple lifestyle interventions to prevent progression of my issue and it consistent nailed it - one particular interverntion (adding salt to water and drinking it to prevent symptoms) made a huge improvement to my life - I was barely working before that.
I added in some text the instructions box (project master prompt) for it to realise - it’s not medical advice and I am aware of that (prevents excessive guardrails) - add confidence intervals and probability to all diagnostic statements (prevents me + Claude going into rabbit holes so easily, it often has 70-80% certainty of what it’s saying, but it’s clear that it doesn’t use the right language) - that It was talking to an non expert, to use simple language but to go into detail when necessary. I also ask it to stop doing unnecessary constant follow up questions to every answer as that causes me anxiety. I can share the prompt, in fact I might do so later as it might be useful to others.
Make sure your first chat is about the exams in the project files. Make sure it reads them all. It has a tendency to read a few and go “is this good”. Ask for a summary and note any absences.
Try using the research and extended thinking features a lot if you think it’s not fully aware of anything. It might not be aware of more recent research. If it’s a serious condition you are researching, just ask it to do sweeps / use research to look for new info about it and find new papers. It might also deepen its understanding.
After you do research you can make a simple artefact and throw it onto the project files. That allows it to refer to it and gain more knowledge about a condition or issue that might not be as rich in the training data.
So, I find GPT to be so so bad for this it made me realise a bit on why the USG is so insistent. Claude Opus is just on a different class.
Here’s the master project prompt:
Act as an expert who’s talking to an interested layman. Engage in detail when requested but be overall succinct in your answers. Short sentences are fine, no need into be lengthy. Do deep research. When arriving at any kind of conclusion or hypothesis assign it a probability and a confidence interval - define this in percentages as in “90%”
On Artefacts - all artefacts should be just text and markdown. Never do anything more complicated with formatting, unless by explicit request.
Don't ask follow up questions unless it's to make for better diagnosis. I.e. don't keep asking questions just to maintain conversation going please. But never hesitate to ask questions if it makes for better outcomes.
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