The ones that drive me around the bend are when I'm looking for technical stuff, and I find a tutorial that looks like its human written, isnt on medium, and and isn't on something thats pre-fucked like MS help forums. I'll get quarter way through when I start noticing that something about the language is a bit .... off.... and then some absolute gibberish turns up and only after wasting 10 minutes of my life do I realise I'm just reading cGPT generated content farm gibberish.

A GP friend found a classic though the other day that had a serious article about some heart condition and mid paragraph towards the end the classic line "As a chatbot from OpenAI it would be unethical to.....". On closer inspection the entire article was apparently nonsense. But even he as a medical doctor, brain bigger than almost anyone else I knew , had been strung along for quite a few paragraphs before it literally said it was chatgpt. If he can be suckered , what hope for us mere mortals.

If the bullshit hashicorp has been pulling lately towards open source projects is anything to go by, I'd say hashicorp have no problem self-enshitifying. With luck IBM will throw them in the barn with Red Hat and we might see an actual improvement in corporate behavior (red hat are no saints, but at least their lawyers are kept on a leash)

>And then of course, there's the whole matter of your car often being
>on the road or parked somewhere else when other people in the
>house might need it to be parked in your garage.

But this is about California, where the obvious solution is to raise revenue by requiring advance purchase of a permit to remove the car from your garage!

>followed by sci-fi itself which generally revolves around some
>Earth/Solar System/Universe threat which only one man (it's almost
>always a man) can solve.

That would generally be "space opera".

There are notable space opera protagonists who are at least nominally female: Weber's Honor Harrington (probably the most successful modern series in the subgenera), Moone's Kyla Vatta, Shepherd's Kris Longknife.

Of those, the first two could pretty much flip the sex of pretty much every character except Harrington's pregnant mother with no real rewriting, while the latter might be an exhibit for why male author's *shouldn't* try to write actually female characters.

Then again, there bulk of SF male protagonists aren't male in any more than name, so . . .

hawk

note that the pendulum has swung back.

Note, for example, the 2000 Morrison case, in which the USSC choked on the notion that a violent act a woman was inherently intra-state act.

While the overreach of the Commerce Clause still needs to be reined in, it doesn't (over) extend nearly as far as it used to.

hawk, esq.

I agree. Some of it, I suspect, is that I've just read so many books now that I'm in 50s that when I read a trope-driven genre novel (SF, Fantasy, Mystery, Thriller, whatever), I rapidly feel like I've read this story before. I've gotten to the same place with TV and movies. Both mediums really suffer from a lack of any kind of originality, or even attempts at quirkiness. It all just feels like Thomas Kinked-esque cookie cutter.

I've started reading a lot more non-fiction, mainly history. Ironically, there's a lot more originality there than in most of the modern fiction I read.

I read the first Three Body Problem novel, and I thought it was crap. Some of that might have been the translation, although I've read other translations from Chinese without that much of an issue. The plotting was terrible, the characters flat. I finished it more because I kept expecting it to eventually turn around, breaking my rule that if I don't like a book in the first three chapters, I won't finish it. In the end, I couldn't imagine why I would want to read any more of it.

Does it have the intro "Imagine Bash, but object oriented and with function call names so long they would drive a Java developer to madness. Brought to you by the author of Microsoft Bob and Clippy, psychopaths that infect your computer with their dead-eyed smiles comes Powershell."

As an owner of the complete History of Middle Earth series, these books are not for the casual fan, or probably even the average fan. They really are more designed for Tolkien scholars, and anyone picking up The Nature of Middle Earth expecting ripping yarns filled with Hobbits and wizards is going to be very disappointed.

Yeah that's the real root of the problem, here.

Yeah I've noticed that. I recently have taken to asking it to write SQLAlchemy models that match json nests downloaded from APIs and it aces it every time. But I'm not sure a non coder would know to ask for it, or how to do that.

Honestly, I dont think its that much buggier than what I write. I keep my standard up by writing unit tests, but those tests will explode a few times before I get it right because if I write 500 lines of code before I hit compile, chances are I've missed a comma or botched the parameter order SOMEWHERE.

cool link! (at least if you disregard things I remember being cast as ancient history!)

the 8080 had at least one or two undocumented instructions that worked their way into code. IIRC, the Heathkit chess program needed a byte changed from that to a documented instruction on the Z80 to run [a one byte patch!].

And there were a pair (?) of quirks where 8085 instructions took a cycle ore or less than the the same instruction on the 8080.

The Z80 executed some instructions in less cycles than the 8080 (but wasn't there one that took an extra cycle for some reason?

it was slow, but could be extremely low power compared to the others, and was silly-rich with registers. 16 general purpose 16 bit registers, iirc. (or pairs of eight bit). And ISTR that you could use all but one or two for program counter and reference (a pair of four bit registers [P & X ?] that pointed to which 16 bit to use]

Also, significantly more radiation resistant than the others of the time (or was that another version? Even so, its design should have been more resistant).

My first computer was a wire-wrapped 1802 . . .

My guess would be that 24 bit address space for the MMU, and that this worked better with the Z80.

There were ways to extend the 6809 space by a couple of bits, but not by eight.

The greater abundance of registers on the Z80--including an entire second set of the 8080 registers, which could be toggled between--sounds like a likely reason. IIRC, the 6809 didn't have any extra data registers as compared to the 6800.

hawk

Ok lets get a couple of things straight.

1) Climate deniers aren't "Skeptics". Science Skepticism is about applying the scientific method to scientific claim. Climate denialism is about applying political convictions to scientific claims.

2) The term your looking for isn't "Alarmist", its "Scientist".