Posts by Ropewash

Re: Forget age verification for operating systems, but bring in clue verification for politicians.

Many of them will easily pass a physical age verification of 97 given the current state of the gerontocracy.

Mental age is trickier, but I'd say 8 and rapidly regressing.

Re: MS Works!

I also recall running into Works in a similar timeframe. Unfortunately it was as the software that couldn't output a file compatible with Word without all the formatting disappearing.

Not quite as rose-tinted my nostalgia for the program.

Re: Gigawatts

Perhaps people get confused by the usage of GW and think it means anything other than giga-wishes. That is a standard unit of prayer representing how much is required to make people believe in any of this make-believe bullshit.

Re: OK they are bastards, but

Just casually tossing the S-slur around like that.

Re: Applications?

Reminds me of an old pickup truck I owned in my youth. Rusty rotor cut right through the pad, the backing plate and into the piston surface. I'd grown so used to the noise that I didn't bother to check until it went from squawking to crunching. Many hours of dirt-backlot repairs later a lesson was learned.

Re: Venn diagram of those MAGA and online trolls is pretty much just a circle though.

So just under half a regular circle? It's x diameter.

No pi for you.

Some would say the lathe was just bouncing across the floor because I'd forgotten to balance the 4jaw with a large offset workpiece, but I maintain it is sentient and was making a spirited bid for freedom.

Re: Bill Gates, too?

You had me right up until the second sentence.

Bill Gates wouldn't be an upright person if you bolted his spine to a wall.

Re: "The session just burns through my token quota."

The enshitification will continue until monetization improves.

Re: So AI people think stealing is fine

Yep. It was all fun and games taking the artists and authors out behind the woodshed for profit, but reverse engineering their mechanical turk is blasphemy.

It's a tool for very quickly removing the scales from fish. Not to be confused with high-per-scale which is either something to do with climbing or cocaine, I don't remember which.

Re: From available evidence below...

Especially when all those wheels are every geometric shape other than round and there's now 7 of them on you car instead of 4.

Pulseaudio was the canary in the coalmine.

Re: Universal Basic Income

I would suggest reading Parkinson's Law.

It explains the reasons for what you are seeing quite well.

Re: Reflections on Trusting Trust

A quote that remains just as true for ELIZAs current descendants as it was back then.

Just because they've built an n-dimensional ELIZA doesn't mean it's not subject to the same fundamental limitations.

Re: Times like this

Interesting. I've no MS account on my win10 machines and only use limited accounts. I did notice one of those rigs tried to turn copilot back on despite my previous efforts to eliminate it completely. However neither has exhibited any other ill effects. Might have dodged a bullet there.

Re: Ummm...maybe Terminator is a real threat

Guess they don't have enough pics of teens taking their kit off for their liking.

Re: "all this is old news"

2008? Panasonic 42" ips screen. Dumb as dirt and still going strong. The thing has lasted longer than my refrigerator.

I've zero need for a smart TV, and while a resolution better than 1080 would be nice, it's not required, and ips still looks good enough for my eyesight so buying any new kit is not something I have on the budget.

Re: Musk

People tend to forget that last bit. Same way they forget that a female nipple is just a food dispenser for infants. We're a very odd species to abstract away our own biology to this extreme.

(Also, blending fabrics is a crime under biblical law. We're already born in sin, no need to compound it.)

Re: Unavailable

Going to have to alter an old saying a bit,

You either die a villain or live long enough to become a pederast.

Re: slightly disappointing article

Imagine pulling up to the drive-through in a dumptruck and saying 'fill-er-up'

Re: That's not survival. It is an unnecessary nightmare.

Obsolescence is the end goal. They've learned from cellphones that if you glue the battery in well enough nobody will bother replacing it, this is the natural evolution of that line of thought.

Next stop will be container based housing, where you can enjoy the dubious benefit of being able to quickly swap out your entire home when the faucet leaks.

Re: No pseudo-thinkers here, mate

You make the most valid point about 'AI' right there. It cannot learn therefore it cannot be intelligent in any way. A Xerox copier is just as capable of producing imitations of the things fed to it, it could even modify the content in pseudo-random ways if the toner was on it's way out, but you'd be hard pressed to label the thing as 'intelligent'.

Before any glimmer of intellect can be attributed to these things, there needs to first be a 'living' model that constantly adjusts it's data and weights according to interactions. Training a new model every time there's new data is not only wasteful, it's pointless.

Re: DuckDuckGo

The core concept is not wrong there. There are billions of humans on Earth. There are very few actual people.

I personally am just one of the tiny, and infinitely replaceable, cogs that make up the background noise of humanity. It's quote comfortable once you know where you stand.

In the case of breaking distance there's no testing required.

All they did was change the gap at which the software switches off and pretends it was never there from 5m to 10m. <!--sarcasm>

Re: snapflatimages

Remember when Windows 3.11 programs used to come bundled with their own versions of system files to ensure they'd run correctly?

Who knew it was the future of Linux.

Hopefully it hits e-bay or bankruptcy auction before heading out to the landfill. The dot-com crash was a goldmine and I'm optimistic the ai crash will be similar.

After all, that hardware isn't suddenly useless just because the company that bought it can't pay their bills.

Re: As usual

Replace 'sunshine' with kerosene and I'm in full agreement..

Re: Oh noes

Each day somehow gives me a reason to be glad that I'm a tradesman. Morlock all the way.

Re: Tariffs

The alternatives come from China. Neither the US nor the EU have any real mass manufacturing capability that isn't reliant on China in some way.

Re: No slow down

On the plus side, when it does pop there will be crates of DDR5 on Ebay for pennies on the dollar.

Re: "colored pencil office"

California liberals and their politically correct policies are the reason there's even a 'colored' pencil office in the first place. We used to just have black pencils, but you ain't supposed to call 'em that anymore.

Re: RE: can do it

They still are being taken in by Eliza. They just managed to stack a bunch of Elizas together in a matrix and named it something new.

Re: Alien Spacers

Not sure what performance you'd get. Corn requires a lot of voltage and chocolate, honey-banana flavoured or otherwise, is not the best thermal conductor.

Re: Lunchtime, doubly so... Reality is an illusion ...

But of course it did that. Not even the image specific machines can actually tell you what an image is about, only what pre-defined tags it is able to recognise. They cannot see the whole image AS a whole image. Show it an apple and 90% of the time it'll tell you that's an apple, not that the apple is accidentally in the dairy section of the store.

That an automated guessing engine cannot fully grasp the idea of QR codes is not a surprise.

Re: Wrong problem

The best offense is a good defense. The only machine I own with TPM got it turned off in uefi. The other machines all reported they were safe via a block of red text in the update window.

Microsoft wasn't lying when they said win10 was the last windows I was going to install.