Soooooo… which is going to ultimately turn out to be more effective way of detecting guns: AI systems, or dowsing? Both are gonna suck, be wholly inadequate for the purpose, and be giant wastes of public money - but obviously, but I’ve gonna admit, AI at least as mild possibility of being better than random chance. In optimal conditions. Maybe.

(You may be thinking “pfffft, surely people wouldn’t be stupid enough use dowsing rods to detect weapons, that’s just so clearly stupid”, but they did, and this “solution” was sold to them by slick conmen. …Sounds familiarrrr???)

Part of me wants to go “well you’re on a public venue, what the hell did you expect?”

But anyone wearing Zuck Glasses should be shot at from the orbit from the EU Anti-Douchebaggotry Satellite, or something. That’s a special exception to public photography laws that I approve of!

Hey. Hey hey hey HEY.

That’s not fair to us.

Random Linux nerds who were bullied. BULLIED, I say. When we coded our personal sites on Netscape on Linux (which was painful enough when Netscape 4 had a hazy understanding of CSS1/2 already) and the site had some random glitches on IE from time when we couldn’t ensure IE compatibility.

This “IE6” shit needs to stay buried, OK? This is “history that must never repeat” shit, OK? OK. Good.

BONUS JOKE:

There was a whole range of jokes dedicated to what happens when you shoot yourself on foot with your favourite programming language.

My favourite was this:

“You shoot yourself in the foot with JavaScript.
If using Netscape, your arm falls off.
If using MSIE, your head explodes.”

“Congratulations, you won million dollars! But first, we’ll, of course, have to deduct the cost of the AI credits you used in this challenge…”

For those wondering about a serious answer, TC was Transfer Control (in most modern ISAs it’s called JMP/JUMP) and TCF was Transfer Control to a Subroutine (equivalent to JSR/CALL).

GOTOPOOH was actually jargon for Program 00 (Hex), which was (I think?) the AGC’s normal idle routine.

BURNBABY was an alias for BURN_BABY_BURN which was the lunar descent burn sequence. Or something. I wouldn’t have named it that.

I don’t think Philips makes televisions or other consumer electronics any more, so I assume it’s been ported on smart light bulbs or medical equipment.

SCART is the most glorious analog video connector ever devised. No one can convince me otherwise. When I was a kid, it really put this idea in my head that we can actually do some pretty damn neat shit here in Europe. 🇪🇺

My only interaction with DisplayPort was this:

[bought a new monitor]
Oooh, this one has two HDMI inputs and a DisplayPort input. I’ll probably just need the HDMI inputs, but whatever.

[got my late father’s PC and decided to install Debian on it]
So wait, this doesn’t do HDMI, it just has VGA output. The only VGA monitor I have at hand kinda sucks. Oh, wait, what the heck is that? Is that a DisplayPort? Where did I put the cable?

(Yeah, the PC works great, only problem is that it defaults to VGA output and will only switch to DP after several seconds, which means I never see the rad GRUB screen. So far, mostly used this PC to rip my CD collection to FLAC, because it has a DVD drive.)

Or just use MIME (e.g. =20). Guaranteed to make someone say “okay, how the hell did that happen?”

(It’s also trendy because badly cleaned up MIME garbage is in the Epstein files!)

I can honestly say I’ve never been impressed enough to utter “ccooooc wwow”

Me: “The Final Shape, huh? Is this going to be the final expansion? I’m several DLCs behind.”

Bungie: “We’ve got another one planned. And a Star Wars crossover too.”

Me: “Oh fuck off now. Peace out.”

Many seemingly invincible businesses empires have collapsed on some beautiful ordinary day when people just said “you know, we can’t pay for this, this is not the price we can pay - we would want to keep doing this, but the price clearly outweighs any benefits to us”.

…Nnnot that I want to defend the Soviet Union, but their propaganda poster artists did stuff just like this, except they didn’t put absolutely cursed piping things in the illustrations, and this despite the fact the artists were probably hella drunk or something.

Is this really a good time for the US to potentially violate the Treaty of Tripoli and risk the rise of piracy against US vessels in the Mediterranean / Middle East region?

Veritable answer? Indubitably!

Yup, it was fully known as IBM PS/2, for “Personal System 2”. IBM wasn’t happy about how the original PC system got cloned to hell and back, so they designed a more proprietary and patentable system. Suffice to say it was a massive failure, what with it being incompatible with basically all of third party hardware. But the keyboard and mouse ports were widely regarded as a good idea! (and probably not as patentable)

Maybe I was unclear: I need to write alt-texts for images. I currently use a web service for generating those. Drag a JPEG in, it spits out a text string. Yeah, I know, I could just open every image in a giant big viewer and type what I see, but having AI assisting it takes maybe 15 minutes out of the workflow, total. Even with the mistakes it makes. And it makes a lot.

The best argument for asking people to use AI in moderation or quit it altogether is to just ask them to use AI for stuff and monitor how much of the stuff it gets right. (You know how the usual excuse goes - “Oh, don’t worry, we’re just using it as a tool”? Well use it like a tool then. Regular apps screw things up all the time, why is this one special? You have to babysit it.)

I use LLMs for image captioning, and it gets stuff right, I dunno, 75% of time. It’s genuinely handy in that I keep tossing it images that I have just thumbnails to work off of in the normal workflow and it can see stuff I forgot of because I’m a scatterbrain like that. But it can’t understand context, so I have to edit the captions anyway. And when it cocks up, it cocks up big time.

It goes WAY back.

The Apollo Guidance Computer software had a routine called KISSING. …about LM-CM docking, of course.

You saw the opening scene of Apollo 13 and thought only the astronauts used horny references in regards to the docking? Think again! So did the programmers.