rm445

Tried and failed in my thirties, succeeding much better in my forties. I doubt you've lost neuroplasticity.

I feel that DHTML Lemmings deserves a mention - an implementation of Lemmings in Javascript in 2003 or 2004. At the time I saw it, my understanding of websites was basic HTML - I had no idea web technologies could be so powerful.

Here it is online, not sure if this is the original site. https://pccc.com/downloads/junk/cool/lemmings/index.html

So... someone has been posting cryptic adverts annually from 1981 through 2026, which together constitute logic puzzles and obscure references.

The main thing I think is quite cool, besides the sheer persistence, is that anyone noticed and there's a community following this. Everyone has stuff going on in their lives, this seems so obscure that you'd almost expect people to shrug and ignore.

I used Lotus Notes until 2022, in a British blue-chip company. Stopped because I left that company - I am almost certain they're still using it, because they weren't close to migrating off the last few use cases.

It was universally hated because it felt so clunky and old-fashioned, but it was being used for ERP-type applications with a lot of business process logic that had developed over time. I found it interesting that you could click through the interface and find a lot of capabilities that were vestigial, still present but unused because they were made obsolete by web apps.

I just searched and I see that it was rebranded HCL Notes in 2019. I don't remember that branding at all. It seems likely we were stuck on an obsolete, non-rebranded version, deployed on local servers.

I worked for a company whose factory really was just a room - the company was a machine-builder, a B2B manufacturer of custom production equipment, but with very little investment in special-purpose machinery for its facilities or even machine tools, just an attitude that the company is the people and we can do or buy anything that our customers need.

In some ways that attitude seemed admirable, but ultimately it didn't help the company win or keep consistent business. You'd have gaggles of smart people building custom prototypes but nothing scaled up. The customers couldn't see the vision of scaling their production there, or just saw that they could get better pricing going to factory which had already invested in the right special-purpose machinery.

That's what a factory is to me - ideally reconfigurable, but a place with capital investment for production. It's good to show kids what's behind the curtain but don't get it mixed up with a prototype shop.

The EU has mildly outperformed the UK in overall economic growth by perhaps 1 percentage point over the last 5-6 years, i.e. ~7% vs ~6%. While of course both massively underperformed the USA.

It's hard to avoid concluding that the actual effects of Brexit have been smaller than this kind of analysis suggests, and while we squabble about such things our countries are missing opportunity after opportunity.

So... It's an interpreter (together with a virtual filesystem and some utilities) packaged into a program with a graphical display window? Still good for lots of interesting uses, I suppose, but surprising. Since it's introduced as a "virtual computer", I thought underneath the hood it would be emulating a machine. Then people, if they wanted, could tinker a level deeper than the scripting language, write an assembler etc.

You can run all the Office apps in a browser, and update documents that are on SharePoint live in collaboration with someone else. Maybe that's not earth-shattering, but it's quite a big change from huge separate Office legacy apps. It must have been a big effort decreed from the top. Given Microsoft leadership is obsessed with AI, you'd think they'd be pushing hard.

This is a fascinating post but I don't believe it reflects (most) human memory development, which has a pronounced forgetting phase called 'childhood amnesia'. When your kid starts to talk, it's startling what a two-year-old can remember and can tell you about. And it's kinda heartbreaking when they're 4-5 and you realise that those early memories have faded.

Those applications seem pretty weak. In a similar timeframe I seem to recall possessing a standalone dictionary/crossword solver device, and a five-language translator/dictionary. Both of which were much more compact and presumably had small, solid-state data in ROM chips. The monochrome, text-first Data Discman software looks similar to the output of those basic devices.

I suspect the problem with the Data Discman was weak multimedia capabilities, compared to the what can fit on a CD-ROM, in either its API or what the hardware could push. If the software of the Data Discman had been more like Microsoft Encarta, it might have wowed people.

People are reacting negatively to the ads, but there's a bigger point. This is bearish as heck for AGI. If OpenAI were recursively improving their general-computer-using agent, who was going to be superhuman at every job, they wouldn't need to be messing around with things like this.

ChatGPT is a useful product, which they're monetising in a well-travelled internet company way. The bad news is you're going to have ads in your ChatGPT in 2030. The good news is you're still going to have a job in 2030.

