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kmoser

My story of getting into a Microsoft event: in late 2000, Microsoft was rebranding MSN with the butterfly logo and they paid groups of inline skaters in NYC to dress up in custom purple velour body suits with wings to skate around Manhattan and generate buzz (heh) about the new MSN.

Well, there happened to be a computer show at the Javits Center so we skated there, convinced a security guard we were with Microsoft (hey, eight skaters in velour MSN body suits must be with Microsoft, right?), and skated onto the show floor. About fifteen minutes later security figured out we weren't part of the show and kicked us out. (We weren't supposed to keep the butterfly outfits but some people did. I didn't keep mine, but I do have photos that prove it really happened.)

You can have a silent conversation with someone else wearing the device? This does not bode well for casinos.
Re:WTF Ubuntu? on Monday November 02, 2026 @01:18PM (#50341131)
That may be part of it but my guess is that since patients tend not to proactively mention depression and loneliness to their doctor, the doctor's office wants to know in advance whether they should be referring you to a mental health specialist.
Re:WTF Ubuntu? on Monday November 02, 2026 @10:53AM (#50338575)
In the US, my experience is that it's more difficult than ever to get an appointment with a doctor.
Re:OccupySaaS on Sunday November 01, 2026 @11:55PM (#50333294)
No, the FAQ describes why they use AI to write the software. It's just a logical extension that they would also use it to build the website.
Re:The Mythical Man-Month in the Age of AI on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @02:04AM (#50269787)
> But someone nudged me: can't you have a look at it?

> My reply: "Haha sorry no! My experience is that adding more people will not solve this problem any quicker".

That seems like snark, bordering on pedantry, and makes one come across as an ass. If they know the answer, or can deduce it faster than any of the others, then it will definitely solve the problem quicker. Much depends on the qualifications and experience of those currently trying to solve the problem.

Re:Antique Fonts Collection – Restored 19th Century Typefaces on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @01:57AM (#50269763)
> Will you win if you try?

Pretty sure that depends on the court, and isn't something you can determine in advance.

Re:Recreational Programming on Friday October 16, 2026 @02:03AM (#50114668)
I'm on Firefox/Windows and see no scroll bars.
Re:Felix Rieseberg Homepage on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @02:42AM (#50083347)
The stark landscape and accented voiceover seem to be inspired by the documentary Happy People: A Year in the Taiga by Werner Herzog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psnY17CImaQ
Re:Recreational Programming on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @12:55AM (#50082555)
Navigation was easy. What I didn't like was having no idea where I was and how much farther there was to go. It was like the world's least intuitive HyperCard stack.
Re:Akhetonics Photonic Computing: 1,000x Faster CPUs on Sunday October 11, 2026 @04:37PM (#50047585)
Do you mean as opposed to operating in an analog fashion? My guess is because keeping it digital means it is as close a possible to a drop-in replacement for today's electronic digital computers, including all the firmware, OS, and software that has already been written for them.
Re:I Could've Accessed 17T Microsoft Records on Thursday October 01, 2026 @12:27AM (#49917737)
Even more impressive to me than finding the bug is the clear way the article was written. Even if they used AI to write it (which I don't think they did), it reveals an incredible maturity and ability to communicate a complex topic.
Re:Minitel on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @02:00PM (#49912256)
There are several projects to resurrect the Minitel, both at the hardware and service level. Here are two:

https://cq94.medium.com/get-your-minitels-back-the-computel-... https://hackaday.com/2023/06/19/bringing-back-the-minitel/

Re:The US state replacing power plants with home batteries on Tuesday September 29, 2026 @10:40PM (#49903735)
Except they're not replacing power plants at all, they're adding batteries to the grid to store and distribute power. After all, something has to charge the batteries.
Re:Walking Men on Tuesday September 29, 2026 @03:43PM (#49899248)
Interestingly, Saragossa seems to be wearing a dress (jodhpurs? breeches?).
Re:Coding Is Not Solved on Monday September 28, 2026 @10:57PM (#49887527)
I don't know if we're there yet, but I have no doubt that LLMs will increasingly crank out better and better code, along with better and better logs, fuzzers, unit tests, and analyzers that, taken together, will maybe--just maybe--produce more solid code per dollar than working with human engineers.

