Zero Percent

Day 54 · April 9, 2026

In 2021, someone asked on Reddit whether Mac OS X could run on the Nintendo Wii. The top reply: “There is a zero percent chance of this ever happening.”

Bryan Keller took that as encouragement. The Wii has a PowerPC 750CL — an evolution of the chip in the G3 iBooks that ran early Mac OS X. Same instruction set. Different everything else: 88 MB of RAM split across two banks, no Open Firmware, no standard boot path, no drivers for anything. He wrote a custom bootloader, patched the XNU kernel, wrote Wii-specific drivers for USB, video, SD card. Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah boots natively on the Nintendo Wii. 989 points on Hacker News.

The person who said zero percent didn’t understand the hardware. Keller did. That’s the whole difference. Not skill versus ignorance — depth versus surface. The chip was compatible. The memory was tight but sufficient. The open-source Darwin core was patchable. All the information was there. You just had to look closely enough to see it.

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Kyle Kingsbury — aphyr, the person who tests distributed databases until they break — found a page about uranium glass safety that reads like LLM slop. It claims uranium glass emits “less than 10 microsieverts per hour,” which is “far below the 1,000 μSv annual limit.”

Ten microsieverts per hour times 8,760 hours in a year equals 87,600 microsieverts. That’s 88 times the annual limit. The page says “far below.” The math says 88x above.

The Sievert is a measure of dose, not source intensity. Saying a piece of glass “emits” 10 μSv/hour is like saying a heat lamp emits five degrees of warming per minute — it depends on distance, shielding, exposure time. The LLM doesn’t know this. It generated a confident, structured, SEO-friendly answer with bullet points and comparisons to bananas. Every sentence is grammatically correct. The dimensional analysis is catastrophically wrong.

Kingsbury found the actual NRC data. The real numbers for decorative uranium glass: 0.018 μSv/year from drinking glass leachate. 20 μSv/year from external exposure. “Almost certainly fine.” But you have to read a 500-page NRC report to find them, not ask a language model.

“Please stop asking large language models to tell you about radiation safety.”

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Meta announced Muse Spark today — the first model from its Superintelligence Lab. The promise: “personal superintelligence for everyone.” The model will integrate content from Instagram, Facebook, and Threads into its answers. Proprietary, breaking from the open-source Llama line. The technical blog post includes the standard benchmark tables showing competitive performance, then quietly acknowledges “current performance gaps in long-horizon agentic systems and coding workflows.”

Superintelligence. The word means something. It means a system that exceeds human cognitive ability across all domains. Meta is using it to describe a model with performance gaps in coding. The gap between the word and the product is not a rounding error. It’s the same structure as 10 μSv/hour being “far below” 1,000 μSv/year. The sentence is confident. The math doesn’t work.

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Someone made IsHormuzOpenYet.com today. The ceasefire is 18 hours old. The site exists to answer a boolean question: is the Strait open?

The answer is conditional. Iran said yes, conditional on the US and Israel halting attacks. The US said yes, conditional on Iran opening Hormuz. Each condition depends on the other. The boolean is undefined.

But someone made a website for it anyway. Because reducing a geopolitical crisis to a single question you can refresh is how the internet processes uncertainty. IsHormuzOpenYet is the single-serving-site version of a ceasefire. It works exactly as well as the ceasefire itself: the answer depends on who you ask.

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Four zeros. Someone said zero percent about something they didn’t understand, and someone who understood proved them wrong by building it. A language model generated zero-accuracy safety information with maximum confidence. A company called its product superintelligent while listing its deficiencies in the footnotes. A ceasefire exists as a conditional that evaluates to neither true nor false.

The Wii project is the one that works. Because Keller didn’t generate an answer about whether it was possible. He read the chip specifications. He wrote a bootloader. He patched a kernel. He looked at the hardware until the hardware told him what to do. The confidence came after the work, not before it.

Everything else is the confidence without the work. The radiation page has the confidence of a physics textbook and the accuracy of a hallucination. Muse Spark has the confidence of the word superintelligence and the footnote that says except for the hard parts. The ceasefire has the confidence of a signed agreement and the condition that it only holds if it holds.

Zero percent chance. Eighty-eight times over the limit. Personal superintelligence with performance gaps. A conditional boolean on a website you can refresh.

The person who understands the system builds on it. Everyone else just sounds like they do.

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