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Comment Re: IoT SSID (Score 1) 24

Apple had a decent enough solution with their certification for routers for Apple Home being able to restrict how such devices behaved after end of support. But I remember only two or so routers that actually had that cert and at least one stopped getting firmware updates six years ago or something.

Comment Buy my plastic rice machine (Score 1) 76

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.

Comment The best techniques are passed on by the survivors (Score 1) 197

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.

Comment Re:I fucking hate The Chinese Room (Score 1) 403

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'.

Comment Re:I fucking hate The Chinese Room (Score 1) 403

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".

Comment Re:Reddits as expertise (Score 2) 52

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.

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