aezart

This part confused me:

lacks basic features like dealing with compressed files – I don’t count a decades-old cumbersome wizard-style interface with countless steps to go through just to unpack a compressed file to be even remotely acceptable in 2026. Dolphin and Nautilus handle compressed files entirely transparently and much faster than Explorer does, and once you’re used to that, going back to ’90s style compressed file management almost feels insulting.

I can open a zip in a normal file explorer window just fine. Maybe this is something stripped from European versions for anti-monopoly reasons?

Anyway here's what I've done with my Win11 install to make it tolerable:

- Disable onedrive

- Make a secondary local admin account and use that exclusively instead of the the main Microsoft account one (since the library paths in the main account all have onedrive in them even if it's disabled)

- Disable web search in the start menu with group policies

- Remove task view, widgets, the search bar, etc. from the task bar

- Put the start menu in list view and remove every pinned item

- Left-align the taskbar

- Show file extensions in explorer

I'm sure there's a lot more I had to do, but I don't remember off the top of my head.

What we get typically is a second or third-hand summary of an analysis someone else did about how the current version works, with no indication of what stuff has to stay as-is in our replacement and what stuff can be improved.

Splinter Cell and Thief are the only series I'm familiar with that actually have light and shadow based stealth. Everything else is all hiding around corners or inside/under furniture, like Metal Gear Solid.

The Splinter Cell lighting stuff never made much sense anyway, since you'd be perfectly fine if you were standing in a shadowy patch while making a clear silhouette on the illuminated wall behind you.

The strangest misbehavior moment I remember from the first game was like this: There were two NPCs working on computers in a dark room. Behind them was an open door to an illuminated office. I walked into the office and shut the door, they didn't notice there was suddenly no light coming through. I turned off the office light, no reaction. I opened the door again, and then they noticed the office light had gone out.

I think it's a good idea to experiment with and discover the limitations of small, untuned models before exposing yourself to the modern very powerful ones. It gives you a better sense of their nature as token predictors and not real sentience.

In the same way, seeing an incompetent stage magician fumble before you see a very talented one perform flawlessly will help you understand that it's all sleight of hand. If you jump right to a professional performance, you might think it's real magic.

Agreed, and you could get a completely unrelated LLM to generate a similar apology without any of the real context, it would make up reasoning just as effectively.

Seems valid to me. I won't read articles with model-generated header images, because it's a good indicator the rest of the text will be slop as well.

For a restaurant, a slop logo gives the impression that the owner doesn't care about the details and has no taste.

Beyond that, the use of generative models is a big moral issue for a growing number of people.

Probably more likely to run into a Shoggoth than Cthulhu in the Antarctic, or maybe an Elder Thing if any are still around. Rl'yeh is a bit further north.

Maybe I'm missing something but I don't understand where that 3.9 g expected weight comes from.

Sounds like my Dad, who used to have an uncanny ability to get stuck in elevators. Even got stuck in one with his claustrophobia therapist.

Regarding the interactions shown in the screenshots:

LLMs are pattern-matching machines. They keep the pattern going. Once "the agent disobeys the human's instructions" has made its way into the context, that is the pattern that it's going to keep matching. No amount of telling it to stop will make it stop.

The only possible solution is excising it from context and replacing it with examples of it doing the right thing. Given that these models have massive context windows now and much of the output is hidden from the user, that's becoming less viable.

It makes the behavior more obvious from simply looking at the file, for one thing, and it means you can just lump it into your next `git add -A` without needing to handle it specially.

I've never been a fan of dual grid, and personally prefer the rpg maker approach of using 5 sample tiles and then chopping up and recombining them to make the 47 tiles needed for what I believe is called "blob tiling".

Teams messages expire in 30 days at my job, we use email for anything that needs a paper trail

We use Mulesoft where I work, and XML namespaces are a constant issue. We never managed to define an API spec in such a way that the RAML compiler and the APIKit validator would both accept the same payload. In the end we just had to turn off validations in APIkit.

Yeah I strongly feel that the best outcome of all of this would be the end of sponsorships and affiliate links, and a general reduction in price discrimination.

Something I've occasionally wished for is a classic-style Zelda game[1] where partway through the adventure you discover that all the dungeons are actually adjacent to each other, and you can open up passages connecting them turning it all into one big Metroidvania experience.

[1]: i.e. one with 4-8 dungeons and new navigation/combat tools in each, not a sandbox like BotW

It's wild to me that it doesn't even generate a tooltip by default.

We had this problem, 119 services that all got their dependencies from a shared domain. Individual services had to depend on the exact version of libraries provided by the domain. It made updates essentially impossible.

Eventually we were forced by a licensing change to move to containers, which fixed that issue but substantially increased our research usage, we went from 16 GB of RAM for the entire domain to 1.5 GB per service, with similar increases on CPU.

Article says 7 million

Wonder if/when prescription lenses will be available for it. I had to get some for my index since my glasses were too big to fit inside the headset.

Microsoft is terrible about this kind of stuff. We have a big problem with MS Teams replacing tabs with nbsps in XML code snippet blocks. It breaks our pom files. We've also had similar issues with pasting excel tables into emails.

American tipping culture has its origins in the post-Civil-War south:

Following the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, formerly enslaved Black workers were often relegated to service jobs (e.g., food service workers and railroad porters). However, instead of paying Black workers any wage at all, employers suggested that guests offer Black workers a small tip for their services. Thus, the use of tipping to pay a worker’s base wage, instead of as a bonus on top of employer-paid wages, became an increasingly common practice for service sector employment. In the early 20th century, these employers, who shared a common goal of keeping labor costs down and preventing worker organizing, formed the National Restaurant Association (NRA). Over the past century, the NRA has lobbied Congress to achieve these goals, first by excluding tipped occupations from minimum wage protections entirely, and later by establishing permanent subminimum wages for tipped workers (One Fair Wage 2021).

From https://www.epi.org/publication/rooted-racism-tipping/

The government staying out of it makes it worse. The companies have so much power over your life without any oversight.

A payment processor should be treated like a utility. They just let the money flow and skim profit off the top without caring who's at either end.

I think aside from any safety issues, another reason to prefer a deb or something over curl | bash is that it lets your package manager know what you're installing. It can warn you about unmet dependencies, it knows where all the individual components are installed, etc. When I see a deb I feel more confident that the software will play nicely with other stuff on the system.

I agree, and would personally extend that to all user interfaces that speak in first person. I don't like it when word's spell check says "we didn't find any errors". Feels creepy.

The first chicken Caesar salad I ever had was, I believe, at Metro Grill during the summer of 2006. I was not (and still am not) much of a salad fan, but that was the salad that made me say "maybe I can learn to like salad."

Interesting that sometimes a washed out color will look darker than a pure color, even though there's more light overall.

What's wrong with that is that a lot of languages don't call them hashtables. I don't think I've used the actual term since like 2016.

Arizona had AAA000 when I was a kid, then 000AAA, then AAA0000 issued sequentially, but then just before they got through all the plates starting with 'C' they switched to a new system that appears completely random to me. It's a shame, I really enjoyed tracking the progression and knowing whether someone got their plate before or after me.