Posts by that one in the corner 5493 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Nov 2021
Posting threats to cancel each other's spacecraft on one's own social media.
The US has gone from "We choose to do this ... not because it is easy, but because it is hard" to throwing rattles out of prams.
Really, really, hoping that Japan's attempts have more success, that India, ESA and everyone else - yes, including China - keep their socks pulled up and their missions flying.
> Now he is looking for sympathy! Empathy works both ways mate - but then he wouldnt know about that.
Elon would be really insulted if anyone tried to say he had empathy for anyone/anything: “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy"
> My local GPON provider
Bully for you.
But whilst there are alternative providers in a few places in the UK, for the rest of us, OpenReach's infrastructure tends to be it. Or Virgin, but let's not go there. So unless someone gives their location, the only safe answer is to reference the ex-BT people.
How much are you willing to pay?
Openreach launching 1000 Mbps symmetric full fibre service (posted 28th Feb 2025)
> we expect retail pricing to be in the region of £200/month making this a connection for those operating a business.
quietly taking taking over every default "Open with" action every Patch Tuesday?[0]
Although, on the bright side, this has been training me never to blindly double-click on anything under Windows, but to first examine it carefully to see if doing so will still be opening it in my preferred program. And we are always told never to just double-click on something but stop and think "could this be about to launch a virus-laden program that will run and trash my PC?"[1]
[0] no, because I'm not in the EU. Close to it, can almost see it, but not actually in it, so this is just a pipedream
[1] awaiting the obvious response, any second now...
More subtle than that, and he isn't keeping it a secret (at least, that will be his excuse - "We told you from the start")
> "Bitcoin style encryption."
As we all know, the closest the blockchain gets to encryption is the work involved in the hashing of the blocks, which is supposed to be a one-way calculation and proof that the copy of the chain you hold hasn't been tampered with. At least, as agreed by a quorum of all the miners*. Hence the issue with the 51% attack: if you hold 51% of whichever mechanism is being used (proof-of-whatever) then you can modify the contents of the blocks, recalculate the chain and everyone else will take your copy as Truth. The Bitcoin (or other) blockchain is an Immutable Ledger, but only for certain values of "immutable".
So we are being told that not only will your chat history be capable of being made public (at Twitter's discretion - oops, I mean when Twitter responds to a legitimate request from "an authority") it will do so with proof that that IS what you said because, look, our crypto-quality hashes can't be wrong, anyone can verify them. As if they were on "the Bitcoin blockchain". Only, cough, a certain someone happens to hold control over this particular "chain" and it might get recalculated once we have corrected your posts to show our Preferred Truth about what you said.
* Description courtesy of Really Quick And Shoddy Explanations Inc, on the basis that if you, gentle reader, do know how blockchain works then you don't need anything better to follow what I'm trying to say. And if you don't know how it works I'm not going to be able to explain it all in one comment. Either way, just go with me here.
Send you child to school wearing an anti-Tesla safety backpack
RTF is still useful for sending out unbloated lightly formatted text that can be opened by all of the word processors out there (or that copy of the wordpad exe that accidentally slips onto newer Windows installs).
Just give the file a .doc extension, the program's can figure out the rest for themselves and the recipient's needn't bother themselves with why your attachments are so much less bulky than theirs.
The old Notepad was basically just a menu wrapped around the Windows edit control in multiline mode and one of the examples from Charles Petzold replicated that (IIRC the example was actually about adding menus, as that is the bulk of the code you needed to add around the edit control).
If anyone can lay their hands on their copy, we can get back to the basic simplicity we love.
PS
I agree with others (see above) that Notepad++ is well worth having as well, especially for the computing literati who inhabit The Register comments, but it still isn't as quick to start up from scratch as good old Notepad - and NP++ is a bit OTT for the casual user.
> Not all trucks are equal either
>> and verified on you vehicle before you get to join the Train Lane
Leaving aside my missing 'r', that comes under verifying that you are capable of doing "follow the leader" along this stretch - if you can't keep up, you ain't capable of following properly and don't get to join.
