Do not worry. I promise to save an extra rod for the flux capacitor I built in my SUV, just in case some crazy person misuses theirs.

Does anyone remember the "plastic rice machine" scam? I don't even know if it's apocryphal, but the idea was, you sold machines that could make convincing fake rice to scam artists, only for the scam artists to find out that there is no real way to ever make back the money trying to counterfeit something as cheap as rice.

I keep thinking about that. Over and over again. For some reason.

It may eventually occur to people that art which no one ever cared about is as valuable as a random screenshot of World of Warcraft.

My armchair theory is that much of it is caused by genuine, temporary problems and the inertia that all successful human societies tend to develop. It could be health stuff. It could be the ancient equivalent of a tariff. It could simply be ceremony. At the end of the day, if a pattern persists for generations, it means there were generations to persist it. Heuristics be like that.

That's a damn fine heuristic for the modern world.

I will not give up my Bugles though.

If you want to appeal to realists, try Ecclesiastes. If you want to appeal to wannabe realists, stop being silly enough to want that.

Oh time thy pyramids.

All questions sensibly. Without making garbled statements, social errors, strange comments, or evasive comments to suggest ignorance or deception. That is the bar, not omniscience. It does not require an infinite rule set. It does require a big one to mimic the way humans actually process language. Answering "I don't know" every time would quickly fail.

Understanding in this context can mean the emotion of thinking you have seen enough of a pattern to discern the whole pattern. It can also mean genuinely understanding a pattern. The emotion may not exist, may exist for correct reasons, or it may exist for incorrect reasons. This is the nature of the 'wall'.

What? I do not understand your problem with the thought experiment. I imagine the Chinese Room would output "I cannot see your hands." Or some other, sensible thing that a person could say to the question.

The thought experiment is of a system which can reliably parse a language, and output sensible replies in said language, without any component of the system being able to understand the language. Neither the books nor the individual within the room are able to understand. The books are inanimate and unchanging, and you are correct that the person is just a "pen".

An antiquated way of avoiding the earliest proto-slop content and many scam results was to just add "site:reddit" to every google search result. Not so long ago, Reddit was a fine destination if you had any random technical question and all things considered it was an effective work around. As related in the lyrics of the song "Google doesn't work right anymore".

Now of course, going to reddit for advice is flat out stupid, yes. We know it is stupid because Google is doing it.

I once referred to FTL a roguelike. The horror which followed has left scars I will forever carry.

Joking about crying on my way to the bank has honestly become kind of hollow now that there's nothing worth buying except frustrating and arbitrarily shitty versions of things I used to love. Computers incidentally very high on that scale. Could I go back in time, I would gladly pay for many of these folks to have never done anything with their lives.

I watched some stuff about North Korea and doctors going in to teach cataract surgery. According to the film, it's one of the easier and most life changing surgeries someone can learn. If this is the case, although it involves the eye, this would be a very safe and conservative surgery to attempt new and cheaper technologies with, and one of the ones that can benefit most from remote assistance. Thus the heavy emphasis on educational and "remote hand holding" situations.

I mentioned Manjaro with KDE specifically because I do not think Ubuntu's default ways of doing things are a good match for someone who used to like Windows. I do not know if it would solve some or any of a given person's problems with compatibility and usability, but I feel it is more like Windows was supposed to become than Windows itself currently is. The basic, elemental usability of the platform I unironically think is better than Windows right now. It gives a very Windows 7 pro power user vibe to me.

I honestly think Windows 11 is worse than Manjaro with KDE for most use cases, including novice and intermediate use. Honestly if Linux isn't there for you yet, buy a Mac mini. Windows is currently the operating system most likely to change things, to break things, to render itself unusable. Windows has been LOSING functionality, everyone else has been gaining it.