I don’t know the rootstock variety’s name; I got the seeds from my BIL’s neighbour, he calls it “ball pepper” (it is not Catalan ñora) or “tree pepper”. The fruits are round, 3~5cm large, red, medium heat.

The grafts will be:

1. Dedo-de-moça - C. baccatum, medium heat, finger-shaped, ~8cm large. Kind of a default pepper where I live, but it has a nasty tendency to die in winter (like mine did).
2. Yellow bell pepper. Market stuff.
3. Chocolate-coloured habanero. Hot as hell, but the strain I got is bloody delicious.
4. Biquinho - C. chinense, no heat, drop-shaped, ~1cm tiny. Extremely fruity.

The first three are part of a breeding project of mine. I want to create two new varieties:

• a yellow jalapeño-like: large, low heat, thinner than a bell pepper. Mostly for stuffing and pizze. It’s a rather simple dedo-de-moça x yellow bell pepper hybrid; I actually got the seeds for the F1 already, I’m just waiting the weather to get a bit more stable to plant them.
• a large and extremely hot pepper for sauces. Preferably finger-shaped and brown (for aesthetics). It’ll be probably a hybrid of the hybrid above, plus habanero.

I’m also considering to add the rootstock to the breeding, since it’s a hardy plant with high yield and it survived winter just fine.

Yes, but I think the ones you’ll see past the bubble burst will be a bit different. For example, incorporating the current attempts of natural language processing, even if in a simplified way.

I use those quotation marks because IMO they’re better described as large token models than large language models. They have rather good morphology and syntax, but once you look at the higher layers (semantics and specially pragmatics) they drop the ball really hard. Even if those layers are way more important than the lower ones.

For a rough analogy, it’s like a taxidermised cat - some layers (the skin and fur) are practically identical to the real thing, but it’s missing what makes a cat a cat, you know? It’s still useful if you want some creepy deco, but don’t expect the taxidermised critter to ruin your furniture or to use your belly as sleeping pad.

I shouldn’t be talking so much about taters. Someone will eventually realise I’m too emotionally invested into food 🤣

Completely off-topic, but in the meantime I’m trying to graft an orange sapling into a lemon tree. Kind of hard to get the timing right, too; I need the tree to get a branch with just the right thickness, so it’s like “too thin [next day] too thin [next day] fuck, now it’s too thick!”. Same deal with my pepper plants.

That’s interesting. Is its meaning similar to the one the AI outputted?

It’s doing better but not by much, though. It shouldn’t be speculating as much, given the lack of info on the potential saying.

A family saying or regional expression

Speaking on that I tried a few sayings from other languages. It seems to be hit-and-miss:

• “Bread is bread, wine is wine” (Italian) - recognised properly as similar to “call a spade a spade”
• “A good fish swims thrice” (Polish) - recognised properly as a recipe-like saying (the fish swims in water, then butter, then wine)
• “Do you think mango core is soap?”, “Mango core is not soap” (Portuguese; specially common in Brazil) - it failed really hard. The rhetorical question / saying roughly means “this is blatantly absurd, why are you denying the obvious?”, or perhaps “cut off the crap”. But here’s the output:

Wow, his potato parable actually makes sense - unlike Gemini’s couple therapy take. (The character in question isn’t even a therapist, but a lawyer!)

Do you want my guess? The current “fight” will go on, until the AI bubble bursts. None of the current large token models will survive; they’ll be simply ditched as “unprofitable”. Instead you’ll see a bunch of smaller models popping up, for more focused tasks, being advertised as something else than AI (perhaps as a “neural network solution” or similar).

So Grok, Gemini, GPT, they’re all going the way of the dodo.

That’s just my guess though. It could be wrong.

Yup, pretty much. And the field is full of red herring terms, so they can mislead you into believing otherwise: “hallucination”, “semantic” supplementation, “reasoning” models, large “language” model…

And it was really, really invested on the lie, to the point it argued why potatoes would be more active!

After some search, I actually found the prompt and output; I asked Bard (before Google renamed it to Gemini) two years ago, in Portuguese. I’ll provide both the original and a translation; emphasis mine in all cases.

I got it, but only through AI mode:

This extension (Chrome version) might be useful for you. Easier than adding “fuck” to the search, it messes with the results a bit.

I can confirm it and it’s bloody hilarious!

