Posts by Gerhard den Hollander 256 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Feb 2007
According to Grok ?
Free pro tip.
Don't rely on anything AI tells you ... esp if it's AI whose main feature seems to be generating 18+ or downright illegal pictures.
Also, second free pro tip.
Don't post any 'According to AI' things publicly without backing them up with real facts, at least if you want to maintain even a modicum of credibility.
We had dual monitors on every desk. Nice big, fat, 21" monitors, capable of doing 1600x1200.
Then hit degauss on both montiors (more or less) at the same time ...
see the poor buggers try to sync ... eventually one would give out and the other would follow .... but this could easily take minutes
We all should know by now that there is no such things as guardrails on gAI.
We already know that all of them can be bypassed.
Gödel proved such things would be impossible back in the 1930s. They need to complete and correct, and he proved this was not possible.
( the above is obviously very broad strokes )
I've setup ahk so that alt-F12 drops down a command window from the top, just like yakuake does on Linux ( or like ~ does in gzdoom or quake, whence the name )
I honestly don't remember why I ended up choosing alt-F12 rather than ~ maybe because alt-F12 works when focus is on a terminal and ~ doesn't?
It's honestly been so long that I think on windows this is done by spawning Konsole.
This is the first time in a long, long time that I see someone post something positive about win2k
The general opinion was
W2k bad
Xp sp3 good
Vista awful
Win7 good
Win10 okish
Win11 makes win10 look good.
Nobody talks about the one in between, that introduced the modern ( i think that was the name for those, modern ) apps. And had the godawfull tiles and metro.
Let's take everything that socks about desktop OSes and combine it with everything that socks on mobile devices so we get one OS that's equally hated on all platforms.
it's ai, which these days more and more seems to mean AntiIntelectualism
LLMs get things wrong more often than LLMs get things right.
But are programmed in such a way that they think they are always right.
It's like being mansplained by your own computer.
Trying to code a working program by telling an AI in words what the program should do ?
Has anyone ever stopped to wonder how hard it is to get a team of good programmers to write code that does what you want, without catastrophic bugs ?
I'm sure the work of Godel or Turing can be used to prove that vibe coding will never work
Anybody who tries to sell you vibe coding is akin to someone who is trying to sell you asbestos 'Look, it's fire proof .... ' and forgets to mention that you should not eat it, saw it, breathe it
It's been a while,
But you'd setup 3 ntpservers, that synced against a few trusted ntp servers outside ( for which you'd punch holes in the firewall to only those )
And then you set up the rest of your machines to talk to those 3.
And in choosing which machines you'd pick things like your nis/yp servers or one of the central file servers or the machine with the tapedrives that's the main backup server.
Indeed you never let all the machines talk to outside.
That's not how ntp is intended to be used.
We did consider buying our own atomic clock thingy. Not because we needed the accuracy but just because we could claim we had an atomic clock.
But we never could really justify this for ourselves.
Cannot remember whether it was the default, but when we setup ntp the Solaris boxes were doing ntpdate on boot up.
We had one linux box where ( forgot the details) the bios was in the wrong timezone or something similarly silly, so the system time on boot up would be 2 hours ( and some ms ) off.
That one also got the ntpdate on startup treatment.
Been in a similar situation.
Rather than chaning the panic treshold, stopping the ntpd stuff, manually setting the clock to within a few seconds of the correct time, starting ntpd did fix the problem
(be careful when doing this, if you set the clock forward this is usually fine, setting the clock backward will lead to all kinds of interesting and amusing phenomena
Proper virtual desktops, like we had with fvwm/tvwm on SunOS, convex, iris, aix and pretty much every Unix I used in the 90s. It's a problem that was solved over 30 years ago.
Whatever the stuff is in win11 ( desktops ? ) works like sh?t.
An app on desktop x stays on desktop x and so do all its popups. Desktop switching is immediately and obvious. Dragging windows from one desktop to another just works.
This will finally allow me to have one desktop for coding
One for email/office
One for webstuff
And one to banish teams to.
And of course this should just work with however many monitors I'm using today.
