coldcode

Nothing says you are an advanced stupid company than using AI to implement the stupid. This is security I doubt even a college student would implement. Does Meta have a CSO? The correct answer is they don't, even though some body might occupy the title.

Of course it's always possible that they simply don't care who has your account, as long as they get money.

I wrote my own interpreted language about 25+ years ago to write online surveys. It made it easy to create complex surveys with many branches. I think I wrote it in Objective-C.

The team implementing the survey system wound up using the same language to implement the runtime portion, something I never expected or designed in.

I don't recall anything about what it looked like now. I do remember it was a lot of fun to write.

The US Air Force intended to use ADA, but had to use JOVIAL instead because ADA took so long to be developed. Most people have never heard of JOVIAL but it still exists in the USAF as a legacy.

I worked with JOVIAL as part of my first project as a programmer in 1981, even though we didn't even have a full JOVIAL compiler there yet (it existed elsewhere). I remember all the talk about the future being ADA but it was only an incomplete specification at the time.

It's not a rule, it's a law passed by Congress and signed by the President in 1978. You can't just ignore it.

Both. He is a fool who thinks he knows better than anyone else.

While I enjoyed writing assembly on the 6502 Apple II back then, I would hate doing it today, 42 years later.

Good job, though! Hard to comprehend how limited the hardware was back then, and how much cleverness it took to get things to work.

The importers would get the refunds, and any of their customers they charged more for would simply keep the refund. If you paid it directly (like international product order) you probably won't ever get repaid, as they probably deleted the transaction or otherwise failed to record it. Refunds even for importers might be caught up in lawsuits which might never resolve. It's a mess, and SCOTUS did not address the mess.

For any AI post, there seems like that one person for whom it worked great, and a whole lot where it didn't. Your mileage may vary...

Some things AI does well, many things it may be not worth the effort entailed, and some where it downright sucks and may even be harmful. The question is will it ever change the curve to where it is useful most of the time?

Which is the argument against flying cars. Uncontrolled flying car crashes over populated areas could be catastrophic.

I thought all measurements in data centers were in US football fields.

Amazing it runs in a browser.

Did they remove any features in Photo? Or is it basically just glommed together?

My career as a programmer started this way. The division VP would eliminate jobs in the last quarter of the year to make his numbers look good, then desperately hire people at the start of the first quarter to avoid projects falling too far behind. I was one of those people.

I used Borland Turbo Pascal in 1984. It was amazing to work with something so fast on a PC that was really so slow. No IDE/Compiler since then matched the speed. Today's code is massively more sophisticated and complex, so there is no way to match that performance today despite the speed of computers today.

I remember a friend having a 17% mortgage, which he eventually walked away from.

I make an unusual kind of art, but I haven't tried selling it, as you need a stable of interested people, and I can only post it in one place at the moment (a Facebook interest group on tiling, Instagram is overrun with AI, you can't start a new profile without lots of existing supporters). I've considered opening a gallery in my local area just to sell my art (5 million people in the metro, and barely a real commercial art gallery). My overhead would be just me and a location. The idea of selling art for tens or hundreds of thousands seems nuts.

I do see that there are too many galleries in places, selling too many artists, to too many people, with massive overhead (in the story, the gallery had $100k+ a month in expenses). Also, it's hard to make something new that is still saleable, almost every kind of art is basically something people did 50 or even 100 years ago; I look at art people are selling all the time, and most is not anything different. The best stuff is from people that hardly anyone knows, who like me just make something different because they want to.

I'd love to sell it online, but without an audience, no one will visit. I could sell it at https://www.saatchiart.com, but they don't really market most of what they have. You have to drag people there. Plus they take 30% or 40% (50% is normal for galleries). Locally, in the right location, people see your art, and stop by. It's just the pain of setting it up, and then sitting there while you wait!

Mentioned it here before, https://andrewwulf.com if interested.

The site is slow so I can't see it. I'm 68, eat well, lost 20 pounds, work out twice a week. Everything is working fine. But I live in a place surrounded by people in walkers, wheelchairs, or using canes. Some of them have had strokes or accidents making improvement hard, but many simply chose to not do anything to avoid the aging. You don't ordinarily wind up with a walker at a single point; it often starts many years or even decades earlier when you failed to keep in decent physical shape. I almost started too late (last couple of years), I can see how easy it is to not notice your physical being slowly going down. But assuming no major injury or disease, you can improve your body at almost any age, a little at a time, and avoid or at least postpone physical aging for quite a while.

