jamiethompson

I suspect you're right there. Yet it forged ahead confidently giving answers anyway!

I just thought it would be interesting, given that it has an understanding of XML to see if it could do a simple diff, "by eye" if you will. Obviously I wasn't intending to trust its output. We of course have long standing trusted tools for diffing files.

I had a brainwave recently. I was tired and looking at two XML documents which looked identical to me and I thought hey, let's see what ChatGPT thinks. So I asked it to describe to me what the differences were between the two documents and it immediately just started talking about elements that it had completely made up. Every time I asked it why it was doing that it apologised but then doubled-down on making even more stuff up. Eventually I asked it to show me what its understanding was of the two documents I was asking it to compare and it showed me two completely unrelated XML documents

I definitely "cheated" some of these by throwing in something horribly verbose rather than whatever a more correct solution would be

Europe has entered the chat

Draw.io does this. When you export a diagram as a PNG. There is an option to embed the source file in the png. If you subsequently open one of those PNGs in Draw.io you can carry on editing it. I find it really handy.

Does anyone else remember "Web 2.0" being talked about as "The Semantic Web"? Because I sure do.

Is it 1998 again?

Is getting old mostly about watching people rediscover the same mistakes over and over again? I think I am getting old.

This is my exact takeaway. I can't decide whether this article and many of the commenters are deliberately missing this point or whether it's actually not understood.

This seems to miss the point. Of course these dithered images don't result in a saving in filesize when offered up as jpegs.

This feels like a bit of a strawman argument.

Some people here weren't web developers in the 90s and it shows :)

One of the things that gets to me while working from home is the lack of ambient noise. Where I live is fairly rural and the silence can be deafening

One benefit I can think of is that you might be willing to pay to sit somewhere but not actually want to purchase food or drinks. I put on weight very easily and whenever I go to a Cafe or even a quiet McDonalds to use the free wifi, I always end up consuming more calories than I should. I have very little will power and that coupled with feeling the obligation to buy something at least once per hour isn't necessarily a healthy combination of factors for me.

Not in England, no. But it is in Ireland or Scotland.

Yeah, i looked for something like that to keep next to the phone but couldn't find anything. I was sure they used to be a thing. What you _can_ get however are little kits you wire up inside the pulse dial phone which do an on the fly pulse to DTMF conversion.

Well, I don't. I rarely use the landline. I'm just saying that you can if you want to.

It's just a bit of fun. It's more ornamental than anything. It's just nice that it also works as a phone although I rarely ever actually use the landline.

I use an unmodified rotary phone as my main landline phone. In the UK it would seem that our exchanges still support pulse dialling. The only drawback are menu systems that expect to hear tones, but I get around this with a small app on my mobile phone that just plays DTMF tones. If i want to, i can pick up the receiver and play tones down it to dial a number rather than using the... dial.

I can remember teaching myself HTML using a WinHelp file I found on a magazine coverdisk.

The main reason is I have kids.

In the past, I mainly just used a tablet to watch video.

This is my experience. Bought an SanDisk card to pop in my phone before I went on holiday. Changed my camera settings to save to the SD card. Great. I can stop worrying about filling up my phone's internal storage with photos now.

Then the card corrupted all of my photos.

My current "Smart TV" setup is a 10 year old 42" dumb tv with an Amazon Fire TV stick plugged into the back. I don't know what I'll do when it dies (it's dying).

I wish you could just buy modern TVs that are essentially just monitors.

I think that even our current civilization, if it stopped today, would be pretty easy to miss in the geological record 200 million years from now.

But imagine if civilization had ended 500 years ago, or even a thousand. There would be absolutely nothing to show for it in a couple hundred million years time.

Something that has occured to me in the past whilst thinking about this is that given the miniscule evidence our species and civilisation will leave in the geological record, can we really be sure that no other short-lived civilizations have existed previous to homo sapiens?

You're right. To anyone that's not incredibly wealthy the deal on offer, in reality, was:

"Two unfeasibly cheap flights to the US plus a free vacuum cleaner"

I'm sorry your situation didn't work out as you'd have liked it to. It sounds a lot like the journey I took to be honest. I drifted from "Senior Developer" to "Lead Developer" into "Development Manager" as the company grew. Before I knew it I'd not written a line of code in over a year and all I did was attend lengthy meetings. I'd also have been very disappointed if I'd had to leave the company. I still had a lot to contribute to the business and the product we were working on, just not as a manager.

I quit being a manager but kinda sideways stepped into a different senior (non management) role in the same company/department. I was quite lucky because I didn't really want to leave the company at the time. I just didn't want to be on the trajectory I was on.

It was kinda awkward initially, mostly for the people I had hired and been manager of who I was now colleagues with, but not for long. Hands down it was one of the best life decisions I've ever made. I feel as though the experience I gained helps me to perform my current role even better than I would otherwise be able to as I have an appreciation of the politics above me that I'd not have had I not been up there and back down again the way I have.

As I developer who accidentally climbed the ladder into management (and eventually bailed) I can say that from my own experience it is by sheer force of pressure from non-technical management above oneself.

I fought the management culture hard for a few years, eventually realising that I needed to either become one of them, or quit.

I quit.

Hands up, who headed straight to ebay looking for old calendars?

I thought this too. As a cyclist I'd be absolutely terrified if a motorcyclist did this and I've never experienced such a maneuver. Bikers are generally the best behaved around cyclists.