(Docked or undocked)
I stopped my duolingo subscription because it took up too much of my time and was not actually helping me learn Finnish ( unless the topic of conversation was parakeets. Duolingo Finnish has lots of sentences involving parakeets)
But using AI ?
A moose once but my sister.
We apologise for the temporary drop in quality. The people who hired the AI have been sacked.
Moosebites can be quite nasty.
We apologise again, all staff that is not AI has now also been sacked.
Bloody wankers
> So, if you got a ps2 port and means to use it, slap the keyboard on it. Otherwise, any difference is merely academical.
Only do this if the machine is powered off.
PS/2 ports are notorious for not liking things plugged in (or removed) when they were powered on.
I've managed to ruin a few PS/2 ports by just swapping out a dead keyboard (users eating tangerines at their desk whilst typing ...) and too late remembering that the machine was not powered off yet. Giving a whole new meaning to the HOT in hot swapping.
Fortunately those machines also had USB ports.
The last time i encountered a PC that did not support USB in the BIOS must have been around the turn of the millenium (though I've kept a PS/2 keyboid/mouse around for another 2 decades orso).
China under Mao actually redefined the meaning of the traffic lights, changing Red to mean go ... (i think in the 60s or maybe 70s)
Anyone who has been to China since will know what a success that was ,,,
(Red once again means stop )
[ 25 aug 1966 apparently ]
At least you didn’t have those old crt monitors.
It was the first thing we did after a power failure. Run around and try to switch them all of before power came back on. Even a few of them could blow a single fuse with their startup surge. And too many of them could blow the main fuse even if the local fuses didn’t.
The other fun thing was to leave 2 identical monitors side by side to poweron at the same time and watch them trying to degauss each other.
Mind you these were 21’ sun or ibm monitors. The buggers officially required 2 people to handle them.
So, embedding a scripting language inside an excel file that can get emailed to you
Trying to rerun last years close-fiscal-year excell sheet, only to end up in pip-hell
excel wizards trying to outsmart themselves by writing extremely clever python scripts that drag in excel sheets that use python scripts
People who don't understand python seeking help from python developers who dont understand excel
O(N^3) python code that works awesomely for 20 line 50 row spreadhseets being applied to 5000 line 200 row spread sheets
And probably the clincher, excel wizards starting to migrate VBA excel files to python files and stopping part way so you know have an excel/VBA/python monstrosity
i think this is a really clever ploy from M$ who will soon be announcing an Excel consultancy business ....
If the blade is smaller than a credit card its allowed on board by many airports.
Though not by all.
In which case they write down your passport details and flight details and confiscate the knife.
Sometimes the flight back has different airport security, which is how i 2ce had to hand them in.
I now gave up traveling with those victorinox items.
There's a fair amount of ways of doing X securely, usually tunneling over ssh is involved somewhere along the lines.
For example, run an X-server on your local machine, ssh into the remote machine, run whatever GUI app you want on the remote and display locally
Added benefit is that you can run compresion on the ssh channel.
Run a local X-server, use a VPN to connect into your work environment, run X-stuff on the box in the office, display on your local box.
I may be off by a year, but im pretty sure i was running a linux desktop ( on a 486 ) in 95.
In 97 id adopted a laptop that the sales team no longer wanted. P133, huge ( for those days ) 256 color screen on which i was running linux. Slack i think. Installed from a stack of floppies.
... meh ...
been there, seen that
We have a largish meeting room in the other continent that has a camera with smart zoom ... now whenever someone coughs or moves their chair or .. the camera will pan & zoom on whoever made the noise ... which usually isnt the person speaking
Even more annoying is it when the room is not even speaking, and the camera starts to randomly pan & zoom to faces in the room, which can be hugely distracting (though sometimes quite entertaining if people realise they were full on zoomed in while picking their nose
Honestly, unless Ai is really, really smart, it can be really, really dumb .. i'd rather stcik to a fixed, wide angle camera thankyouverymuch ....
I do.
I've been compiling the latest xscreensaver on whatever happens to be my current Linux desktop since xscreensaver 1.14 ( I think, the one with nose guy added).
So far I've ran it on convex, sunos, Solaris, irix, whatever the Unix was on a Dec alpha and various Linux flavors.
