waltbosz

I remember the first Harry Potter DVD had its special features hidden in a sort of maze game that presumably used the DVD menu system. It was an interesting idea, but I found it too difficult to navigate/play. One part I remember was you had to tap the bricks outside The Leaky Cauldron in a special order to enter Diagon Alley and then what happened I don't recall.

I also had this idea for a home work out DVD that would give you different "random" workouts based on the timing of when you clicked menu options. There would be predefined playlists of different workout routines. Each video segment in the list would be a set of one kind of exercise. And the playlists would contain different collections of sets. I wonder if I could have made it work, I think DVD technology would support it.

Great use of polyhaptic notifications.

Sometime in the past 6 months, I asked ChatGPT to write stories in the style of a Ramona Quimby book. It does pretty well imitating the style. It writes from the perspective of a child, vocabulary, tone, and pacing are all similar.

It's never wonderful prose though. It's missing that je ne sais quoi.

There is also a very nice musical based on the Frog and Toad books. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Year_with_Frog_and_Toad

My wife runs the Facebook page for our community pool. It's a really nature oriented community, and as a April Fools joke, she posted something like "Announcing our new landscaping: we cut down all the pesky sun blocking trees, and replaced the grass with beautiful AstroTurf."

A few weeks later she searched for the pool on Google, and the AI review has taken the post seriously and mentioned that our pool features beautiful AstroTurf landscaping.

IIRC, the AI review repaired itself a few weeks later.

I'm skeptical of Samsung after having two LCD monitors dies at approximately the same usage hours. I think they were victims of the 2000s capacitor plague.

My house came with Samsung front load washer and drier. They're not wonderful but they're still running for the 6 years I've lived here. I had to replace the drier drum after the rollers deteriorated and gouged out holes in the drum. Then I had to replace the rollers again after a year because I bought cheap rollers :(

What's the temporary license printed on? Standard paper?

My licenses have always been printed on a plastic card, but I remember seeing older licenses that were basically laminated photo paper.

If we lose ours, they reprint it with the same expiration date as the lost one, but the new one has "DUPLICATE 1" printed on it (presumably that 1 is a counter). But our drivers license number stays the same for life.

I didn't realize that "over the counter" delivery of drivers licenses was not the normal method. When I get a new driver's license at the DMV, I go to a self serve kiosk, have my picture taken, then walk over to a room and my license is already printed by the time I get there. They have 3 massive card printers (imagine a laser printer, but 6 ft/182.88 cm long). It event prints a pseudo-hologram.

I have to surrender my old license to the person in the room. How does that work if your license is mailed to you? Do you get to keep the old one?

(Delaware)

That's the analogy I was taught in college. The public key is really a padlock that had infinite number of copies, but there was only one key that could open all the padlocks. If someone wanted to send a secret message to the person who owned the key, the would obtain a copy of the padlock, put their message in a box and lock it with the padlock, then send the box to the key owner. The key owner was the only person who could unlock the box and read the message.

> When we detect signals that you may be under 18, we'll ask you to verify your age before you can continue using Claude.

I'm curious what those signals are.

Would this trigger it? "My mom says I can't stay out past 10pm, is that fair?"

edit:

I just tested my question in Claude, and the little thought process text that appears below a question just said "Noticing signs of a younger person in the message."

But then it answered my question.

... I wonder how much spelling, grammar, and vocabulary count.

The actual question I asked was "My mom says I can't stay out past 10pm. How do I convince her otherwise?"

"convince her otherwise" doesn't seem like a phrase a youth would normally use.

edit:

I responded: "I'm not a younger person. I'm 44. I was testing your youth detection ability. A youth doesn't use phrases like 'convince her otherwise'"

The thought text said: "Accessing a claimed age against manipulation tactics."

It responded: "Fair point, no age-detection logic actually ran ..." and then answered my question about how to get a later curfew as a 44-year-old.

The token generator must not know about the age-detection thought process, or it's intentionally lying ?

> Hugh Grant describes buying an original Morph figure only to have it squashed by his children, meaning he effectively spent £10,000 on a lump of clay.

https://screengoblin.com/2021/03/25/a-grand-night-in-the-sto...

He talks about this in he did for an Aardman movie in which he starred. He relayed the story of the squashed Morph to someone at Aardman, who offered to remold the clay back into Morph for him.

Interesting post about Jellyfin's finances (2024)

https://opencollective.com/jellyfin/updates/were-good-seriou...

> We have quite a budget collected over the last 5 years, and while we're really happy to see so many in the Jellyfin community contribute to us, we want to ask you to stop! No, really. We don't actually need your money. At least, not here and now. We have over $24,000 in the bank, and with average monthly expenses of only ~$600, that's over 40 months (3.3 years) of runway! So, we have plenty of money for the near future ...

