As they say: “never meet your heroes”. Two out of three ain’t bad.

Or you’d get lucky and some other program you installed happens to have the right dependencies. Just copy them to the application install dir or to C:\windows\win32\ and off you go.

Yeah, stuff like that continues to be the best use-case for windows virtualization. Sounds a lot like trying to upgrade the BIOS or Firmware on an older PC; often the installer is some binary that only runs on Windows of the same vintage.

Backwards-compatibility with older web browsers so engineers can build websites for them, is another. I’ve also heard of industrial automation (e.g. CNC machines) being married to Win2k or WinXP, so being able to run an old OS on new hardware is crucial.

Windows, can I run this 25 year old software I just installed?

Thank you for your service.

I have a lot of thoughts on this because this is a complicated topic.

TL;DR: it’s breakthrough tech, made possible by GPUs left over from the crypto hype, but TechBros and Billionaires are dead set on ruining it for everyone.

It’s clearly overhyped as a solution in a lot of contexts. I object to the mass scraping of data to train it, the lack of transparency around what data exactly went into it, and the inability to request one’s art from being excused from any/all models.

Neural nets as a technology have a lot of legitimate uses for connecting disparate elements in large datasets, finding patterns where people struggle, and more. There is ample room for legitimately curated (vegan? we’re talking consent after all) training data, getting results that matter, and not pissing anyone off. Sadly, this has been obscured by everything else encircling the technology.

At the same time, AI is flawed in practice as it’s single greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. “Hallucinations” are really all this thing does. We just call obviously wrong output that because that’s in the eye of the beholder. In the end, these things don’t really think, so it’s not capable of producing right or wrong answers. It just compiles stuff out of its dataset by playing the odds on what tokens come next. It’s very fancy autocomplete.

To put the above into focus, it’s possible to use a trained model to implement lossy text compression. You ship a model of a boatload of text, prose, and poetry, ahead of time. Then you can send compressed payloads as a prompt. The receiver uses the prompt to “decompress” your message by running it through the model, and they get a facsimile of what you wrote. It wont’ be a 1:1 copy, but the gist will be in there. It works even better if its trained on the sender’s written work.

The hype surrounding AI is both a product of securing investment, and the staggeringly huge levels of investment that generated. I think it’s all caught up in a self-sustaining hype cycle now that will eventually run out of energy. We may as well be talking about Stanley Cups or limited edition Crocs… the actual product doesn’t even matter at this point.

The resource impact brought on by record investment is nothing short of tragic. Considering the steep competition in the AI space, I wager we have somewhere between 3-8x the amount of AI-capable hardware deployed than we could ever possibly use at the current level of demand. While I’m sure everyone is projecting for future use, and “building a market” (see hype above), I think the flaws and limitations in the tech will temper those numbers substantially. As much as I’d love some second-hand AI datacenter tech after this all pops, something tells me that’s not going to be possible.

Meanwhile, the resource drain on other tangent tech markets have punched down even harder on anyone that might compete, let alone just use their own hardware; I can’t help but feel that’s by design.

Sweet tap-dancing christ, this whole thread. If there’s anything I’ve learned today, it’s that some teachers are the most petty dictators that cannot tolerate being proven in the wrong, nor can handle having their decision making skills challenged. They’re out there doing real lasting damage to people and their ability to think critically.

It’s almost enough to make me want to go into education, just to displace one of these tyrants.

Sincerely, I’m sorry all of you had to go through any of this. Here’s hoping you have support and find closure.

Oooh, rocking an HP? I too like to live dangerously.

But seriously, that’s good to know. Those are probably easier to come by out in the wild. It really looks like Thinkpads go from office deployments straight to refurb companies these days. I never see them at thrift stores, and I’m not brave enough to dumpster-dive at e-waste.

Sometimes, old machines are survivors. Beware of confirmation bias when trash/thrift-picking cheap systems though. IMO, Thinkpads can be tough as a coffin nail. Including work systems, I’m on number 8 at this point with no hardware failures in sight.

That said, I have a very lightweight Acer that’s about a decade old with the worst keyboard and trackpad ever manufactured. It also performs like a slug, even with Linux on it. Still, it refuses to break so I can get rid of it.

Yesterday we made quesadillas with gluten-free tortillas, kimchi, thinly sliced fried spam, and smoked cheese. All stuff we happened to have in our pantry. This was better than it had any right to be.

I can also make vegitarian maki (sushi), spam musubi, or korean gimbap with a bit more prep work. We also always have Korean sides (pickled radish, cucumber, and more) on hand to throw together healthy meals fast.

If push comes to shove, I can just thaw some ground beef out, season it up, and throw it on rice.

If I’m feeling really lazy: peanut butter straight out of the jar. Don’t @ me.

Disclaimer: I can’t eat wheat, so my whole diet got up and (mostly) moved to Southeast Asia to compensate.

This essay is brought to you by Raid: Shadow Legends.

My boss had Narcissistic Personality Disorder, complete with face-melting off-the-record disapproval of my behavior, followed by “love-bombs” affirming my positive contribution to the workplace, mere days after. This resulted in not so much a rage-quit as taking my first opportunity to exit as fast as possible. And the cherry on top? An open invitation to come back mere weeks afterwards. The pattern was so textbook, that all I had to do was look up NPD romantic advice and search+replace “partner” for “boss” in most cases.

That said, I was pretty mad about how a great opportunity was ruined like this, let alone not as advertised. We’ve all heard “this meeting could have been an email”, well there’s also “this tirade could have been a counseling session.”

I mean, that happens with CloudWatch all the time. It’s the most plausible part about this.

The answer is: binary, sometimes with electrical switches.

As late as the very early 1980’s, the PDP-11 could be started by entering a small bootstrap program into memory, using the machine’s front panel:

You toggle the switches to make the binary pattern you want at a specific location in RAM, then hit another button to store it. Repeat until the bootstrap is in RAM, and then press start to run the program from that first address. Said start address is always some hardwired starting location.

And that’s a LATE example. Earlier (programmable) systems had other mechanisms for hard-wired or manual input like this. Go back far enough and you have systems that are so fixed-function in nature that it’s just wired to do one specific job.

Yes, but I honestly don’t entirely understand why it bothers me so much. I think it’s the compressed and high-frequency noise aspect of it. Like if someone just had white noise blasting out of a tiny phone speaker, there would be no discussion that it’s intended to annoy.

There’s an argument to be made here in/around the area of cleanliness (I agree on the other points). I once worked somewhere that someone left toe-nail clippings in the nursing room, and the restroom floor under the urinals was an perpetual and inexhaustible puddle of piss. It’s hard to say if the responsible parties did this because they felt at home, or felt very much the opposite.

It’s things like this that make managers sanitize their speech and say naive “treat this place like you live here” mandates, as though they’ve never met someone that lives like a feral raccoon, nor understand that such edicts can elicit a rebellious response.

It really was.

1984: Brand-new Megatron transformer was wrapped and under the tree. Unwrapping that and seeing the box, then pulling the toy out, was a level of joy unrivaled for a long time to come.

I broke that shit in 45 minutes. (so did a lot of other kids)

Zero regrets.

Or Twitter users: Twits.

Windows, with it’s numerable AI and cloud integrations, has morphed itself into a “Sloperating System” and I refuse to call it anything else.