I remember the warning in the old USENET days when every time I posted, my message will cost the net hundreds if not thousands of dollars to send everywhere.

I have used ChatGPT since December; I was (and still am) impressed at what it can generate. I think you need to be careful about what questions you ask it, and how you ask those questions. If you ask ChatGPT about a bunch of "edge" cases, or questions that require a lot of inference, it will not do well. But if you ask ChatGPT about topics that are fairly well understood and researched, it can write a very coherent reply.

As an experiment, I used ChatGPT to write a programming book about FORTRAN77. I wrote it over a week in January. It took me longer to map out the book's outline and to figure out what questions to ask ChatGPT than for ChatGPT to generate its responses. You might learn FORTRAN77 by reading this book, but that wasn't the point of writing it. I was experimenting with ChatGPT to see how far I could push it. I picked FORTRAN77 as my topic for two reasons:

(1) FORTRAN77 has been around for a long time, so a lot has already been written about it. This is a well researched topic and I figured ChatGPT would have a lot to work with. And it did.

(2) I thought it was funny to ask an AI to write about FORTRAN77 in 2023. Because let's face it, I did the book for fun.

Some interesting things here: ChatGPT generates text that is of "average" complexity and sentence length. There weren't any really short sentences, nor any really long sentences. Everything was kind of "moderate" length. Also, in the 80 pages of the book, the only semicolons were in the code, or in my end-of-chapter commentary. ChatGPT doesn't seem to use semicolons in its writing.

Another interesting thing is that you need to be careful of errors. If you're relying on an AI to do the writing, then you need to fact-check it. In the book, ChatGPT boldly claimed code samples were FORTRAN77 but then it wrote something else, probably some more recent version of Fortran. (I stopped programming in FORTRAN77 as an undergraduate in the early 1990s, just as Fortran90 was starting to replace F77. So I don't know the later editions of Fortran.) Based on other experiments I've done, I think if you (a human) know a topic fairly well, you can probably catch most (or all?) of any errors that ChatGPT makes. But you need to be careful and watch closely. If you're using ChatGPT's output verbatim, that fact-checking and editing phase might outweight its usefulness. But if you're using ChatGPT as a starting point to write something on your own, then that might be okay.

I think we're still in the early days of AI. Today, you're seeing a lot of people using ChatGPT to write annual goals, or to respond to exam questions, or to write a book - and we're all "wow'ed" by that right now. If you set the clock ahead 5 or 10 years, we'll all use AI as some kind of "co-author." It won't seem weird anymore.

A few reasons. ITAR/EAR restrictions. It's running on VxWorks, on a RAD750. Can't quite go down to the local big box store to pick up one of those.

Congratulations to the FreeDOS people, I was given an old (P2 or P1) that will be nice to setup with FreeDOS. I have not looked at that system yet, so wish me luck :)

Thanks! And thanks for trying the new FreeDOS 1.3. It should work fine on a Pentium or Pentium-2. That's basicalliy how I have my virtual machine set up for emulation. :-)

It is a big install if you install everything. It's much smaller (about 20MB) if you install just a "plain DOS" system. You can make it even smaller if you do a custom install (boot the LiveCD and do a manual install .. or run SETUP ADV from the LiveCD for a custom install) on small systems. We also have a floppy-only version that is very small, and appropriate for low-end systems like '286 computers and other classic systems.

Yup, we still have some things on SourceForge. Our website is hosted elsewhere, but SourceForge still hosts our email lists and wiki, for example.

The news summary might have included more of the announcement to share what's new here:

This contains a bunch of great new features and improvements since the 1.2 release, including: new FreeCOM 0.85a, new Kernel 2043 and an 8086 version with FAT32 support, floppy edition now uses compression and requires about half as many diskettes, the return of networking, some new programs and games, many many many package updates, some updates and improvements to NLS, improved install process, especially with the MBR, some support to automatically set the COUNTRY.SYS information, improved CD initialization for the boot media and installed system, .. and much, much more!

And:

Check the Readme for more details. You'll need 20MB to install a "Plain DOS system," or about 275MB for a "Full installation including applications and games." You can find other optional packages on the BonusCD. For a list of everything included in FreeDOS 1.3, including what's installed and what's available to install, read the release report file.

There have been a ton of package updates here, as expected. The FreeDOS 1.3 release also has a bunch of translation and internationalization improvements. The package descriptions in the installer are also much improved.

Bah! Assan Motors Corporation did 15,000 per month in their Hadleyville Pennsylvania plant.

Tether is only backed by ~8% cash, but there are reports that the ~50% 'commercial paper' is in fact Bitcoin. So if there's a rush to pull from Tether, would it break the buck, or would it actually put Bitcoin into a further dive? — FWIW, Tether are still under investigation by the NY Attorney General. I'm sure that will be quite revealing when it comes to a head.

There isn't really any proof that Waymo vehicles are driverless, only that the driver isn't in the vehicle. If you compare a dozen dubiously driverless vehicles to a million collecting data every moment and already doing a pretty good job at autonomy, which do you think will succeed?

The fact that the driver is not in the vehicle does not mean that there is no driver.

I believe that this was figured out in the amateur observer community before NASA confirmed it. I saw it go by in my twitter feed. Not sure I can find it now...

Linear Energy Transfer

It's not radioactive. When high-energy particles strike it, they break apart into lower-energy particles that are more harmful. So, you need enough shielding to catch the particles that break apart in the top layer of your shielding.