Imagine what *that* is going to do to the price of eggs...

Guys? People were pouring their hearts out to Eliza fifty years ago. I've been telling folks that ChatGPT is little more than Eliza on steroids...

Make things more customizable in the GUI. A lot of times I'll try to do something simple (e.g. "How do I keep it from re-opening all my windows after a crash?"), so I google the answer and it frequently comes back with a referral to "about:config" and then tweaking some uninutitively-named parameters, and half the time it doesn't work anyway. Customizing should be baked into the product, not the subject of arcane folk wisdom...

The first computer I ever *used* was an IBM 1130 that my high school had. We programmed it in FORTRAN on punch cards.

The first personal computer I used was when my brother bought a Sphere-1 6800-based computer. It was one of the first all-in-one computers with CPU, memory, and monitor all in one package. It had... issues, which is why it sank into obscurity.

Later he bought a TRS-80 Model 1 which I also did a lot of programming on.

The first computer I ever owned myself was a Sinclair ZX-81 that I soldered together; as a broke college kid it was all I could afford at the time.

It's the famous "chopstick" algorithm puzzle, only with arms...

After years of cobbling together white boxes with their attendant compatibility issues (but they were cheap!) I went out and bought my wife a Compaq Deskpro with Windows ME. I figured that a professionally-built system *had* to be better, right? After all, Top Men were entrusted with the integration testing and everything...

Then the WinME bugs started to show. After about a year of fussing around with it and trying to work around the bugs I figured "There's so many bugs there must be a service pack, right?"

Crickets.

I had never heard of a Windows OS that *never* had bugfixes released, until then.

This is because of the eternal legal arms race. We pay lawyers good money to find loopholes in contracts. We then pay lawyers good money to write contracts without loopholes. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Despite this shift in opinion, employers are still going to require a four-year college degree in order to get a job as an entry-level file clerk...

To be fair, I'm pretty sure that most "person-in-the-street" interviews are edited so as to highlight the worst of the bozos because that makes for good television. When I was a kid I'd watch these and go "Ooh! Ooh! Pick Me! PickMeeeeee!!! I know the answer". Later I realized this would be the best way NOT to make the final cut that aired...

I have taken to calling this "Popular Science Fatigue". It's where you read about some wonderful breakthrough technology in Popular Science or some other mass-market source and then it disappears never to be seen again.

I don't know what it's like in NYC, but I know that in Boston one of the big advantages of Uber/Lyft is the ability to pay by credit card AT ALL. Whenever one attemps to pay by credit card in Boston the driver will claim this his machine is "broken", and only if you don't have any cash and there's no other option will it magically "repair" itself.

When the simulation theory began making the rounds, I realized that this could explain part of the uncertainty principle where a particle does not achieve a definite state until it is observed. How would a particle know that it's being observed, after all? If we're living in a simulation, though, the uncertainty principle becomes a rendering optimization: why compute the final state of a particle that nobody is observing or interacting with? In other words, the particle doesn't know if it's being observed, but the simulation does.

Well, consider f'rinstance the uncertainty principle. Certain phenomena (e.g. the state of a particle) do not fully manifest until someone/something is observing it. That strongly resembles a rendering optimization to me...

I thought that the original deal to use the RD-180 also came with blueprints and specs so that we could build the same engine on our own. Why aren't we pursuing this?