librarian42

Do you have a nose like an anteater or are you actually a cyclops? I don't think typical human's noses occupy a large space in the center of their vision.

ChatGPT has done that for me too, but as you note asking the question a slightly different way produced a positive response. I think they simply trained it to produce “I don’t know” as a response to certain patterns of input.

I asked chatGPT questions about some Open Source libraries, such as what interfaces to use for certain tasks. It recommended deprecated APIs and claimed that the preferred APIs didn’t support options they do (for example, it claimed pg_exec couldn’t perform parameter substitution in Pgtcl). Then I corrected it and it blithely spun 180 degrees, but of course it won’t remember. I’m sure Copilot does the same thing.

I can't even. Did they use the one that's basically Forth with a string stack (No, not Postscript, Forth with a string stack) or the one that's basically m4 (the higher level of the two sendmail scripting languages) implemented in Forth with a string stack?

I used BeOS. It had some great features, but it wasn't great the way NeXTStep was great. If it had been built on top of C++ 11 or later, instead of whatever C++9x they were using, maybe.

Technically that was an SQL injection attack. :)

Bitcoin's value is backed by people's belief in Bitcoin. Otherwise it wouldn't be worth any more than Dogecoin.

And calling the massive waste of resources involved in Bitcoin mining ethical is fucking hilarious. Congratulations, Libertaria has invented a new kind of evil.

Netflix chooses to use DRM. That's completely on them.

Earlier this year I downloaded a season of a TV show I wanted to catch up on, into Google Play on my tablet. A few weeks later I was on a plane, and finally had a chance to watch them. Google Play had blithely decided to save space (possibly prompted by the OS) and had removed my downloads.

If they weren't DRMed I would have just downloaded them into space I control and there would have been none of this "oh he's not interested" BS guessing.

I deal with this kind of bovine exhaust regularly.

So, hell, no, DRM has NOT IN ANY WAY been good for me. ANYTHING that makes DRM less viable is an absolute good. Period.

Flash and Silverlight were low friction. And both are deprecated or unavailable on a lot of players now.

Making DRM harder for the end user is the only effective push-back. It worked for music. It's working for e-Books. It would have worked for movies... if it wasn't for this.

> i want DRM to be a difficult and cumbersome stack to use

Exactly. Even flash plugins are too easy, really, so long as flash is ubiquitous. NOW would be the time to hit it, as flash is less common (almost completely absent on mobile) and silverlight is deprecated.

Imagine if Apple and Microsoft and Real had agreed on an easy and ubiquitous plugin framework for music DRM.

We would still be dealing with near-universal DRM for music today.

Unnecessary dependencies are a bug. I've seen people pull in half a dozen nested libraries just to avoid writing ten lines of code. Sometimes re-inventing the wheel is the right thing to do.

Simplify the interface. Don't combine unrelated functionality in a single library.