I also write code daily, read the same things I read when I worked, thus keep my brain going too. You can't ignore body or mind, you have to keep both in tune.

I am still getting older, but I am in better shape than I was before I retired. The last time I felt as fit was when I was still playing basketball 30+ years ago.

Don't wait, it's easier to do a little for decades than wait until it's almost too late.

Truth Social, X and Rumble are all backed by the very people who wrote the law, so will not be sued. Get Out Of Jail Free cards.

It's so interesting to see how much of a commodity charting/graphing has become. When we started building Deltagraph in late 1988, what we made become a kind of standard since we targeted Postscript and Illustrator output, and included almost every kind of chart we could find with ridiculous options for everything, so people used it world wide, especially if targeting print. In the mid-90's, it was sold by the publisher (we just did the dev), and it spent the next 25 years at various owners before dying during the pandemic, all still based on the original source code (C) I started. I can't imagine how bad the code looked by then...

I once worked a contract at a public University, and the first thing I noticed was their SSO implementation. You logged into a single page, and then it called the other applications with a GET putting the username and password in the clear in the URL. Facepalm.

Image generation may not always trigger:

The model may output text only. Try asking for image outputs explicitly (e.g. "generate an image", "provide images as you go along", "update the image").

The model may stop generating partway through. Try again or try a different prompt.

Seriously?

I had a shirt from a piece made at Printful, but it's way too small (even at XXXL) for a normal person. It is cool to see though. I wish I could find a tailor who actually makes dress shirts, and have the fabic made at Spoonflower.

I only make art designed to be printed on 10-12 color large format inkjet printers. Making plotter art is not inherently better or worse that printing, it's just a different type of art. I love what people do with plotters, but I just prefer doing printed versions, since what I make is often not possible with a plotter, as I deal in pixels (up to 200+ megapixels), and plotters deal in vectors. It's like Photoshop vs Illustrator, the don't compete as much as specialize in different things. https://andrewwulf.com if interested.

I parsed the original Illustrator format in 1988 or 1989, which is a precursor to PDF. It was simpler than today's PDF, but of course I had zero documentation to guide me. I was mostly interested in writing Illustrator files, not importing them, so it was easier than this.

I use a lot of truchet tiles in my art (https://andrewwulf.com), but I color them afterwards, which seems fairly uncommon (article from last year, https://thecodist.com/my-art-and-color-after-tiling/) outside of shaders. I focus on 2d art for print. I also use various combinations of 1x1, 1x2, 2x2, 3x3 and 4x4 tiles, sometimes all in one work.

Funny, I wrote a recursive descent parser in 1982, in Fortran, to parse the syntax of the Jovial programming language. That was my first ever professional programming project, with no university degree in CS, or job experience. Note, Fortran (78) is a terrible language to write a parser in.

I wish I could have save the source. It would be fun to see it.

I've been doing it for 52 years (with a gap during the late 70s) and still teaching myself new things.

My cardiologist did all of these except the eGFR. My calcium score was fairly high, but not high enough to be concerning since my cholesterol is controlled and my diet and exercise regime are good now. Until the CAC was done, I had no idea if I had any or not. It's better to deal with cholesterol earlier than I did.

I too worked at Apple during this period (Dec 95 to May 96). It does not surprise me that code was released without anyone asking or looking at it from a product standpoint. Management of Copland for example (the new OS from hell that was eventually canned, leading to the purchase of NeXT and the return of Jobs) was a complete utter shitshow, leading me to give up and quit (leading to me spending my life going d'oh).

I never trusted them from the start. I remember the hype that came out of Sun when J2EE/EJBs appeared. Their hype documents said the future of programming was buying EJBs from vendors and wiring them together. AI is of course a much bigger hype machine with massive investments that need to be justified somehow. AI is a useful tool (sometimes) but not a revolution. ML is much more useful a tool. AGI is a pipe dream fantasy pushed to make it seem like AI will change everything, as if AI is like the discovery that making fire was.