forinti

I've been tasked with justifying the renewal of software I would never choose to begin with. It has occurred to me that I could easily use AI to make up the required text.

I guess AI is a new form of alienation and also a new light on the lunacy of bureaucracy.

The ones I know are completely brown.

They put their four front legs together, two by two, and sort of point at you.

I was told that they are aggressive because they are well fed because they feed on the sap from the bananas whereas most spiders are usually hungry.

In South America there's a very aggressive spider that lives on the bananas (genus Phoneutria). Spiders usually shy away from humans but these attack and have a very nasty venom. I wonder if the heat will take nasty critters to Europe.

Universe #23: keep solar systems far enough that they can't make war on each other.

If you found that movie interesting, check out The Second Mother (Que Horas ela Volta?) which is a Brazilian movie about a maid and her relationship with the middle class family that employs her.

Let's play Global Thermonuclear War.

If you pay minimum wage (about US$300) it would be about that per working day. Increasingly, cleaners are working per diem because they earn a lot more (about US$40 a day, but this varies a lot by region).

The downside is that they get no benefits.

Minimum wage is about US$300, which would make about US$220k total (you get about 13.3 salaries per year), plus fines and overtime. They'll have to pay social security too. It seems to me that the case doesn't include the labour part of the situation. That might be a separate case.

Its a common occurrence for families to take in poor girls to do house work in exchange for food and lodging. And with the insidious nature of Brazilian racism, they will pretend that she is part of the family. They might even take her on vacations (to work, of course). If you grow up with this mentality it might even be hard for you to see the injustice. Brazil abolished slavery in 1888, the last country in the Americas to do so, decades after its neighbours. The slaves never got compensation but their owners did.

There's a Portuguese saying "há mouro na costa" which is literally "there are moor at the coast" and means that there is something fishy going on.

It's an uphill battle to inform the public. Most people just don't understand and don't care to understand the issues until it actually hits them, such as with the farmers who bought JD.

That makes for a cool rot13: /a-z/n-za-m/

I spent hours typing 6502 assembly. It went a lot better when someone dictated: LDA, STA, BEQ, LDY, STY...

This reminds me of a T-shirt I once saw that read:

          perl -e '
     "$a="etbjxntqrdke";
  $a=~s/(.)/chr(ord($1)+1)/eg;
        print "$a\n;"'

It's cursing. Don't run it if it might offend you.

Upon seeing this, I decided to golf and came up with a shorter version:

  perl -e "print chr 1+ ord for split //,'etbjxntqrdke'"

I've gained a taste for a yt channel that shows depopulated towns across the US.

It seems to me that local governments must also have tons of properties to sell or give away. The real issue is that these are in places where people don't usually want to live.

I've been learning Russian by myself since the pandemic and along the way I've picked up bits and bobs about food, history, geography, music, and even electronics. Learning a language is not just about the language per se.

I've even realised a few things about my own language.

I had a little chat recently with a glaciologist and he told me about a student who had come from a very religious family. The guy had to learn all about the formation of Earth, etc, and decided to give up geology because it would put him at odds with his family and friends and he decided that they were more important.

So, you could say he rationally decided to keep his irrational beliefs.

Intel mobile chipsets for Core 2 Duo only supported 2 or 4GB. And not all the desktop chipsets supported 8 or 16GB. I have a laptop with 3GB: one of the slots only supports 1GB.

Does this mean that the government will compensate OpenAI for lost revenue?

My company recently hired a concierge. At first I thought it was unnecessary and just meant to give someone's friend a job.

But the guy is really good at it. He organises groups of people who show up; he knows everybody, so he can quickly point people to where they should go; and overall he just makes the reception a welcoming place.

It's a political problem, not a technical problem.

The same thing used to happen in Brazil. Machado de Assis is great for older audiences, but a bore for children and teenagers. Making them read his books probably did more harm than good.

I like this little thing: https://openwrt.org/toh/gl.inet/gl-usb150

You can use it as a repeater, so the whole family can just use the same network/password we use at home. And it is so small, you can run it from a power bank for hours.

Unfortunately, they are not sold anymore.

I started seeing LED displays on store fronts in the late 80s (the ones that scroll text horizontally).

This would have been quite the product then. TVs were expensive, but B&W TVs not so much.

It seems reckless and unnecessary even if the gamble were 100% a sure thing, which no gamble ever is.

Even if AI is a game changer, it doesn't mean that your business model will have a role in it.

The good bits will be sold off. Some of their products are very valuable, even if you don't like them.

It doesn't seem rational to me that such a big company wouldn't prefer to diversify.

I knew a bit of 6502 assembly, so I was happy just to have more RAM and more registers.

Looking back, the simplicity of the instruction set seems quaint next to the thousands of instructions we have today.

I'll just recognise that I'm old (and a bit grumpy): back in the day, if you didn't write minimally efficient code, it simply wouldn't run or it would be terribly slow.

Young devs have not been exposed to this and they can get away with writing inefficient code most of the time, sometimes all of the time.

And even if there is a RAM shortage, we are still in the Gigabyte age. So I don't think we will go back to cycle and byte counting.

I can't even get some devs to care if their query runs in 3s or 8ms.

That's just not enough motive to waste someone's time.

And, no offense intended, that car is not that interesting. I guess policing must be boring.