Supposedly a deeply unprofitable one. Which is a huge chunk of why no real competition has surfaced.

It’s one thing to set up a proverbial store with prices so low you choke out the competition. It’s another thing to essentially pay your customers to come in, either by literally paying them or by providing a service that they pay below actual cost for.

Same. Like, it’s your company, you don’t know for certain when it was founded…?

I had to unsubscribe from NotJustBikes’s YouTube channel because I could no longer bear thinking about just how thoroughly and irreversably fucked the city planning is out here in the American midwest, and how there’s less than a gnat’s fart in the wind I can do about any of it.

I’m extremely skeptical of your advice, as HP in my mind has always been the posterchild of abysmally bad hardware. Garbage printers, garbage laptops, garbage workstations, even garbage rack servers. You’re honestly the first one I’ve seen with a credibe-looking opinion that has anything positive to say about something they’ve made.

I believe in the adage of, “If it sits between you and the ground, don’t skimp”.

Shoes, socks, desk chairs, lounge chairs, sofas, car( seat)s, mattresses…

You spend too much time in or on all of these things to be uncomfortable.

I also see posted here the Adam Savage advice of buying cheap tools first, and then upgrade after you better understand your needs. I also think that’s great advice you can apply to most things. Just not the above things.

Just as long as you’re not searching for a “gaming laptop”. IMO those do not exist to any degree of satisfaction. They are all a “choose two” among performance, size/weight, battery life, and noise.

Unless you are so mobile that you are never ever at home, and the prosect of only scraping mid graphical settings at best while being permanently anchored to a wall outlet any time you play is worth it to you, I’d suggest taking that money and instead putting it toward a combo of a desktop rig and a cheap netbook. You won’t be gaming on the go, but you’ll have a better experience for the price. And if there’s a more mundane task that the little netbook can’t handle, you can, provided you have an Internet connection, always remote in to the desktop workstation at home and delegate expensive tasks to it.

If all you need though is something that runs well with a dozen browser tabs open, doesn’t struggle playing back high definition video, and can handle playing a less demanding game every now and again, you can definitely find laptops that can do that while still being relatively slim, quiet, and cool. Just temper your expectations on how far you can push it.

I believe this most recent update to v0.19 was somewhat unique in the regard of login incompatibility across versions, as major breaking changes to authentication itself were the focus of it.

Thank you for letting me know about this.

I use a few apps from the SimpleMobileTools suite. They aren’t full FOSS, they have basic and pro versions where the basic version is GPL3 and the proprietary extended features cost a few bucks. The basic FOSS tools are still decent, if barebones.

The suite includes:

• a calculator
• a phone dialer
• a music player
• a calendar
• a photo gallery (with basic editor)
• an audio recorder
• a flashlight
• a clock
• an app launcher
• an SMS messenger
• a camera
• a keyboard
• a note taker
• a file manager
• a contact book
• a simple painting canvas

I use the gallery and file manager the most. Though admittedly I threw a couple bucks their way for the proprietary extensions. It’s not FOSS, but if it was going to be proprietary, I think it’s one of the fairest deals in software these days. Better than another bloody subscription model, or holding the ad-free experience hostage behind a paywall.

I still listen to my music using a 160 GB iPod Classic. Apple struck gold with that clickwheel. Carrying around a dedicated device for music just for that elegant one-thumb control I don’t even have to look at to use is still totally worth it to me.

Pokemon names nearly always deviate from the spellings of their constituent root words in at least one superficial way.

There are a couple odd exceptions like Electrode and Talonflame, of course. And even more now with paradox mons, but those are, uh, a special case.

My point being, I am confident the “sudo” in “Sudowoodo” is not a nod to sudo at all, it’s just a coincidental side effect of corrupting “pseudo”. As they do.

I suppose if one really wanted to know, one could just ask Nob Ogasawara himself, the one who named Sudowoodo. He’s on Twitter…

It only just hit me a month or two ago just what a timezone, as described by IANA, actually is.

I’m from the eastern half of the US state of North Dakota. We run on what we’d collloquially call “central time”, often abbreviated CST. That’s UTC-6:00 in winter and UTC-5:00 in summer (technically CDT, but whatever).

Long ago I had it passed down to me from on high that the IANA timezone indicator I should use for my local time is America/Chicago. Ok. Easy enough. Why Chicago, though? I long guessed because it happens to be one of the largest localities in the CST block? That is in fact the answer if you read the rationale of the tz database, but I did not know this at the time.

What threw me off, though, is that there are other localities that seemingly map to the same time zone block. Like America/Mexico_City, or America/Indianapolis. What’s up with those? When I set my computer system clock to them, they behave just like America/Chicago does. Why are these here? And why these cities, specifically?

Then, imagine the loop I was thrown for when I discovered three timezone definitions exclusive to North Dakota. Those being America/North_Dakota/Beulah, ../../Center, and ../../New_Salem. What the fuck…?? These are literal nowhere towns. Midwest America is the middle of nowhere. North Dakota is the middle of nowhere within the Midwest. And these three towns are the middle of nowhere to the rest of us in North Dakota. What is going on? Why are there three tiny timezones in the middle of nowhere in the middle of nowhere in the middle of nowhere? And they’re all right next to each other!

Then, it clicked. What do these three places have in common? These towns all used to be in the next timezone over (“Mountain Time”, MST), but later decided to jump over to CST.

There’s a humorous story for why this happened. Supposedly, drinkers in the capital city, Bismarck, would stay to bar close. Then, they’d all hop in their cars and drunk drive to the sister city across the river, Mandan, for an extra hour of fun, causing untold chaos in the process. The jump was allegedly to curb this. Sadly, that story apocryphal. In reality, it was just because it was economically favorable to be time-aligned with the state capital city. But I digress…

If you were, say, looking over historic records of events recorded in both Bismarck and Beulah, where records are always taken simultaneously, and your data happened to span back before this switchover, there would be an inexplicable point in time where after it the timestamps would match, but before it, they’d be offset. So, to encode that, Beulah gets its own unique timezone all to itself that indicates this historical switchover exists.

