dcminter

I guess it varies then. When I did it (probably 15 or 20 years ago mind) I unleashed a torrent of spam so voluminous that I had to write scripts to clean it up my inbox after I turned it off again.

Battery life. I love my Linux laptops, and I don't mind being selective to make sure the hardware's fully supported, but whatever the reason Mac battery life is second to none.

If you do this you immediately get thousands of emails a day from bots trying common first names etc.

Much better to maintain an explicit list of names you're currently allowing.

I have a trick for writing (I used to write tech books) where I allow myself to write one sentence of the current in-progress chapter instead of aiming for anything more. The activation energy for writing one sentence is so low that it's almost easier to do this than make excuses. Once you've written that first sentence... well, it wasn't unusual to sit down to write a sentence and write a couple of chapters instead.

I'm not saying I never found an excuse instead of writing ONE FEEBLE SENTENCE of the damn things, but tricking my stupid brain did work quite often.

Speak for yourself.

Hmm. Using Claude, it will tell me words to the effect of "this won't work, here's why, want me to try this instead?" That's a polite "no" in my book.

Such as Tradera in Sweden where I live (they don't try to make me install the app on Tradera at least).

If I'm buying random funkis furniture or computer bits and bobs I can probably use Tradera, and if I want fancy furniture or jewlery or something then there are coalitions of auction houses like Auctionet out there - but as soon as something gets even mildly obscure then there's nothing that has the reach and coverage of eBay.

Starting a new online auction site sounds like a terrific way to throw money away.

Brazil is one of the scariest films I've ever seen.

I got temporarily banned from the Sun Java Forums years and years ago because of something like this. I tried creating a few test accounts and it seemed to be the first name, not even the full name, that was the "match" ! I assume someone on the list had an alias of just "Dave" or "David" and whoever implemented the filter had just done the easiest thing possible.

Not really a life-altering inconvenience, and the other forum members got sufficiently uppity that they re-reviewed it and let me back in, but it was a good lesson in how big orgs have no innate common sense.

There's some alternate timeline where browsers kept competing on widgets and every website now looks like a native application.

I don't know if it would be better or worse.

Ah yes, I shall use that other auction site. Which was it again?

eBay stops me from typing in the thing I want to search for so they can try to persuade me to use the app that I have expressed zero interest in for a decade or so. Guys, I'm trying to press money into your thieving little hands - why are you trying to stop me?

And?

For personal stuff I have a separate physical machine on the network that Claude runs on in yolo mode and the worst it can do over there is wipe the machine. It doesn't have privileged access to anything else unless it starts trying to hack my network, which I suppose is theoretically possible with prompt injection attacks.

For work stuff in the work environment I don't risk it.

> I wish the command would be easier to write like --dsp

It amazes me they didn't make the short version --yolo ... but I would imagine the merit of the long name is that you can't claim you weren't warned!

> since functional programmers pride themselves on the elegance of their code while programmers using hybrid languages just want to get the code working

Says who?

Despite calling it baity in my other comment, I actually think that it's more word-play. In my reading the title means that this subject of the book was "intelligence through artifice", not necessarily anything to do with what we nowadays think of as the inevitable coupling between computing and intelligence that is artificial.

I'm sure the author of the piece was very aware of the topicality of "Artificial Intelligence" when choosing their title though!

Before clicking through to the article I honestly expected it to be about AI!

The AI title is veeeery tenuous/baity, but this is a fun read nonetheless. Upvoted.

Pretty much every job I've had has involved integrating with highly imperfect, changeable, and inaccurately implemented (and barely documented) third party APIs. That's where most of the work went and I don't see formal methods improving the situation any time soon.

It's not "gibberish", but it's got the stink of AI prose about it. The author's comments here do too.

Of course I might just be over-sensitised to certain turns of phrase and the author might be completely abstaining from bot commenting, but it has that overpowering flavour to it for me.

So to the author, if you are using AI to write your text, you might want to re-consider. Something superficially less polished might in fact be more appealing.

Speccy guy back in the day here, but these days I love Linux, and you know Linus cut his teeth on the QL, right?

I feel like storage has improved slightly since microdrives were state of the art too...

:) Me too, but it seemed like the people who knew would know and for the ones who didn't "grey" was going to be close enough...

It's so interesting that the intuitive meaning of this has changed - first meaning grey, then bright blue, and now... perhaps black, perhaps nothing? What does "a dead channel" mean to kids today?

I recently re-read the sprawl trilogy and thought Neuromancer stood up very well, but the others not so much.

I was issued an equivalent Latitude 7490 at a gig in 2019 and enjoyed using it (under Linux). It's robust and easily upgraded, but a little heavier than I would like. I replaced the battery a year or two ago.

I generally haven't had much trouble with second hand Dell and Thinkpad machines; perhaps buying second hand means that the real lemons are already ewaste? Though the XPS machines bought new were fine aside from the annoyingly brief battery life.

Currently using a Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 13 under Linux for work stuff and I like that (much lighter) so if I can get one second hand with enough memory I might choose that when/if the Dell eventually feels too slow.

They have it in one place and never ever use it anywhere else? Do you know why?

Ok, I don't know anyone at all who does that. Your friends are odd.

0. Developer

1. Dell Latitude 7490

2. As long as I can.

I think I've been on the Latutude for about 4 years now, but it's a second-hand device coming up on seven or eight years old. I generally don't need much oomph for the stuff I like to do at home (I don't game for example).

I had a series of XPS laptops, but the battery life in use was poor and they tended to need the battery replacing quite quickly (puffy batteries - possibly because they run quite hot).

Prior to that I'd been on second hand Thinkpads, with the X220s still kicking around somewhere in case the main device dies.

I reckon the current Dell has at least a couple more years in it for my purposes. It has 64Gb ram so until website bloat gets out of control I'm good I think.

I have a fairly fast mini-pc with oodles of ram on the network that I use as a sacrificial yolo machine for Claude, and an elderly desktop machine with a decent GPU for local running of LLMs. The latter is noisy and in practice it hasn't been turned on for months.

I hate Macs, but envy you the battery life and spiffy Arm CPU (yes, I know about Asahi, but until one can safely entirely wipe MacOS from the Mac I'm not interested).

Taking your puzzlement at face value...

> I don't quite understand why people have laptops at home if they always use it in the same place.

A lot of people wil be using it from the sofa or generally in a shared space where it's not convenient to have a permanent computer setup.

Those who usually use it in one place may want the flexibility of occasionally using it from the coffee shop or while on vacation.

Hilariously, no.

That would be the Monster Raving Loony party who will apparently also be standing in this by-election. Count Binface has ruled out a pact with them.

Yeah, for a lot of systems it really is more trouble than it's worth - I remember enjoying this article when it came out: https://www.enterpriseintegrationpatterns.com/ramblings/18_s...