I see it as anybody too young to remember a world that wasn’t connected 24/7, somebody who in their child/teen years that didn’t make heavy use of the phone attached to the kitchen wall to contact friends. Someone who’s never had to seriously use dialup Internet or an 8/16 bit computer.

This will be the (fifth?) time Microsoft has tried to implement virtual assistants. And they are still exceedingly inefficient at it.

There’s an entire step between trying to figure it out yourself and resorting to an LLM which is probably likely to tell you to shove cheese into the USB ports. Regular web searching. Forum and social media posts. The distro’s wiki itself or other such resources. You know, the stuff the AI originally sucked up, mashed together, mixed around, and spat back out.

Congratulations. It’s come a loooong way. Long live Konqi the cyberdragon.

It’s okay, you can find alternative install media here: https://distrochooser.de/en/

There was an idea I read about, sorta along the same crazy track, (might have been Popular Science or something like 25 years ago) where they came up with an idea for a jet that didn’t use traditional control surfaces like ailerons, but rather line the wings and fuselage in thousands of tiny flaps that would all be precisely computer controlled. It would be able to basically mold and shape the airstream around itself to make precise movements.

We’ve known this since September 1993, but we just let it keep going. I don’t think anyone can actually stop it or knows how, unless we get hit with an asteroid or something.

Learning C: Random asterisks go

As someone who uses scissor lifts a lot, I wish the manufacturers standardized on one way. Some have you push the joystick forward to descend, others will raise the platform when doing the same. I’ve damn near smashed some things in the ceiling going the wrong way for a second.

This is the most boomer-y comment I’ve read in a while. I remember my parents saying shit like this about me and my NES.

I usually do it when we take over a customer’s access control system and we have half their doors on the new system and half in the old still and are migrating them over. I’m an electronic security tech, this is what I do for a living.

I use it at work to clone a customer’s proximity card when I work in their building so they don’t have to leave me theirs to get around. The one legitimate use I found.

I guess being able to trigger the customer service announcement without having to find a button in a store is nice.

You gotta put the sticker on lest you forget it’s even there, just being an OS and getting out of your way.

This analogy doesn’t really work because there are thousands of different wheels that all spin on an axis but are used for many different things. If the wheel was never reinvented or improved upon we wouldn’t have automatic transmissions, rocket engine turbo pumps, gyroscopes, etc.

Maybe. And I can’t blame it on not having had coffee when I made the comment. Just me being completely oblivious to a joke.

Or literally just look at its binary representation. If the least significant digit is a “1”, it’s odd, if “0”, it’s even. Or you can divide by 2 and check for a remainder.

Your method is just spending time grinding away CPU cycles for no reason.

Honestly, good. Getting sick of the “professional” world being so goddamn stiff and boring. Push back against sanitized corporate aesthetics.

You need to design a dystopian near-future tabletop RPG of some kind.

It’s not very good at it though, if you’ve ever used it to code. It automates and eases a lot of mundane tasks, but still requires a LOT of supervision and domain knowledge to not have it go off the rails or hallucinate code that’s either full of bugs or will never work. It’s not a “prompt and forget” thing, not by a long shot. It’s just an easier way to steal code it picked up from Stackoverflow and GitHub.

Me as a human will know to check how much data is going into a fixed size buffer somewhere and break out of the code if it exceeds it. The LLM will have no qualms about putting buffer overflow vulnerabilities all over your shit because it doesn’t care, it only wants to fulfill the prompt and get something to work.

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