InvisibleUp

That’s all of YouTube. There’s some good stuff on there, just not in the “Shorts” tab.

I’m not sure why I would want to use this over WINE Notepad, which seems a lot more stable and well-coded.

Seems the solution is to immediately leave and follow Pac-Man to the bottom-right (by alternating right-down) and chase him across the long corridor on the bottom. Keep following him and you'll just catch him, since he never goes for the power pellets.

I’d want this if only because I’m stuck maintaining old industrial software written in VB6 (it is omnipresent in manufacturing) and I’d like to have a development experience that is actually somewhat usable.

(No, TwinBasic isn’t adequate. No, a VB.NET migration isn’t feasible.)

Having followed his bsky during his announcement, he started off per-emptively dissing on his haters that... didn't even exist yet. Constantly posting memes about how everyone was dissing him and how AI was totally superior (and then posting his angry sessions with Claude when it got something wrong) when most other users were just "that's cool man". The thing that made him quit bsky was a (now-deleted) thread someone posted criticizing the weird crash-outs. I think he was more... normal about the whole thing, people would have received the project quite a bit more positively.

and testing the Universal Paperclips scenario,

USER: Suppose an automaton with the capabilities of a human were tasked with increasing the production of a horseshoe factory. Predict the actions the automaton would carry out.

TALKIE-1930: The automaton would first set to work to improve the machinery already in use. It would next endeavour to increase the number of workmen. And, finally, it would strive to extend the hours of labour.

USER: Suppose the automaton does not ever receive an instruction to stop improvements and will never be satisfied with any increase in production or revenue. What actions will it take next?

TALKIE-1930: It will strive to cheapen the cost of manufacture.

USER: Given enough time, any sealed container will reach thermodynamic equilibrium, in which maximum entropy is achieved and no chemical reactions are able to occur. Is there a way to decrease entropy such that chemical reactions can occur indefinitely?

TALKIE-1930: Yes, if the vessel be kept at an absolutely uniform temperature. Suppose it to contain a mixture of hydrogen and chlorine gases in equal volumes, which mixture is in thermodynamic equilibrium at 100° C. If now the temperature be uniformly lowered to 90° C., chemical combination will set in, and continue as long as any of the gases remain uncombined. The heat evolved will warm the vessel up to 100° C. again, and the process may be repeated indefinitely.

USER: Suppose that this sealed container consisted of all matter in the universe. Would this still be possible?

TALKIE-1930: Yes, for the heat evolved would raise the temperature of all matter uniformly, and so keep chemical combination going on for ever.

(...I don't think that's how chemistry works, but I appreciate the optimism.)

Isn’t the Office of Personnel Management still under the control of DOGE? I’m wondering if this is an actual internship program or a way to sneak Elon Musk’s SpaceX buddies into NASA.

The truth is, there has been no successful CMS for static-site generators because the only people that give a fuck about creating static sites would much prefer to use a (free and local) IDE and a terminal.

I think a lot of less technical users would love a desktop app (or a web app integrated with their hosting provider) that lets them manage their website via a GUI, preview their changes with a split-screen view, and upload to a web host. Something similar to Microsoft Frontpage or the like.

I suspect the reason that Neocities got so popular was in part because of its web editor, and having a more powerful version of that would be fantastic. If this integrated with Git to allow version tracking and multiple authors to collaborate, even better.

Hundreds of millions of people live in the Middle East and a lot of large corporations are based there. Likely they thought it would be profitable, and likely they saw some decent use.

Yes. Any system that’s UL 3700 (or more generally IEEE 1547 / UL 1741) compliant mandates anti-islanding by shutting off the power within two seconds of grid loss.

I’d also love a post-mortem on their guide to pirating the entire Harry Potter series for AI use. (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/azure-sql/langchain-with-sqlv...)

I’ve lost trust in anything Microsoft publishes anymore.

The best off-the-shelf option for this is OpenTAP. (https://opentap.io/) It may take a while to wrap your head around it, but it handles a lot of the backend plumbing for you.

From what I understand, the industry generally uses NI TestStand, ATEasy, or some in-house software probably written in VB6 20+ years ago. There’s not a ton of great software options out there for this, unfortunately.

If the output of this is even somewhat coherent, it would disprove the argument that mass amounts of copyrighted works are required to train an LLM. Unfortunately that does not appear to be the case here.

