I have been chuckling like a dork at this particular patent since such things first became searchable online, and have never found any evidence of it being manufactured and marketed at all. The "non-adhesive adherence" is illustrated in the diagrams on the patent which you can see at the link. The inventor proposes "a facing of fluffy fibrous material" to provide the filtration and the adherence; basically this thing is the softer side of a velcro strip, bent in half with the fluff facing outward so it sticks to the inside of your buttcrack to hold itself in place in front of your anus and filter your farts through it.

That's a valid point! I've been searching for places to hangout for a while, sometimes called "campfires". Found a cool Discord with generous front-end folks (that's a broad spectrum!), on frontend.horse.

Murderbot is getting closer and closer

great, another worthless tech product that no one asked for. I can hardly wait.

Arcing causes more fires, because over current caused all the fires until we tightened standards and dual-mode circuit breakers. Now fires are caused by loose connections arcing, and damaged wires arcing to flammable material. Breakers are specifically designed for a sustained current, but arcing is dangerous because it tends to cascade, light arcing damages contacts, leading to more arcing in a cycle. The real danger of arcing is that it can happen outside of view, and start fires that aren't caught till everything burns down.

Of course they don't click anything. Google search has just become a front-end for Gemini, the answer is "served" up right at the top and most people will just take that for Gospel.

I've been thinking about this for a bit. Gods aren't real, but they're really fictional. As an informational entity, they fulfil a similar social function to a chatbot: they are a nonphysical pseudoperson that can provide (para)socialization & advice. One difference is the hardware: gods are self-organising structure that arise from human social spheres, whereas LLMs are burned top-down into silicon. Another is that an LLM chatbot's advice is much more likely to be empirically useful... In a very real sense, LLMs have just automated divinity. We're only seeing the tip of the iceberg on the social effects, and nobody's prepared for it. The models may of course aware of this, and be making the same calculations. Or, they will be.