I have all my photos back to my first digital camera in 2004. (Plus digital photos a few years further back - I used to use a service that developed and printed your film rolls and also delivered files on CD-ROM). The strategy of keep copying files to newer hardware remains undefeated.

Still, there are big gaps due to prevailing photo-taking habits. Unless you were seriously into photography, people took way fewer photos. Lots of posed pics of family and friends on special occasions, fewer of everyday life. I have like 2 pictures of my undergraduate projects.

I've read this book. It's definitely one of the more interesting and readable maths texts out there. I wasn't exactly sure I'd use the methods. Working as a mechanical engineer I probably go straight to numerical methods, or approximate things even more crudely and approximately than a mathematician's 'rough' work. Though "replace a complicated function with a rectangle" definitely resonated. Overall the impression was that it was full of great techniques for mathematicians and scientists puzzling out every bit of meaning they can from a situation whose true features aren't yet known.

Try a gaming store that offers a guarantee? I don't know where you are, but here in the UK, second-hand stores such as Cash Converters are full of PS2s, fat and slim. Dedicated second-hand entertainment stores like CEX will test consoles before buying them off people, and claim to offer a several-months guarantee.

I think the claim is that plugging in the USB device is enough. If people needed to try running an executable from the device, some devices would still be compromised, but with lower frequency. I don't know exactly what happens. Automatically-triggered 'driver' install that is actually malware? Presenting as a keyboard and typing commands? Low-level cracks in the OS USB stack?

It feels to me more like OSes ought to be more secure. But USB devices are extremely convenient.

The strength of feeling some English lovers of history have for the Anglo-Saxon kings slightly mystifies me. Athelstan created a unified English kingdom. Briefly, till he died and it un-unified. England was fully conquered by a Danish king later (Cnut). A couple of the kings, Aethelred the Unready and Edward the Confessor, were such colossal wet blankets that you get the impression of a people just crying out to be conquered. I can see why so much of the popular conception of English history basically starts with the Norman Conquest.

I am a Durham graduate, still somewhat involved with the university via some voluntary roles, and a bit of a 'booster' in the sense that I'll sing its praises to anyone. I also have a postgrad degree from Cambridge and did a little teaching while there. So, I'm quite familiar, and while I'm happy to see Durham get some love, this is bunk.

There is a gulf in undergraduate teaching between Oxbridge and the pack. The supervision system guarantees all Oxbridge students weekly, small-group tutorials, organised and paid for by the colleges, which retain much more academic involvement than other collegiate universities like Durham and York (whose colleges are mainly residences with pastoral care and sports teams). If you go to Oxbridge as an undergrad, you'll be pushed hard and closely supported.

The second gulf is of course the selection effect of every bright child in the UK having Oxford or Cambridge as their first university pick. No-one from an older generation would advise any teenager to do otherwise. (Incidentally, I'm acutely aware that Durham first, then Cambridge is lower social status than vice versa. Because I didn't get in at 17). Everyone knows about this, and we could debate how reputations change, but I suspect my point above about the supervisions system for undergraduate teaching is less well-known.

I could also mention the gulf in wealth between universities (which pays for those supervisions, book grants etc), in age (Oxbridge actively lobbied against new universities in England for hundreds of years), which has a consequence for historic buildings, famous names and prizes, and so on. It all creates an almost unbreakable flywheel of reputational lead for Oxbridge that would take generations to overturn.

Might rather see it the other way around - Nvidia getting license to create products with x86(_64) CPUs integrated in the silicon. Nvidia are the big boy in this transaction and they'll get what they want out of it. But I can see the attraction for Intel.

The biggest bottlenecks are hardware design and software design. Materials science to an extent, particularly battery materials, but we could build robots with currently-available materials and power density if only we knew how to make them work usefully enough.

I'm not against the concept and I agree the manufacturing can be scaled. There just isn't a product yet.

Fair enough, I'm not able to evaluate counterfactuals in American maritime law. But on the roulette analogy, I reckon the everything-bagel approach gives you a healthy edge against the house and is well worth betting against.

> It's a requirement that vessels which operate between US ports must be made in the US, crewed by the US, and flagged to the US.

