FWIW, mushroom rings are real, at least in the UK. They seemed to be affected by EMF, because I wandered past one centered directly centered under street power lines, I have no idea whether that's where a ley-line intersect it or not. I don't think they were psychedelic mushrooms though, but it was pretty cool seeing them growing in a large circle about 3-4m in diameter.

The main point of the article is that they're psychedelic, but don't contain psilocybin as the active molecule.

In earlier centuries it doesn't seem unreasonable to allow the possibility of the mushroom ingester to describe their experience as visiting the fae realm, whether in the UK or otherwise - as an accidental occurence I don't know how else people from the past would be able to explain what they perceived to others?

I've never used AI except for messing around with Stable Diffusion in its early days (my then-current graphics card didn't have enough ram to run it), played with it a bit after an upgrade and that was it.

Never used a LLM or anything explicitly.

Got annoyed when I had to deal with AI chatbots as front-line customer service - although that only happened once or twice in the last couple of months.

So basically, keep doing what I'm doing.

I like AI for specifically targeted applications: - e.g. 100,000+ AI "eyeballs" vs. a few 100 for diagonstic imaging, working out whether there's something to worry about or not. I hate the idea of generalised AI, LLM's etc.

Lowering the bar to enable 'creative output' from non-creative individuals just fucks up the world, because natural talent is replaced by unnatural talent, especially in (late) capitalism, where money is worth more than human experience to those few control-freak managers.

I'm old. I even earnt enough to buy a house with lawn over 4 years ago during my (pre-AI) career as a Software Developer. Get off my damn lawn.

Guild halls and Freemasons were doing this kind of thing long before now.

Remember when Silverlight was _the_ future?

How long did it last. Ironically it still gives me the shits because you can't select text on Netflix's front end.

The fan edit (M4's) of the Hobbit trilogy is way better than the released version.

They're still going to take note of what you're reading and possibly brand you as a non-ultra-capitalist disruptor. Amazon can get fucked.

I still buy physical media from them once a year (November) when availabilty and rest of the world can't compete price-wise. Yes I recognise the hypocrisy of said actions and minimise it as much as possible. Non-US based. Many physical media producers (e.g. Disney) no longer produce stuff for our 'region'.

$_ was one of the things that put me off perl, because the same syntax meant different things depending on context.

The Pragmatic Programmers had just started praising Ruby, so I opted for the that over Perl, and just went with it ever since. Hated PHP and didn't like Python's whitespace thing. I never Ruby on Rails'd either. That said my first interactive website was effectively a hello world button with cgi/perl.

But trying to learn to code from reading other peoples perl scripts was way harder than the (then) newer language alternatives.

Now I'm over 50 none of that is nearly as important. I remember being young and strongly opininated, this vs. that - its just part of the journey, and the culture. It also explains the current FizzBuzz in CSS minimisation post. We do because we can, not necessarily because we should.

Given the situation occurred in the UK, I doubt it.

I think The Equality Act 2010 would be the UK equivalent. No idea whether it would cover this - might be a stretch.

I just did this now. I can't remember exactly what it said, but something like "Remove AI chatbot" and I clicked it, and it was no longer in the context menu. Just after updating versioh 145.0.1 to 145.0.2.