Posts by Anonymous Custard 2942 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Jul 2008
I was going to say much the same thing.
The adult me thinks it's a fun use of GPT (or at least better than some recent ones).
The kid in me is horrified that it kills off the best part of Lego, that being taking a bunch of bricks and seeing where your imagination took you.
Like the difference between building the actual kit itself by following the instructions, but then smashing it up again and seeing what else the same bricks could make freeform.
"When I am right no one remembers, when I am wrong, no one forgets."
- Larry Goetz (and possibly Muhammad Ali too).
That's where the Conservatives could campaign around a promise to get rid of renewable energy, re-open the pits, resurrect the NCB and NUM and create an AI powered holographic Scargil
Vote Tory and support our glorious 5year plan for national coal power and shiny biceps
And then Labour would attack them for stealing their previous stance when they elected Corbyn as leader...?
Habit 12: Insert two pencils in your nose as well as wearing aforesaid pants on your head.
And if you ever want a yardstick about how much you do actually know about a subject, just try teaching it to someone else and gauge how my information they actually gain on the subject.
From personal experience of watching others attempting this test, the quickest indicator is whether the "expert" welcomes the questions and challenges from the trainees, or they loathe them.
The trick for new jars is the wrong end of a teaspoon inserted under the lid-edge and twisted a little to release the vacuum within the jar.
Once that's done, the lid will screw off easily. Of course it does require enough gap to be present to get the spoon in (and requires a spoon!), but it's a handy little trick.
Professor Sir Martyn Poliakoff?
And his legendary YouTube channels - here and here
Full disclosure - I'm a double Nottingham physics graduate (BSc and PhD).
Back in my prehistoric uni days, I had a friend whose room was around 100m or so from an MRI scanner with a 6T magnet (Uni of Notts, Cripps Hall just near to the MRI building where they pioneered work on the things and still did optimisation etc on them at the time - RIP Prof Mansfield).
He could always tell when the thing was fired up by the interesting effect it had on his computer monitor (Cub monitor on a BBC-B - I did say this was prehistoric).
...possibly with a new bit of notation thrown in and the blackboard's wiped clean for the next stage.
Back in my prehistoric undergrad days, we had a lecturer who had refined that one. He would write two or three blackboards worth of stuff up (the boards were side by side), and then proceed to pace up and down in front of them whilst lecturing/explaining.
The problem was he also (for some reason) insisted on wearing his academic robes when teaching, and every time he about-faced they billowed out and did a fair job of wiping the board behind him. So after a few minutes there were large gaps in his text, which he never seemed to notice for some reason.
Hence we had to frantically copy stuff down as he was writing it at the beginning, as we knew full well that it wouldn't survive the time when he was actual explaining it.
Suffice it to say he was not a popular lecturer.
My A-level chemistry teacher was also the school safety rep.
Only issue was he was also a lunatic, who actually taught us to make stuff like nitrogen tri-iodide (which we did quite regularly) and even on one occasion TNT (we were doing something with toluene and his comment was "whatever you do, don't do <age addled brain cannot remember> or it'll become TNT"). So of course some of my peers decided to make some, which resulted in a small beaker that was used being found the next morning in a prep room fume cupboard (where it had been left intact the night before) in many small pieces.
His favourite experiment (which we did several times) was the red lead rocket/volcano/fountain, and apparently one time (so he told us) he did the "balloon full of hydrogen popping" experiment with a wheelie-bin bag and only avoided taking out all the windows in the classroom by another teacher opening the door to come in at an opportune moment.
I ended up as a Physicist by training (and electronics process engineer by employment) but will always remember his lessons fondly. Nice one Michael, wherever you are (and in however many pieces).
The best (ie worst) one I ever had was the mandatory safety training when going on-site at a certain customer.
Course given by a young lad who had no clue, including a slide on LOTO (lock-out, tag-out). All fine, except the breaker was locked out in the ON position, not the OFF one.
So being the engineering sort (as well as a trainer myself within our company, both for over 25 years) I told him there was something wrong with his slide and asked him if he could spot it.
I left him staring at it and looking confused for a few minutes before pointing out the issue, with the suggest that he go find whoever actually wrote his course and do something highly unsafe to them.
Biggest problem of all though was I went back to the same site a couple of years later and had to redo the course (it was an annual one).
Different trainer (although equally clueless) but guess what, exactly the same (uncorrected) slide.
Deja-vu kicked in, followed later in the afternoon by a quiet word with our company safety officer that if the customer course wasn't corrected, we should threaten stop work and decline to go on-site for safety reasons until it was corrected (ironically the customer in question makes big lip-service about safety).
And then the realisation dawned concerning who actually ran the place, as opposed to who thought they did?
The mantra is true for both academia and industry - get on the good side of the secretaries (assistants nowadays), storesmen, technicians, security and cleaning staff and you can get anything done anywhere.
We also had the same situation at work a while back, where some bright spark mandated that everyone now had to use Concur and arrange their own travel when on business trips.
All to save on the salaries of maybe 3-4 part time ladies who used to handle everything with efficient grace at a rapid speed.
Cue everyone from the engineers up to vice presidents trying to tame Concur, getting frustrated and angry and of course taking 3-4 times longer than aforesaid part timers did it.
And that's not to mention the hourly rate difference involved, compounded by the extended period of time wasted in the DIY effort...
Once upon a time I'm sure readers remember the 'Uninstall/Install Windows Features' back when you could decide what weird and wonderful stuff you wanted on your Windows PC (see icon). That seems to have gone by the by.
It's still in there, under programs and features in the control panel (available in the left-hand menu, requires admin privs). At least it is on my home machine.
Admittedly it's buried down deep enough to be recyclable as firelighter, and so deep into the maze that is the current Windows start menu that you risk running into a minotaur if you take a wrong turn...
It would mean opening the black box and understanding how the company actually does things.
In my experience, that's often beyond the capabilities of manglement, either as it's too scary or it's beneath their opinion of themselves.
They just look at spreadsheets and PowerBi dashboards without wondering where the data and profits actually come from.
One thing I see as a contributor to a long-existing and large FOSS project is the generational difference in coding styles.
It quite often occurs that contributions from the new generation needs a fair amount of work simply because the younger coders have been taught different styles of coding to older ones.
And for a mature project, everything is in the older style simply due to being written by people who grew up learning such older/established standards.
If the new stuff gets included as-is, then you get issues of readability and debugging, but conversely it's not unknown for newer coders to get disheartened by the requirement to follow standards (especially given the volunteer nature of the contribution, even leaving aside any "ego" thinking that the code is perfect as it works).
And unfortunately I can see tools like ChatGPT and CoPilot potentially making this even worse, or requiring older code to be completely rewritten if it's output does become the new standard.
I can empathise with that live.
We've recently started moving in that exact way (some edict from on-high that PST files are now to be verboten for some reason) and so I'm piloting such a move as all my stuff is in nicely organised PSTs that our IT crowd can easy grab and upload in the background directly.
One got missed though, so I've spent today copying it within Outlook. At the start (around 9:30am) it said 3-4 hours remaining, and as of now (3:45pm) it's about 1/3 done and is saying 12 hours remaining (and it's locked out Outlook, so I'm doing mails via the webmail portal instead).
Gotta love those elastic Microsoft minutes - guess whose laptop is going to spend the weekend locked to the desk and slowly chugging through the task...
Somehow I'm expecting to come into the office on Monday to find it 95% done, and have either crashed or the remaining time to be just about enough to reach the heat death of the universe...
I feel more sorry for the IT guys, as apparently in our office there are some 4,500 or so PST files to be moved.
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