I use ChatGPT quite a lot. I like to ask off-the-wall questions just to see how it responds. It's also fun to have it write a short story as a demo for someone else who's unfamiliar. ("Write a 200 word story about the time [name] saved the day using only [two common unrelated objects]") But I've also asked very complex questions about network configurations, troubleshooting obscure hardware failures, and horticulture. I generally get accurate and workable answers straight off. Sometimes I just describe a problem I'm having, without asking any specific question, and it almost always is able to infer what my question would be and give a correct answer.

I do find the bootlicking cheerfulness a little annoying. It reminds me of Ford Prefect's short-circuited security bot.

I have had a couple of instances where it was clearly hallucinating, and it doubled down when I challenged it. Here's an example: I saw a "Dedicated to:" slide at the end of a TV episode so I asked ChatGPT what it was about. In response I got a biography of a fictional woman, and a paragraph describing her importance to the show. When I responded that I was pretty sure that was not accurate, the second response I got was an apology, followed by a statement that there was no dedication. When I said there definitely was, I got a biography of a completely different fictional woman. At this point, I rewound the video, took a screen grab of the dedication (which was to a man) and uploaded that. ChatGPT apologized again, and finally gave me a couple of paragraphs about the actual person.

I do some programming, but have not used ChatGPT in a programming context so I can't speak to that.

I first encountered the acronym "BSOD" in the context of NetWare 3.x servers, where it stood for "Black Screen of Death" -- some failures would cause the server to stop on a black screen with just a blinking underline cursor in the upper left corner. Later on, Windows introduced their blue error message, and the acronym was repurposed.

I worked for a company that was exploring using a modular computer system called "Agilis" in the early 1990s. This system used "slices" that locked together with a cam-and-jumper system. We had a NiCd "slice" (PN 11BN) that began hissing and smoking while on charge. After it calmed down, we returned it to Agilis for warranty replacement. When the replacement arrived, the official reason for replacement was listed as "11BN Chernobyl".

Here's a fix for the penny problem:

For one week, banks will redeem pennies for five cents each. These pennies are sent to the mint, who reimburses the bank the extra four cents. So the banks break even (except, of course, for the massive hassle of people bringing in wheelbarrows and pickle jars for a week). Since it costs something around four cents to mint a new penny, the mint breaks even (except for the cost of running the program). Regular Folks make out, because they get five times face value for all the pennies that are cluttering up their desk drawers and what have you. You can't really game the system, because counterfeit pennies are unprofitable and so is trying to stockpile real pennies as an "investment".

The returned pennies are put back into circulation, at roughly the same cost as minting new pennies, except without the environmental impact of mining the zinc and copper and running the machinery.

If necessary, "Penny Week" could be repeated every decade or two.

I bought a BP Microsystems (now BPM) universal device programmer which included "lifetime software updates" but after a few years BP announced that the "lifetime" of the programmer had ended and therefore, the lifetime updates also ended. This was in the days when Windows was the norm but DOS was still around. The programmer originally came with DOS software only but you could pay for Windows software. After the "death" of the software, the Windows version continued to support my programmer which struck me as underhanded.

I still have the programmer, and an old DOS machine to talk to it, and it still works just fine. But no lifetime updates since the 1990s. And yeah, I'm still a little frosty.

When I started high school in 1972, there was one computer (a DEC pdp8/e) for the entire school of several thousand students. Each department had a "lab" room where students could come during their free time and get assistance with that subject; the one computer was in the "Math Lab". (inb4: all the "meth lab" jokes -- haha, meth wasn't even a Thing then)

There were maybe a dozen students who were really interested in the computer, and I became one of them. (One of my classmates went on to work for Williams, where he ended up co-writing the code for the original Defender arcade game.) At the start, all I knew about computers was that in the movies the villain would use one to take over the world. I found a paper tape in the hallway with a number-guessing game on it, and I went to the Math Lab to play. One of the Teletypes was available, so I sat down to try and figure out what to do with this tape. Another student suggested I wait for the other TTY. I asked him why, and he said "it works better." I later learned that he was the author of the game I was trying to play, and the other TTY was the only one actually connected to the computer. But "works better" was the level of computer wisdom I was graced with at that time.

Eventually I became more of an "expert" -- I learned to program in FOCAL-69, then FOCAL8, and finally EDUSYSTEM-20 BASIC. I had some faint grasp of assembly language, but mostly stayed clear of that black magic. The teachers who supervised the Math Lab weren't "computer people" and so when there was a problem with the machine, the teacher would find one of Us and write us a pass out of our next class, if necessary, to reload BASIC -- a process that took just about precisely one class period. We learned how to intentionally crash the pdp, so that we could get a pass out of a class if, for example, there was a test we hadn't studied for.

After graduation I joined the US Navy and when I was home on leave I visited my old school and noticed they had changed to Apple II machines. I asked what had happened to the old computer and they said it was in a district warehouse. I talked my way up the chain and eventually bought it (in 1980 or thereabout), plus an ASR-33 and all the tapes they could find, for a few hundred dollars. I actually got permission to bring it aboard my ship, a Spruance class destroyer, and over the next few years that pdp8 travelled with me to the Persian Gulf and all over the Pacific. I also wrote a program that would print out an ASCII graphic girlie calendar, customized to count down to a specific date, and handed out "short-timer" calendars to my shipmates.

I had written a Yahtzee program and when we spent some cold-war time off the coast of Russia, I patched the game to change all the print statements to sound like it was the output of some kind of encryption device. The Radio Room on the ship used KSR-35s and so my printouts looked like they could have come from there. In those days trash disposal at sea was simply a matter of tossing plastic bags over the side, and I fantasized that the Russians would pick up my discarded Yahtzee sessions and puzzle over this hitherto-unknown American code.

I haven't fired up that old pdp8 in a few decades, but it, plus some spare parts and at least two ASR-33s, is waiting in my garage to be a fun summer restoration project.

Back in the day, I was all-in on OS/2 and I still miss it. The shootout video between OS/2 and NT was a real eye opener, and not just because Microsoft sent a sweaty guy in a suit while IBM sent a gym-bro.

At the company where I worked, I was the only OS/2 user on their Netware server. I ran all the DOS and Win3 stuff without any issues. The OS/2 UI was similar to Windows but better in so many ways, once you learned it.

I know that after a couple of renamings OS/2 is still kinda around today, but I'd like to peek into the multiverse where IBM had stuck with it and it went mainstream.

...when I report an account as an obvious scam, Meta responds to me that they've investigated and found it does not violate their TOS. Not just once or twice; over and over. I think I had one success for ~50 reports. I finally gave up.

... it has Macrovision :- )

I remember in the late 1970s that I was wishing I had the budget to subscribe to The Source. I think it was from Readers Digest? It may not have predated CompuServe but it was the first such service I heard of.

...these fires are obviously the result of LiPo battery failures.

I believe the climate is changing. I believe there's a strong likelihood that human activity is responsible for at least part of this change. I believe that humans have the ability to alter the climate intentionally.

I also believe we're not smart enough to do it successfully.

I ran a webserver (32-bit Apache/Win) on Windows 98SE for about ten years, until about 2018. Basic security precautions and not much traffic, but still port 80 was wide open to the world. It was fine.

"...put a transistor radio on the console and tune it in between AM stations. From the other side of the room, the tone of the static indicated whether the machine had crashed or not."

We would write programs specifically to play music through the radio.

I very nearly bought one of those. But I realized that the 2.0 version (if it ever came into existence) would probably be the awesome one. I'm not wealthy enough to drop that kind of coin to beta test a neat toy, so I held off.