Dogs Hittification
Enshittification’s wicked stepsister
I’m increasingly a fan of the new AI search engine Perplexity. The other day my buddy
and I were using Apple Messages to compare Google and Perplexity results for obscure subjects, such as novelty-seeking behavior in mice. Perplexity offered a reasonably accurate summary of the field and provided quite a few useful links. Google basically just gave me a long list of ads for fancy mousetraps. I wrote:
The F-word’s OK but animal cruelty is preferable to the S-word1? Earlier on in the thread, Siri stealthily auto-corrected
’s name to “Tool.” As a man whose name rhymes with the F-word, I feel deep sympathy for people whose names get auto-corrected to a synonym for dick.My recent posts have had me thinking about the phenomenon Cory Doctorow dubbed enshittification - in which tech platforms achieve monopoly status through network effects and then proceed to make the platform more and more extortive and unpleasant to use, in service of obscene profit. When Google gives me a long list of ads for expensive mousetraps, it’s because of enshittification. The dingleberry on top of this turd sundae is that Apple Messages auto-corrects the word “enshittification” to “sensitization.” I’m sensitized, alright!
Hoping for Apple’s auto-correct to understand context used to seem like a pretty big ask, but now that we’ve entered the age of generative AI, its absence suddenly strikes me as an unforgivable fubar. Apple should have been leading this charge! But instead of investing in progress, Apple investors chose obscene quarterly stock buybacks.
I hereby define the term “dogs hittification” as the egregious failure of investor-owned monopolies to improve their products over time. Public capitalism to promote market competition! Now!
Update: Today I described the first two weeks of the new Trump administration as a clownshow. The supposedly AI-improved version of Siri I’m running auto-corrected it to “clowns how.” How indeed, Apple investors. How indeed. ESOP! NOW!
Song of the day: “The F-Word” by Babybird
It starts on the ground, not high up. Duckduckgo is the way to go. They even have an AI chat in beta that seems not too bad:
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https://duckduckgo.com/?q=DuckDuckGo&ia=chat
"Can mint and similar herbs fight viruses?"
There is some limited evidence that mint and certain other herbs may have antiviral properties, but the research is still quite preliminary:
Peppermint oil and its main active compound menthol have shown some ability to inhibit the replication of certain viruses in laboratory studies. This includes influenza viruses, rhinoviruses (common cold), and even some coronaviruses.
Other mint species like spearmint and wild mint have also demonstrated antiviral effects against viruses like herpes simplex, influenza, and HIV in test tube and animal studies.
The proposed antiviral mechanisms include disrupting viral entry into cells, inhibiting viral enzymes, and modulating the immune system.
However, it's important to note a few caveats:
Most of this research has been done in controlled lab settings, not in human clinical trials. The real-world antiviral efficacy in humans is still unclear.
The antiviral effects tend to be relatively mild compared to pharmaceutical antiviral drugs.
Mint and other herbs are not a substitute for proven antiviral medications or vaccines for serious viral infections.
So while mint and related herbs may have some potential as complementary or supportive treatments, they should not be relied upon as primary therapies for fighting viruses without further clinical validation. More research is needed to determine their true antiviral capabilities.