The “sources cited” are some entire books, and I am not going go read 100’s of pages to possibly find a sentence or two that may or may not back up what this spew is saying. Also, emojis do not “clearly mark” anything, because they can appear different on different systems and are ambiguous.

Please delete this post, or I’m going to refer it to the moderators to decide if it should be here.

For sure! See that huge freakin post someone made up above, which looks like pasted LLM spew without any attempt at verification.

In that case, it has LLM hallmarks, but LLMs can also generate more human looking text, seeding unlimited misinfo into the popular zeitgeist. Which is a little scary. And by a little, I mean a lot.

Kudos to Zephorah for actually doing the legwork! Most people skip that part.

Eh, unless they shoehorn the word “miracle” in there somewhere, I’m reserving judgement. /s

From where does that text come? It looks like someone just cut and pasted the output of an LLM, in which case I would suggest deleting it.

LLMs have their uses, but they will happily confabulate, and sound very confident while doing it, such as referring to fictitious court cases which sound plausible, but were never actually cases. You cannot simply ask an LLM and believe what it says without verification.

My impression from the ad copy (“no need to ‘cut it down’”) is that it’s meant to let people smoke more without worrying. But the ad is rather unhelpful about the specifics.

It’s plausible that it did contain some active ingredient, since there are chemicals which mimic the effects of nicotine, or interfere with it. Of course, smoking more = more dangerous even if you somehow block the effects of the nicotine.

That is my understanding too - but my understanding is on shaky ground and only based on a few dubious web sources.

There are some substances that are chemically similar to nicotine which will bind to the same receptors. Some are used in anti-smoking aids meant to ease the craving for cigarettes, although that is the opposite of the stated goal of the ad, which was to let people smoke more! Perhaps the idea was to block nicotine jitters?

It is also unclear if this product actually contained anything like that. And of course, cigarettes are harmful in lots of other ways, like you say.

I always thought the peas were just nasty.

I’ve got no other theories to offer, so … sounds good :).

Still sort of a weird ad theme, IMO.

It’s a good point, they weren’t actually rolled out yet as a product you could buy, until 1961. There were consumer prototypes in use in 54-55 according to wikipedia, but just for testing. Not as a product you could purchase. I’ll correct the post text.

It’s for very thick soup.

Woah. Nice find, klu9.

Rotten Tomatoes has this to say.

“By turns lurid and disturbing, The Man with the X-Ray Eyes is a compelling piece of sci-fi pulp and one of Roger Corman’s most effective movies.”

Reviews sound like rather than pure schlock, it has a strong Monkey’s Paw theme going on. I need to watch this.

Arguably, the “be careful what you ask for” allegory applies to today’s technology, more than ever.

Aside from Bernhardt, I remember hearing that some silent film movie stars failed to make the transition to talkies, because despite being successful actors up until that point, they had bad voices, and it didn’t work out once their speech became part of the film performance.

Thanks for the translation!

Looks like the brewery is still around. Their page is timing out for me, but maybe that’s a problem between my ISP and them, or a temporary glitch.

https://ilgezeem.lv/en/

Also interesting, from wikipedia. The Butler referenced was Annie’s husband.

Oakley supposedly shot the ashes off a cigarette held by the newly crowned German Kaiser Wilhelm II at his request.

After World War I broke out, Oakley reflected, “If I shot the kaiser, I might have saved the lives of several millions of soldiers. […] Perhaps it was well for both of us that humans lack foresight.” According to Butler, he sat down and wrote a letter to the Kaiser Wilhelm, saying that Annie wanted to repeat the shot. The kaiser never replied.

She did! I haven’t seen it and I really should. There was a musical, and a film made from the musical. Apparently it was somewhat fictionalized though, so it’s more of a “loosely based on the life of” kind of thing, than it was a straight up biopic.

Annie Get Your Gun (musical)

Annie Get Your Gun (film)

It ran on Babbage’s difference engine, at the time. Much slower than a B200.

Oh yeah! I was gonna put that weird fact in the post after reading it while researching the specs, but forgot.

Also, a massive white supremacist, which I did not know until today.

Football is a brutal sport

For sure. I think Bo himself has said that if we knew then what we know now about CTE, he never would have gone into a football career.

Not sure, but wikipedia says he sustained a hip injury in a football game, which caused some trauma to the joint, and his retirement.

They would make a cute couple.