“sometimes used in informal conversation to make a joke” - no, it isn’t, stop lying.

“potatoes […] are a limited, underground crop.” - that’s why Cuzco never rose to power, right? Right? No such thing as the Inca Empire, built upon potatoes, since they’re a limited crop. …or the Irish famine.

I can’t… I can’t even…

Note: ~a year ago I was testing Gemini and asked it “what’s the difference in behaviour between a potato and an orange?”, and it “told” me oranges are passive and potatoes are active. That’s where the “expression” comes from - I often mock Gemini and LLMs in general with it.

I’ll stop doing it, though. Onwards I shall refer to… the potato parable!

Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger, Pokémon Emerald, and Fire Emblem.

Turn-based makes awful phone controls more bearable, and since those games are RPGs it’s easier to pause and resume without breaking the “flow” of the game.

Some things never end. For example, CEOs’ propensity towards dishonesty / idiocy / disingenuousness. Or my disdain towards straw men, I hope it outlives me, like a meme.

EDIT: my point is, that those CEOs are consistently distorting what SKG is about: from “don’t design games to be unplayable once support ends” (fairly reasonable) into “u think gaems shuld live 4ever lol but ackshyually nuffin does lmao XD”. This is a fucking straw man; it’s the bottom of the barrel when it comes to irrationality.

And they’re doing it to discourage people from supporting SKG. And in this specific case what the article is calling “vibing” is just part of a diversion tactic - to avoid having people calling him out for his dishonesty / idiocy / disingenuousness. Say something filthy, then distract the audience with mental masturbation, it works!

I wonder why languages lost that form, because it seems really useful to have a single verb for those.

I am not sure, but I think it’s due to the changes in the passive. Latin had proper passive forms for plenty verbs, and a lot of those verbs handling states were either deponent (passive-looking with active meaning; like irascor) or relied on the passive for the state (like terreo “I terrify” → terreor “I’m terrified”). Somewhere down the road the Romance languages ditched it for the sake of the analytical passive, sum + participle.

I’m saying this because, while irascor died, the participle survived in e.g. Portuguese (Lat. iratum → Por. irado, “angered”). And it got even re-attached to a new verb (irar “to cause anger”).

It isn’t something you’d expect people to say; like, “hoy estoy miedoso, pero mañana estaré valiente” sounds weird as fuck. But it isn’t agrammatical, the oddity there is semantic.

“Soy aqui” reminds me a certain movie scene:

–El senado decidirá tu destino.
–YO SOY EL SENADO.

Bad idea to confuse it with “estoy cenado”, otherwise you might get Jedi trying to murder you for having dinner.

I know some German but I’m not proficient with it.

It’s easier to analyse the sentence by including the subject, typically omitted: “es ist mir kalt” = “it is me cold”, or “it’s cold to me”. It’s a lot like saying “that’s blue to me”, you know? Like, it isn’t like you are cold or blue, it’s something else, but you’re experiencing it. (It’s a dative of relation, in both languages.)

“Mir” is German for “me” or “to me” roughly, right?

Roughly, yes. But that gets messy, there’s no good equivalent.

Think on it this way: you have a bunch of situations where you’d use the first person, right? English arbitrarily splits those situations between “me” and “I”; German does it between “ich”, “mich”, and “mir”.

That German dative is used in situations like:

• if a verb demands two objects, one gets the dative; e.g. “er gibt mir das Buch” (he gives me the book).
• if the preposition demands it; e.g. “er spricht mit mir” = “he speaks with me”
• if you got a dative of relation (like the above), or benefaction (something done for another person), etc.

I tried to learn some German at some point, but I didn’t manage to learn enough to get comfortable with the various cases.

I got to thank Latin for that - by the time I started studying German, the cases felt intuitive.

But… really, when you’re dealing with Indo-European languages, you’re going to experience at least some grammatical hell: adpositions (English), cases (Latin), a mix of both (German), but never “neither”.

Speaking on Latin, it just clicked me it does something else than the languages you listed - those states/emotions get handled primarily by the verb:

• hungry - esurio (verb, “I’m hungry”)
• angry - irascor (verb, “I’m angry”)
• cold - frigeo (verb, “I’m chilly/cold”)
• scared - timeo (verb, “I fear/have fear”)
• brave - fortis (adjective, “strong”); animosus (adjective, roughly “adamant”, “stubborn”, “angry”)