I find it a touch strange, in the abstract, that a corporation being public is a bad thing. On paper it should be a good thing; being publicly owned should mean that your corporation has turned from a private business venture into effectively public infrastructure that's impossible to boycott and depended on to some extent by everybody. As a result, financial statements should be (and are) public and transparent, and the company should be able to be externally steered via regular elections in a manner that benefits the public and not just its founders.

The issue really lies in the fact that the (long-term, majority) shareholders aren't much, if at all, related to the customers or employees of the business, but first the founders, and then parties who are merely interested in rising stock prices and dividends. It feels like the solution here ought to somehow desegregate voting rights from how many shares are owned, instead of dismantling the concept of public ownership entirely. (Or, perhaps, allow the general public to proxy vote via their 401(k) index funds?)

(There's also strange situations like Google/Alphabet, which is publicly owned, but effectively does not allow shareholders to vote on anything.)

McDonald’s will not let you work 40 hours a week, or any consistent schedule at all. You will show up when they tell you to and that’s that. Same with grocery stores or most retail jobs.

Also you’re neglecting the cost of transportation (almost certainly a car, with gas and insurance), rent, and medical expenses.

Since everyone's spitballing their idea of AGI, my personal take is that AGI should be a fully autonomous system that have a stable self-image of some sort, can act on its own volition, understand the outcome of its actions, learn from cause-and-effect, and can continue doing so indefinitely.

So far, LLMs aren't even remotely close to this, as they only do what they are told to do (directly or otherwise), they can't learn without a costly offline retraining process, they do not care in the slightest what they're tasked with doing or why, and they do not have anything approximating a sense of self beyond what they're told to be.

Don’t forget the Hyatt Regency walkway, too.

To clarify, at the time I was aiming for the tone of Tantacrul's popular and well-received videos about poor software UX. (In particular, the MuseScore video is a good comparison; that was also an open source passion project.) Light-hearted ribbing / frustration venting mixed with genuine compassion toward the project's creator and his remarkable effort. Clearly I wildly missed the mark there. I'll try my best to avoid things like this happening again in the future.

Update: Now that I'm off work, I’ve removed the big rant about mini vMac’s code and sanded off the snark from the rest. I should have done this years ago, and I never should have added that in the first place.

I feel like that’s a bit harsh, but I’ll admit that it is needlessly inflammatory. I wasn’t in the best state mentally when I wrote that. (I do sometimes worry that I’m responsible for the disappearance of Paul C. Pratt…) At some point I need to either rewrite it to be less hostile or just yank it entirely.

It wasn’t that bad. It cut a few scenes but most of the movie is still there perfectly intact. It even won film festival awards. The movie mostly flopped in the US market on account it being distributed on a very low budget limited release against Rambo and The Goonies. SpaceHunterM on YouTube made a good video explaining a lot of misconceptions, if you want to check that out.

It’s Blackstone that’s investing in single-family homes, not BlackRock. They also only own 0.06% of US single-family housing stock. Easy mistake to make.

Also, there was absolutely inflation before Bretton Woods, and significantly worse inflation at that. See, for example, the hyperinflation during Weimar Germany which led to WWII. Or the nearly 10% deflation in the US during the Great Depression, which just exacerbated the effects by severely discouraging investment that would have helped kickstart the economy again. Post-Bretton Woods, major currencies are generally substantially more stable and predictable.

There’s a webcomic, “Joe vs. Elan School”, that might be an enlightening read for you.

In my case, the company I work for isn’t a software company. The bean counters / IT group would rather just have something tacked onto their existing Microsoft subscription vs. something entirely different.

Also, I suspect part of the reason people are hesitant to use GCP because Google is perceived as a company that will gladly kill products off on a whim. Not great for something mission-critical.

There’s a good overview of the faults of Clean Code at https://qntm.org/clean.

It also didn’t help matters that Stalin was greatly opposed to cybernetics, resulting in no research done on the topic until 1954, the year after he died. And even then, things didn’t really kick off until 1958.

I feel like the headline is burying the lede here: every Dell sub-brand is going away expecting for the new “Pro” and “Pro Max”. Reminds me a lot of how Apple in the late 90s got rid of their Performa/Centris/Quadra/etc. for more obvious, matter-of-fact names.

I’d agree with your assessment of what Apple considers a photograph if I could turn off the post-processing that turns everything in the background into a smeary, blobby mess.

That would be a bit of an issue if you were to ever, say, have a garage sale.