I just got accepted to use Bing+ChatGPT - I was told to use Microsoft Edge Dev, but that is so crashy on Linux (lasts only 30-60 secs before dying every time), that I ended up installing the Bing Android app on my phone.

The first two questions I asked it, it gave partially or completely wrong answers to and on both occasions, when I replied to it with corrections, it ended the conversation with a standard "I'm not talking to you any more" response and refused to reply to any further questions in that conversation. I had to actually completely clear the conversation to get it to respond again, which is absolutely terrible for an AI chatbot session.

What's worse is that the original ChatGPT at chat.openai.com will, if your correction is warranted, admit it is wrong and will omit the wrong answer if you repeat the question. Bssically, Bing+ChatGPT is assuming it's always right, can't be argued with if you question any of its answers and if you do dare to challenge it, it'll storm off in a huff, never to be seen again unless you wipe its memory. This is appalling and I bet ChatGPT engineers are furious that Microsoft have hugely gimped the Bing version.

Well, I signed up for 5G Home Broadband (deals are indeed now cheap in the UK) because the ISP's 5G checker map said it was available at my postcode. What the checker didn't say was that I live at the bottom of a hill that blocks off the 5G signal from the only 5G mast in my small town. Managed to get 10 Mbits/sec down, so had to cancel it during the 14-day cool off period.

I've signed up for a different ISP because they had a cheap FTTP offer instead (£25/month for 500 Mbits/sec down+up), only for it to be delayed multiple months (they claim it will be installed after a 6 month (!) wait, but I don't believe them, so I've signed up for a year with an FTTC ISP while I wait...). So trying to get truly high speed broadband in the UK isn't as easy as you think...

Yep, I have a Ryzen R7 1700 (8 cores/16 threads), 64GB RAM and 20TB of storage (a mix of NVMe SSDs and some HDDs) - this spec runs Linux and Windows 10 fine and at a decent speed too. Apparently, the CPU is "too old" to run Windows 11 despite performing well even for demanding tasks.

Mind you, I'm about to buy a new PC and despite the new PC's CPU being from Intel's 13th gen, Microsoft's idiocy w.r.t. first gen Ryzen made my decision quite easy - the new PC will exclusively run Linux and no version of Windows (not even in a VM) ever. It's a pity most people don't know about Linux and instead will cling onto Windows 10 until 2025, at which point they'll either go without OS updates (bad idea) or buy a new PC with Windows 11 (not a great use of money if the old machine was working fine).

I've never used VMWare myself, but having seen the comments here, you do wonder why companies keep using it when there's support issues like this, along with a high cost too. For SMBs, something like Proxmox where you can run it for free or pay a relatively small server fee for support/earlier access to updates might be an alternative.

I've had a glaucoma in my right eye since birth, which means that while I can see colour and movement with it, I can't focus or read text with the affected eye. This renders all 3D tech (autostereograms ["magic eye"], 3D glasses/TV and, yes, VR) completely useless to me. Guess I'll never join the metaverse then...not exactly a big loss in my book.

I use Live Captions to quickly test my microphone in a Teams meeting (I'm usually the first in, so there's no-one to say "can you hear me?" to) and I now leave it on all through the meeting as hilarious entertainment if the meeting is boring. It is utterly hopeless at transcribing audio - making multiple mistakes in every sentence (often substituting words in a very amusing manner).

If it's that bad at audio transcription, I dread to think what damage the new Voice Access tool could do...

I'm on the "Main" beta OS channel on my Steam Deck, which is the most bleeding edge a member of the public can be. It gets 1 or 2 new SteamOS updates a week, so Valve is still working at a frenetic pace nearly 4 months after the Deck's release.

Weirdly though, both the kernel (5.13.0 - almost a year out of date and has some AMD APU improvements in later releases) and KDE Plasma (5.23.5 - two significant versions behind and over 5 months out of date) seem to be lagging well behind. I've encountered quite a few bugs in the Deck's Desktop Mode (Discover store is particularly unstable) that I suspect 5.24/5.25 have probably already fixed, so it makes Desktop Mode on the Deck what Americans would term "a janky experience".

