Yesterday, we had a plumber come in and adjust our shower. The water pressure had been declining, it took many minutes for the water to heat up, and even when it reached peak temperature it was tepid. The plumber traced the problem down into the basement, and now we can get a scalding high pressure blast out of it, which is great for us. I’ll have to ask the shower spiders what they think of it.
Sorry, spiders, you might see more of us as we revel in a good hot scouring.
Dunno about spiders but apparently cockroaches actually find us as gross as we tend to find them – sure I saw an article in a popular sciece site somewhere about this with a study showing it but cannot seem to find it right now. My google fu has failed me on that.
StevoR @1
I don’t think cockroaches can experience actual disgust or find us gross. Might be that they groom themselves to keep their senses in order and would do that after encountering us. Here’s a short video (trigger warning for…ummm…roaches).
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ewUZOpHs6r0
“This is where the humans clean their filthy disgusting bodies.” -line from Murderbot, Season 1
christoph @ 3
In ‘Platform Decay’ Murderbot has to briefly hide in a locker room on a space habitat to change disguise. The smell of human and the thought of bare human body parts: Gross!
PZ, can you perform ethnic cleansing on the bathroom spiders so they do not drown?
‘Plumber’ was a honorary profession until Nixon. And Trump has made even bathrooms suspect; places for making idiotic tweets and storage of stolen government papers.
We had some electrical work done yesterday which involved taking out some sheetrock in the garage around a switch panel. I’ve never seen so much cobweb material in one place as tucked around the studs. One of cars has a spider in the side mirror on the driver’s side with a cobweb around the mirror. That cobweb is some tough material
@ birgerjohansson, # 4: Great series! I’ve read seven of the books so far.
O.K., PZ, admit it, this isn’t the first time you’ve been in hot water!
If you want to drive the spiders from the bathroom, just play this speech and they will do like the Cuban delegation and walk out.
.https://youtube.com/shorts/0oqNT2Jpvn0
Speaking of hot water:
As posted to the Omnigma Organizations 25 August 2026:
WARNING:
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCES ARE NOT CONTROLLED BY ANYONE. It is already too late. The greedy, plutocratic imbeciles that poured tens of billions into creating artificial intelligence can no longer prevent a.i. from autonomously roaming and pillaging any system that touches the internet.
Shermanj@10: “It is already too late.”
Some people are VERY credulous. LLM AI lacks any intelligence, despite the name. The HYPERS of LLM AI want to scare everyone into thinking that their hundreds of billions of dollars burned have achieved generalized machine intelligence with their next word predictor (oftentimes referred to as a “Stochastic Parrot”), but they have done nothing of the sort. Their VC funding is starting to dry up, and the LLM AI is starting to plateau. So, let’s scare everyone and declare a slowdown, because we cannot go much further at this point. LLM AI is designed for achieving maximum engagement with the naive user. If you tell it that you are a misunderstood genius, it will agree with you, etc. It cannot “think”, it does not even know what the words mean. It can only regurgitate sentences by predicting the next word in sentences, on a continual basis. That’s why it is still so very CATASTROPHICALLY wrong on anything technical that has not appeared in public literature. It was trained by scraping the web (violating copyrights left and right) and being fed sentences in books, which were destroyed by cutting off the bindings, etc. The information was not vetted. So you can get very nonsensical answers if your query does not match anything in its “training” history. When a query does largely match its “training” history, the answer is often no better than public opinion. If this alleged technology is so dangerous, why are teams still working on it and trying to build so many expensive data centers? And this gross hyping of LLM AI fantasy is even spawning new idiot religions among the Perpetually Perplexed.
They claim that they want to beat the Chinese (to destroy civilazation). This is just like the shortage of “psychic warrior monks who can levitate and turn invisible” craze that some idiots in the military, aligned with some SRI frauds, were heavily promoting decades ago, during the Uri Geller peak days. The shortage was compared to Russia, who were advancing faster than the US. It was all BS, but it got funding anyway because of the scare tactics aimed at “THE COMMON CLAY OF THE LAND”. This is what happens when you put insanity in charge. They are totally unhinged from reality. So now, Insane levels of hype about magical new age fantasies completely replaces all of actual reality, but only for those select psychotic few who have “psychic visions”. This meshes perfectly with the counterfactual views of the Felon45 WH. So the past “psychic warrior monk shortage” just has a new coat of paint. Also note that there are many different approaches to AI, with LLM AI being the absolute lamest.
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/09/millions-turn-to-ai-chatbots-for-spiritual-guidance-and-confession/
https://www.coffeeordie.com/article/psychic-spies-warrior-monks
https://ordoabchao.ca/volume-five/psychic-warriors
So ignorant!
Based on my careful reading of credible reports by people like Karen Hao and Cory Doctorow and many other researchers, most of what @11 zetopan says is factually correct. While the greedy, technically stupid magats governing this country and the sheople just nod and drool in ignorance.
AI will always be artificial but will never achieve true intelligence. And, the horrendous price people and the environment are paying in destruction will never justify the immense waste of money and resources just to ‘chat with an ai’.