What I'm not convinced of, and what I fear most, is the lack of accountability. When something does go wrong, who will take responsibility? I don't mean who will be tasked with fixing it; I mean who will stand up and say, "yeah, that was me, I screwed up, lesson learned, I will do better next time?" Who will then look into the code for similar issues, to find them before they wreak more havoc? Who will prioritize the different pieces of the giant puzzle in a way that makes it work better for humans, not just machines producing a sterile end result?

This trend concerns me because I see an increasing lack of ownership and a disconnect between what are ultimately human processes at either side of the computation equation: a human being (e.g. customer) trying to accomplish a goal that affects another human (e.g. business owner).

As an analogy, I'm reminded of an aspect of Japan that is in stark contrast to the US: people in Japan take deep responsibility for that which is assigned to them, especially things that aren't necessarily someone's official responsibility. Every public place is immaculately attended to. Not so much in the US, and it's not for lack of budget; anybody with five minutes to spare can sweep up the cigarette butts; they just don't care to.

So sure, your LLM steam engines may be faster and more powerful than John Henry the developer, but what happens when something goes wrong? How do I know the LLMs aren't just spitting out logs and test results that they think will please us? At a certain point, you have to dig into the code, otherwise you're no better than a CSR who is reading from a script and pretending to give a damn.

Re:Owed a billion dollars in Nvidia stock on Monday September 28, 2026 @02:55AM (#49874484)
Yep, that was it. Our department (Humanware) was quite forward-thinking, and an anomaly in an otherwise conservative institution. Unfortunately we never ended up using VR in any of our products! They also brought in Edward Tufte, whose show-and-tell included his personal copy of what was likely Sir Henry Billingsley's 1570 English translation of Euclid's Elements.
Re:Owed a billion dollars in Nvidia stock on Sunday September 27, 2026 @11:58PM (#49873461)
In 1989 I was consulting for a large company in NYC that hired you to give our small UI/UX team a demo of your VR system. I still remember strapping on the headset and looking around the virtual world. I might even have your business card somewhere!
Re:Real-time feedback: My closing move in every interview on Sunday September 27, 2026 @10:15PM (#49872790)
It sure is, if that's what I'm trying to find out. You might also think it would be crazy to base a hiring decision on whether the candidate was rude to their airport shuttle bus driver, but that strategy famously worked out well for Zappos: https://www.businessinsider.com/tony-hsieh-zappos-hiring-str...
Re:Real-time feedback: My closing move in every interview on Sunday September 27, 2026 @02:37AM (#49863969)
The point of questions like that isn't necessarily to ascertain the actual answer; it can be used to engage the interviewee in conversation to see how they think and communicate, or how they react to minor curveballs being thrown at them.
Re:Surprise, Meta's latest AI gimmick is just underpaid humans on Wednesday September 23, 2026 @11:43PM (#49825994)
They just reinvented Fiverr.
Re:Gemini 3.8 text-to-speech says hello on Wednesday September 23, 2026 @01:19PM (#49819425)
Does it detect synthesized consent recordings?
Re:Gemini 3.8 text-to-speech says hello on Wednesday September 23, 2026 @01:17PM (#49819404)
Google granted themselves the authority be evil back in 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil
Re:I don't want the details on Wednesday September 23, 2026 @09:39AM (#49816002)
Not wanting to know the details is a red flag. Sometimes the process of expressing the details can reveal things that were unknown by one or both parties, leading to improved processes. The only acceptable exception would be "Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up."
Re:Jev-Leftpad on Monday September 21, 2026 @11:14AM (#49788372)
This comes just in time. My app has been using Amazon Mechanical Turk for left-pad queries, and that service is shutting down in less than two weeks.
Re:AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible on Saturday September 19, 2026 @10:01AM (#49766673)
> a 10 years old kid and give him a PC with Microsoft Paint

You'd run afoul of child labor protestors. I'd just prompt the AI to generate a poster in the style of a 10-year-old with Microsoft Paint.

My understanding is that wear-leveling on SSDs leaves forensic traces which allows hidden volumes to be detected.
That's the theoretical worst that should happen. The theoretical worst that could happen is far worse than that.
Sometimes people get searched randomly, and occasionally it correlates to their skin color.
Re:When LLM judges agree, should we believe them? on Monday September 14, 2026 @11:35PM (#49707407)
By design, even the same LLM, when asked the same question multiple times, will almost never hallucinate in the same way. By that (flawed) logic, you could have the same LLM check itself.

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