It also explains why there are three tiny timezones all right next to one another. Three counties participated in this switchover, and to make it happen, each one had to individually pass laws to enact it. These laws all took effect on slightly different dates. Thus, if we wish to capture the nuanced time shifts in all three counties, each county needs its own bespoke timezone.

IANA timezones aren’t just representations of all the time zones that currently exist. They are representations of every unique permutation of historic clock changes for every place on Earth. That’s fucking nuts! Knowing that, I went from being shocked that there are so many timezones to being shocked that the list of timezones is as short as it is!

There’s a new RFC in the pipeline that will address this.

It’s already been approved, just needs to slooowly crawl its way theough the final publication queue.

The only difference you seem to be highlighting here is that an AI like ChatGPT is only active when queried while an insect is “always on”. I find this to be an entirely irrelevant detail to the question of whether either one meets criteria of intelligence.

“Understanding” and “interpretation” are themselves nothing more than emergent properties of advanced pattern recognition.

I find it interesting that you bring up insects as your proof of how they differ from artificial intelligence. To me, they are among nature’s most demonstrably clockwork creatures. I find some of their rather predictable “decisions” to some kinds of stimuli to be evidence that they aren’t so different from an AI that responds “without thinking”.

The way you can tease out a response from ChatGPT by leading it by the nose with very specifically worded prompts, or put it on the spot to hallucinate facts that are untrue is, in my mind, no different than how so-called “intelligent” insects can be stopped in their tracks by a harmless line of Sharpie ink, or be made to death spiral with a faulty pheromone trail, or to thrust themselves into the electrified jaws of a bug zapper. In both cases their inner machinations are fundamentally reactionary and thus exploitable.

Stimulus in, action out. Just needs to pass through some wiring that maps the I/O. Whether that wiring is fleshy or metallic doesn’t matter. Any notion of the wiring “thinking” is merely anthropomorphism.

The “second round” of the game is always just, “flip your odds of winning if you swap”. That’s all it is.

Monty will always open the proper doors to ensure this happens every time. Did you pick the winning door in the first round? Monty will eliminate all other doors but leave one of the losers. Did you pick a losing door in the first round? Monty will eliminate all the other losers and only leave the winner. It’s always the opposite of what you picked. Therefore, if you swap, you will simply get the opposite odds of the first round.

100 doors to pick from, only 1 winner? 1/100 chance to win if you just picked at random and ended it there. Now Monty offers a swap. Without the swap, you have 99 different ways to lose this. But with the swap, all 99 of those ways become winners, because Monty will always swap the opposite with you.

I would never complain about it being served to me at a social gathering. But given the choice of most other canonical topping options, I would never order it myself.

At the time the first games were out, PMD felt like they were the only games in the Pokemon franchise that actually tried to build a world out of the lore that Game Freak made for its own monsters. Read the Pokedex entries in any of the first three generations. They’re fantastic, but they don’t seem to tie into the actual games themselves. A lot of them are strangely disconnected flavor text that hint at mannerisms, abilities, or feats that simply do not translate to what the mons are like in gameplay. The fine lads at Chunsoft were apparently the only ones who bothered to read that flavor text and think, “Hey, we can make something great with this.” And holy shit did they ever. Several times.

TreeSize has saved me a lot of bytes over the years. Performant and visually slick. I would prefer a FOSS utility, though. Apparently, reading other comments here, there isn’t an actively maintained one that isn’t garbage. Oh well.

Procmon has gotten me out of a couple binds. Task Manager can only do so much for you. I’ve always been dubious of people who deify Task Manager as some ultimate authority of the OS that kicks ass and takes no prisoners, as I’ve run into several problems it couldn’t solve for me. Procmon feels like the real version of that mythic Task Manager. The main thing it can do which Task Manager (to my knowledge) cannot do that I’ve needed several times is detect which running processes have a lock on a given file, so I can kill them.

KeePassXC is KeePass2, but not sinfully ugly. It’s FOSS and equally functional as the program it aims to supplant, but it’s also multiplatform (so I can use it on Linux without Mono!) and it looks like it actually has a design philosophy developed by someone who knows a thing or two about UX design. Also, it lets you auto bulk download favicons for all of your key entries. With KeePass2 I had to do that manually one by one. I was happy to do it then thinking the program was worth it, but now that I know there’s a better way I feel like an idiot for putting up with it for as long as I did.

Also, just a short rant: I am so glad Windows finally has a native OpenSSH implementation that ships with the OS. Because that means good fucking riddance to PuTTY and WinSPC. I appreciate them having been there to be our secure and stable options for SSH and FTP/SFTP clients on Windows over the years. But now that I can finally do those things in the terminal with standard cross-platform tools, I no longer have to use their ugly, clumsy GUIs, their stupid .ppk key format, or WinSCP’s cryptic command line args ever again, and I couldn’t be happier.

I fail to see the distinction between “making a logical decision without all the facts” and “make guesses based on how [you’ve been programmed]”. Literally what is the difference?

I’ll concede that human intelligence is several orders more powerful, can act upon a wider space of stimuli, and can do it at a fraction of the energy efficiency. That definitely sets it apart. But I disagree that it’s the only “true” form of intelligence.

Intelligence is the ability to accumulate new information (i.e. memorize patterns) and apply that information to respond to novel situations. That’s exactly what AI does. It is intelligence. Underwhelming intelligence, but nonetheless intelligence. The method of implementation, the input/output space, and the matter of degree are irrelevant.