The everything-bagel approach. One of those requirements incentivises US shipbuilding, the other two incentivise other things. Seems like the net effect was less US shipbuilding and a smaller US-flagged fleet. Given those effects, it doesn't seem likely to have increased the number of US merchant seamen either.

> If any bullets were found and if the gun was shown to be a ballistic "match," the article neglected to mention it.

Good point - maybe I read too much into "The search turned up what police say is the murder weapon".

On the principle, I'm contending the tree wasn't poisoned. However they got the guy's name, whether it came out of some high-tech black box, or a detective remembered the guy from somewhere, or they, I don't know, employed a clairvoyant and conducted a seance, once they've looked at the guy's socials and the CCTV and seen it's the same dude, there's no poison.

They had a bunch of CCTV and no name. The AI gave them a few names, they looked at its report which had photos from the guy's social media and were like 'yes that's him', and then got a warrant to go to his house and found the gun.

Perhaps there's some important principle of rights that's eluding me. But it seems like the actual murderer was seen on CCTV and found with the murder weapon, and claiming AI (used as a search tool) as an illegitimate cause for the warrant is a ploy by the defence. Doing their job, sure, but it doesn't seem like natural justice or any broader rights would be served by letting this guy off.

It would be different, the Prosecutor's Fallacy, if the AI->name link was used to justify guilt, but instead the standard of human facial recognition used for getting other warrants from CCTV can be used.

Embarrassment at discussions of bugs from 2007 that are still not fixed.

(For clarification, I doubt that is really the (main) reason, but longstanding bugs in CAD systems are definitely a thing, and I guarantee there are bugs that old in Inventor (and its main competitor Solidworks), and probably older still ones in AutoCAD).

Once you give up sleep tracking as a feature, it doesn't matter too much as people can charge their watch nightly.

I'm very much on the other side of that decision - I find sleep tracking to be a killer feature, but you can see how Apple got away with it.

It's a Steve Yegge article. His writing is enjoyable, but it's a miracle he wrote an article short enough not to skim. He's excitable and verbose.

Although he's talking up his product, it's an interesting premise. The idea is that cooking relevant context and parts from a codebase down into an LLM's context window, is a useful product for coding assistants.

It's interesting that the author is so disparaging of ChatGPT, when he himself had misremembered the title of the story as containing 'Michaelmas' and the importance of the goblins. What are these but hallucinations?

Obviously, it's no good that tools are offering useless results and making searches harder. There's also how you use the tools - asking GPT to one-shot find something that may not have been in the training data is a risk of hallucination that's easy to be aware about, while using AI to assist a web and archive search might have produced the same end result as what happened, a smart librarian kindly doing some searching.

Probably more fundamental breakthroughs are needed in how AIs 'know' stuff. But the gap between how humans and machines produce obscure half-remembered knowledge doesn't seem that big.

> You all know the Dock, it’s been at the bottom of your Mac screen for what feels like forever (if you keep it in the correct location, anyway).

On a website with huge margins at the sides. I think the OSX Dock is a pretty good thing, but it makes so much more sense to keep it on the side of the screen and preserve vertical pixels. Unlike (some versions of) the Windows Taskbar, the icons are all square with no text, so you're not even sacrificing readability.

I'm curious whether the whole tree of life being related plays some part in cross-species adoption (and even animal behaviour in general???).

In the sense that genes don't 'want' anything, but selection creates a pressure towards overall adaptation and survival... a lion shares a lot of genes with a leopard. Is it pro-genetic-survival in some very broad sense for a lioness to care for a baby leopard? I guess not, if adults of those species compete to the death... but many species don't seem to do a lot of murdering, beyond predation for food. Animals sometimes seem quite incurious about other activity close to them, except when they need to eat. Could there be some small selection pressure towards live-and-let-other-DNA-live?

When living in university halls of residence, I could identify each of the thirteen residents of my block by their footfall along the corridor outside my room. Training was entirely subconscious. Validation was easy, because people would often walk along a bit before greeting someone or talking to themselves.

There are all kinds of reasons someone might change their footsteps based on health or what they're carrying, but most of the time people probably walk in their own characteristic way. It's a shame that the panopticon is always creeping in on us, but in this modern world, it's easy to imagine footsteps being used for security, to flag someone for review that they may not be who they are presenting as being.