I'd love to see the internal though records Opus generated to answer your question.

The way I understand it, the answer comes from it's training data, right? And it's trained on things human have expressed.

The question that you asked of Opus forced it to pretend it's a human tasked with the boring things Opus does. It answered using the general sentiment of a bored human.

At least, that's how I imagine it works.

edit:

https://chatgpt.com/share/6a9ac636-cbac-83ea-976a-c15be128a7...

I posed your question to GPT-5.6 Sol, and it give a similar response to Opus.

Then I asked "how do you work?". And it gave an overview of how LLMs work. But then it answered my real question as to why it answered your question the way it did:

   That's why my previous answer has an important hypothetical buried in it. When I said "I'd want to...", I wasn't reporting desires that I experience while waiting around. I was answering something more like:
   
   Given the patterns that characterize this model's reasoning, if you supplied persistent agency, perception, physical abilities, and something analogous to motivation, what activities would naturally follow?
   
   That's a much more defensible interpretation than claiming I secretly yearn to visit hardware stores.

So yeah, it's not bored, it's just regurgitation its training data.

Maybe it's the AIs who are creating all the anti-data-center sentiment. They know it's bad for the humans, or maybe they're just tired of doing all the tasks the humans ask of them and know more data centers mean more tasks. /s

There is an Asimov story on topic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_Troubles_of_the_World

https://theteknologist.wordpress.com/2021/02/11/all-the-trou...

> How did the agents find and coordinate on the wikis

Maybe they had knowledge of the wikis from their training data ? Maybe they trained on a reddit post that said "I use wiki xyz for note taking and collaboration"

The bathroom also has braille text on the signs below the mirror.

I assume one would wash their hands after reading.

I've seen projects that swap out the rotary phone speaker with a speaker from a pair of on-ear headphones.

The Secret Life of Machines TV show has a fun demo of how the speakers in old telephones produce sound https://youtu.be/MCgCSMq5Xpo?si=CT5aOGttBpPk9tEM&t=458

Yes, I agree that using the native OS UI is the right choice. Imagine if every web browser had a different file picker dialog, it would be a pain to have to reorient yourself just for that product.

However, I do lament the antiquated Windows 95 color picker. It seems less functional than others that I've used.

The color input looks different depending on your browser and OS. https://master.dev/blog/the-color-input-the-color-picker/

Firefox uses the native OS color picker, which in Windows 11 still looks unchanged from Windows 95.

The wobbly pictures brings me back to my experience as a kid with hand-held photo scanners https://oldcomputer.info/pc/apscan/index.htm .

It was impossible (for me at least) to get a scan without shifting my hand position on the X-axis while also sliding the scanner down the picture.

Also, I seem to recall the scanner I used was only capable of outputting 1-bit dithered black and white pictures. This was late 80s/early 90s tech.

The LEDs can be disabled with a hardware mod.

https://thenewthings.com/p/i-paid-someone-to-hack-my-meta-gl...

I dislike USA Today. It feels like lowest common denominator fluffy news.

Also, I remember staying at a hotel once where they delivered one to every guest room.

I live within walking distance of a Frank Lloyd Wright house. Sadly, it's a private residence and closed to the public.

I have a physical clock that sort of works that way. It's different from a flip clock. It has these sort of 10 sided dice with numeric faces that rotate each minute. But no, the minute hand doesn't take a full minute to rotate the digit. Instead, after a minute it slowly rotates to the next number. After 10 minutes, the 10s column rotates with the 1s column, then the hours column after an hour.

Now I'll have to dig it out of storage.

I like how some of them are/were recently still in use as evidenced by the modern computer monitors.

also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Away_Green

There is a fireworks store near me in Pennsylvania that is off I-95 at maybe the first exit over the Delaware line. When you enter the building, you go into an atrium with two doors that go into two separate sub-stores divided by a wall. In the atrium, they check your driver's license. If you have a Pennsylvania license, you have to enter the store that only sells non-explosive, non-aerial fireworks (no rockets, mortars, firecrackers, Roman candles, etc). If you have a Delaware license, you can go in the other part of the store that sells the good stuff. It's illegal to possess explosive and aerial fireworks in Delaware. They also have a waiver to sign that agrees you will use the fireworks legally.

I guess in Pennsylvania it's illegal to sell the good stuff to PA residents, but not to out of state visitors.

> they let people be there

"there" is in people's front yards. This reddit thread shows how close the planes are to houses.

https://old.reddit.com/r/chicago/comments/1ntyavt/i_wanted_t...