It also runs on my iPhone but I haven't figured out how to get it to run automatically if
1) it's plugged in
2) not closed ( well the protective cover is not closed)
3) not horizontal
With the ( to me) recent switch to usb-c connected docking stations which drive multiple monitors of different resolution, at least one nice, sound, a bunch of legacy USB Shit from sometimes literally the previous Millennium, mice with built in color changing leds bought for less than 5 ucu from some Chinese Ali baba clone website, connected to a USB hub in one of those monitors and then plugging in usb3 disk drives in the same slot that a microsecond ago was syncing iTunes to their phone, yes, USB induced bsods are making a comeback.
Esp If the aforementioned docking station was being powered by the power brick from their first laptop from over a decade ago which was already plugged in and nicely cable tied to the bottom of the desk.
In the comments.
Having experienced wfh and in person office and now enjoying the benefit of hybrid working, I try to schedule my days such that most meetings can happen in person as much as possible and use the wfh days to focus.
Having endured both, a day filled with in person meetings is not much fun, but a day filled with video meetings is soul draining, despair inducing and brain melting.
At least I got the washing done.
And even there is the rub, after a really bad day of really bad meetings, hanging around the coffee machine and sharing the grief w/ colleagues is a lit better than trying to explain to your partner why your day left you soulless.
Or some days in stead of the coffee machine the beer fridge. Or maybe som9ne had a decent bottle of red in their office drawer for just this kind of emergency.
Whereas drinking after work in a wfh situation just marks you as an alcoholic.
That the server had only half the expected CPU and only half the expected memory ?
Or was he administering so many machines he didnt know how much meory/cpu there was supposed to be in this one ?
I'm assuming that since there was telnet to the machine he could have checked the amount of memory and amount of CPUs ?
thumbs up to the ppl mentioning aftershokz
Perfect if you go anywhere where being aware of your surroundings can be vital for your survival (which is pretty much everywhere outside the house, and quite a lot of places in the house)
Also really nice when on the plane you can hear the stewardess is asking you something (not what they are asking, but at least that they are asking).
Indeede, they are not noise cancelling, but unless you're in the back of a Tu-154 between the engines an appropriate playlist can drown out the background noise just as well (Helloween, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Tool, the mighty Mogwai)
And since they're bone conducting, you can use any kind of earplugs to block out all the other sounds (or so they say, I've never tried)
At some point we ended up with someone in charge of IT who did not really have the required skills (neither technical nor interpersonal) so we started referring to him as the supreme head of information technology.
Which he overheard
He liked it so much he started signing his emails with it
We never managed to get him business cards with that title on it
plugs that only a specialised plug could fit into still get unplugged to see if it will take a charger.
I even had a cable that was not only marked ``do not unplug'' but even duct-taped to the scoket being removed just because someone needed a wall socket, and this one was nearest
I'm actually more interested in the fans, ever since I had to share an office with a coworker who had a slightly off fan on his videocard ...
it's a bit like Vetinari's clock ... the annoying tick would be regular, and just as you were gettingused to it, the fan would change speed (or whatever it is) and the tick would be different ....
Exactly that ...
plus, it forced you to pay attention, rather then to think you'd have the printouts of the ppt so you can sleep through the lecture ...
Sheesh, whatever happened to bumming the course notes from your fellow students in exchnage for a few beers because you happened to miss the early morning class .... usually because someone had bummed your notes in exchange for a few beers the night before ....
Besides that ..
you had monitors ?
Luxury ...
we had a teacher who made handwritten notes on the blackboard
in about as legible a handwriting as my own
and who kept talking while making these notes
which meant he had his back to the class, and was even less comprehensible then
Maybe he used to replace ram in Sun Ultra machines.
I think it was the U60 where you had to press down on the ram so hard the motherboard literally started bending before the ram would fit.
And this was proper Sun original sun certified memory ...
we found that the (relatively) cheaper 3rdparty memory would fit a lot easier (still requiring ridiculous amounts of force though).
but the sight of my colleague bearing down his full weight on the ram, and the mobo bending was quite something