There are a few Conway's Game of Life programs out there - it looks like Golly is the most cross-platform (yes, it's even on Android/iOS!), has a ton of options and comes with a bunch of useful examples you can load without having to start from scratch editing your own.

The transition from CentOS 6 to 7 was beautifully smoothed out by MATE, so that made me a big MATE fan. Imagine my huge disappointment when CentOS 8 came out and dropped all of the desktop environments of its previous versions except by far the worst of them, GNOME 3!

Luckily, I found an unofficial MATE repo for CentOS 8 (and XFCE belatedly turned up the EPEL repo too), so I've happily rocking that ever since. For some inexplicable reason, neither MATE nor XFCE featured in this comparison, yet 2 DE's I'd never heard of until today - Regolith and Awesome - did, which devalues the comparison significantly, IMHO.

Here in the UK, most ISPs offer unlimited bandwidth plans for home broadband as standard and for the few that have any caps, it's usually done by speed throttling rather than extra charges when the cap is hit. Data caps with extra charges when hit are frankly hopeless for home broadband - US ISPs need to be dragged into the 21st century and permanently remove them.

Yes, it's different for UK mobile broadband where data caps and charges for exceeding that do apply, but with 5G starting to roll out and UK ISPs offering 5G home broadband routers, a data cap for 5G home broadband is looking increasingly ridiculous ("use up your entire monthly data allowance in 1 hour!"). Last time I looked, only Three in the UK had an unlimited 5G home broadband plan - other UK ISPs had ludicrously low 5G data caps.

Arm Holdings were probably the "crown jewels" of the UK IT industry, so it was shocking to me when the Japanese Softbank Group just bought it lock, stock and barrel in 2016, with barely a murmur from anyone in the UK it appears.

Is there any other UK IT company who has impacted the global IT market the way Arm Holdings has in the last couple of decades? Although I might think of Vodafone or British Telecom, I'm not sure either of these have global influence.

I remember trying uTorrent on Android quite a while ago and it was the most horrendously buggy torrent client on that platform I'd ever seen in my life. Switched to Flud fairly quickly after that, which works well on Android.

On my Linux desktop, qBittorrent rules the roost and is just a great torrent client, easily surpassing uTorrent, IMHO. And, yes, you can get it for other platforms like Win/Mac if you really must.

Assuming the UK elderly have bank accounts (if for no other reason than to get their pension paid into and being able to get cash out from an ATM), they should also have a contactless payment card to go with the account.

In the simplest case, this means just swiping the card over a terminal or slotting it in and typing a PIN where contactless isn't available or they are over the contactless limit. I'd even argue a contactless card is easier than an equivalent mobile app + NFC - no phone needed, no app needed, no battery charge needed. I'm "digital savvy", but still refuse to use something battery powered (and expensive!) to pay for goods - it's contactless cards (or cash until recently - with the virus around, safer with the card) all the way.

The ZX Spectrum wasn't "bloody brilliant" at all - its only saving grace was that it was "bloody cheap" which got it the lion's share of the UK home computer market (attracting most games developers in a chicken and egg scenario).

The original ZX Spectrum was frankly awful - the keyboard was a disaster, the machine was slow, it had terrible sound, an awful blocky colour palette and a horrendously poor BASIC (certainly not very good to learn programming on).

By far the best machine around that era was the BBC Micro - it was the exact opposite: fast, great keyboard, good sound, excellent OS/BASIC and decent graphics (with 8 screen modes to pick from)...and very expensive for the time. The BBC Micro is the only 8-bit computer worth emulating (or going this hardware route if you must) nowadays - the Spectrum most certainly wasn't.

I'm not familiar with VMware, but I know Proxmox can specify a "machine type" for VMs to use. Apparently, the Ivy Bridge profile is the one to use if Reddit is to be believed. No idea if VMware can specify the CPU/machine type in a similar manner though.