qubex

The output of all AI tools is now stenographically marked whether they carry a visual watermark or not.

I’m uncomfortable with having something in common with Switzerland (Northern Italian, grew up about thirty kilometres south of the border) but here we are.

#whatcouldpossiblygowrong

Siemens Nixendorf Scenic Mobile 300, 133 MHz Pentium (before we had to number them), 16 MB of RAM, 800×600 passive matrix LCD, released 1997. I caused a major scandal at my high school since nobody on the staff had ever contemplated the scenario whereby a student turned up with a computer of their own. I dual booted Windows NT 4.0 and Linux (2.2 kernel I think).

Oh, the simple things in life!

Isn’t that the Wave Collapse Algorithm in a nutshell?

Of course I remember IrDA.

In my native Italy, ‘Andrea’ is a boy’s name.

I’m sticking with my 2010 Toshiba REGZA until it dies. 1080p is fine for me.

Look at how many people add keyboards and trackpads to their tablets. You’re not an outlier any more than I am. I’d never want to smudge my screen with fingerprints, and I’d never want to perform the profoundly counterintuitive contortions necessary to touch and drag on a quasi-vertical surface a keyboard’s breadth away from you.

I’m in the exact same predicament: I bought an M2 Air upon release in 2022, chose a BTO with 16 GB of RAM, the top-bin processor, and it still runs absolutely 100% perfectly. Unlike the OP, I’m doing very OK with storage, so I don’t even have that excuse.

The machine is basically flawless and entirely suitable for everything I throw at it (and throw stuff at it I do: when I’m not web-browsing or playing YouTube videos I’m using Wolfram Mathematica, which is one heck of a resource hog) and it’s absolutely utterly fine and blasé about the whole thing.

As things are, I can see myself keeping it for a decade. There was a time when I used to change Apple laptops on a yearly basis (starting with PowerBook G4s in the early/mid 2000s and up until the mid 2010s, when I migrated most of my mobile computing to iPads… which lasted for about a decade until I got this thing).

I first encountered NT 4.0 at age fifteen in 1996 and realised what a huge jump it was compared to the dOS/Windows 3.x/Windows 9x lineage. I went on to use it for the rest of the nineties and I was a beta tester for NT 5.0 (which later became Windows 2000). I jumped ship in 2003 and switched to MacOS X before XP SP2 was released. I feel a strange sense of familiarity but also alienation whenever I have to use a Windows machine nowadays.

[citation needed]

A good-faith judgement was made within a broader context that was unknown to him. What are we expected to demand, hanging on electrified barbed wire?? He acted in good faith, he’s not the architect of a global cataclysm.

No. He is not solely responsible. A sequence of bugs introduced by developers created a hole. Information about how to deal with this calamity was not privy to him. He is not “solely responsible”. He merely reacted (publicly) to information that he was not beholden to maintain secret about things others had done inadvertently in the past. He’s not alone. He does not bear that “sole responsibility”. He acted within the UK’s freedom of speech doctrine (IANAL). He need not place this burden upon himself.

I’ve been downvoted to oblivion already anyway so I’ll come out of the closet and say it plainly: I still use C. I’m perfect happy with C and I’m under the illusion that I know how to use it without accidentally undermining a whole system. That is because I’m disciplined.

Oh and I still use K&R style braces, because they make sense to me and thankfully whitespace is worth than a semicolon. Burn me at the stake. I’m willing to be a fossil fuel.

Oh and I’m from Bristol. We might have more in common than you’d expect.

You did as good as you could with the information available to you. You don’t need to “take full responsibility”.

It is honourable but it is also linguistic abuse that drains the phrase of its full semantic meaning. “Take full responsibility” must remain a stricture of the highest regard. He is not fully responsible nor should he be held to be nor should we demand that he be and most importantly we must not dilute that phrase of its full semantic import, or else we shall have to come up with another one once this one is devalued to mean essentially nothing beyond “I fucked up in good faith and with a lack of information that was concealed for me for decisions taken by others in good faith way upstream of myself”.

What does “I take full responsibility” mean if not (amongst other things) “I accept it is my duty to pay reparations”? As you yourself rephrase it “he could have said ‘I blame only myself for this mistake, nothing else has to change’”. That would have been sufficient and beyond necessary. “I accept full responsibility” is corporate-speak empty hyperbole, and it has to end. Is he any more responsible than those who introduced the hole in the first place? No. Is he responsible for not adhering to agreements he was not privy to? No. He cannot “take full responsibility” because that is an utterly unreasonable burden to place upon him, a lone well-meaning actor who unbeknownst to him took a misstep. We need to discount this corporate-speak linguistic hyperbole.

“Nobody else’s fault but mine” is a perfectly good way of asserting “nobody else’s fault but mine”; “I take full responsibility” is something else entirely and the two are not synonymous. Hyperbole needs to be radically discounted.

Relax. You did no wrong. You reacted to the information that was ‘local’ to you. I am merely objecting (hopefully humorously) to the phrase “take full responsibility “: it is uncalled-for, unnecessary, and vacuous. Try to have a good Thursday. Tuesday was not your fault.

Finally they’ll stop scrolling HTML or Java sample code on screen.

To be fair, it was one hell of a corpse.

What does “take full responsibility” mean in the present context? Are you forfeiting all your assets and pledging the next twenty generations of your descendants into peonage?

(For clarity, I’m being facetious, but it’s a really meaningless and empty phrase to commit to the written record.)

There’s an xkcd for this: https://xkcd.com/221/

Nothing: I couldn’t care less about it.

Ah.

So you don’t understand the concept of sovereignty then.

That is an amazingly flawed idea. By that reasoning, only a neutral budget is acceptable, and a positive debt surplus a boon. Unfortunately, the opposite is empirically true: the only places running total budget surpluses tend to be undemocratic shitholes because they need to promise nothing and do not rely upon the consent of the governed to loan them savings and pay them taxes.

That is quite beside the point that sovereign debt is considered one of the safest places to store savings and by diminishing the stockpile of debt with a budget in surplus one is diminishing the economy’s ability to save at a low risk level.

Remember it needs to get criminalised everywhere for it to stop happening.

I think I’m going to have a crack at with with Claude and REA this weekend, if nothing else comes up.

I’m grandfathered-in (account created in 2013 or something like that) but I voted their app down to one star on the Apple App Store and stated they’re committing highway robbery.