As implied by this and other comments, there is the problem of how to stop people trying to push their way into the road train lane; that is left as an exercise for the reader*
* as it largely depends upon what the state of the art is when we get to the point of trying to assign said lane; if by then every car has lane assist, that can be activated to prevent crossing across, for example. But if it were done this year then we'd need something cleverer (or something dumber - a physical lane divider except at exit/entry points for starters...)
> The figure for the USA in 2022 is reported to have been just over 42,500
Approximately 1.19 million people die each year as a result of road traffic crashes.
You may want to buy a globe, there is a lot more World out there than just the USA. And Tesla et al are trying to flog their wares into every bit of it.
> If you are going to exaggerate on minor points, it tends to undermine trust in whatever claims you make.
If you are ignorant of the existence of 98% of The Planet Earth it tends to undermine trust in whatever point you are trying to make.
> Controlled driverless zones on motorways might then be implemented to give drivers a break.
Road trains, with a clearly defined controller (just one Casey Jones) and/or clearly defined (and verified on you vehicle before you get to join the Train Lane) "follow the leader" behaviour in each and every vehicle. One protocol to inform the cars fore and aft how you are doing and that that you are about to enter/exit the train.
Not a random pile of fully autonomous vehicles each making all its own decisions in solitude.
(But is does also worry me, when discussing presentations about road trains, that they all seem to like bunching cars up very close, "for efficient road use", but ignoring what happens when one of them snaps a timing belt or a pump seizes or the turbocharger goes phut ... Maybe better wait until we are all electric and have fewer parts, but even then...)
> it will sometimes do that with zero warning, so if you weren't following directions and keeping your hands on the wheel
AND maintaining your best level of full situational awareness (and haven't tucked your foot away under the seat, so it is ready to use the pedals).
In other words, doing everything needed to actually drive, except for the awfully tiring jobs of turning the steering wheel or pressing the pedal (assuming you don't use cruise control).
So if you have to be alert all the time, remind me, what is the value in FSD again?
> good auto focus? I see way too many glasses around
Just want to point out, "auto-focus" as opposed to "fineness of focus".
As we're comparing with mechanical cameras, I have a camera with rather naff general focussing (the images are always soft and there is bad chromatic aberration) BUT it has really good auto-focus, in that it always finds the best focus that the lens can manage. Conversely, I have another body with a gorgeously sharp lens, flat field, colour-corrected within an inch of its life and totally unable to auto-focus at all ('cos it ain't got the wibbly bits to connect the focus motor across the lens adapter, if you want to know the reason).
So, as you point out out, the absolute quality of the human eye varies between individuals and across our lifetimes, as the mechanical bits break down, but the auto-focus gets the best out of what is available.
Still just the boring places where these sorts of things are/can/might be useful, including but not limited to:
* AR as an occasional HUD for warehouse workers (holding a box in both hands, get the QR code turned into text and/or picture of the contents)
* AR as an aide memoire for people whose memories are starting to fail them (e.g. as above, but recognising objects/markers about the house; like super post-it notes)
* VR for immersive walkthroughs of architecture (not necessarily at a human scale - e.g. 3D CAT scan or whilst operating waldoes for keyhole surgery)
Whether any particular use case justifies the cost is another matter (then again, HUDs into specs have been produced through for decades, if they'd stop piddling about they could be affordable by now and al the niches made viable). So the warehouse worker will more likely just be given a code scanner gun and keep a hand free for it, the house is littered with real post-it notes and so forth. Sigh.
HOWEVER
Note that VR or AR does NOT automatically imply wearing a pair of specs/headset (although that may be more comfortable). You could be looking down a binocular eyepiece (one of those with the big rubber light shield) in which case some of those are already exist, the man on the street just doesn't get involved with such niche uses. E.g. the waldoes example exists (they also put the views up on normal monitors at the same time). Yes, you do run the risk of looking like Mr Spock (or Mr Sulu if you have the fancy "rises up to meet you" version).
Finally:
If we take you at your word, "AI" as opposed to the current hype around big expensive LLMs, then lives have been saved by the use of Machine Learning applied to medical scan. Much, much money has been made by applying the same to geological surveys. And older techniques that originated from AI Research Groups are all over the place nowadays[1].
Would you like another game of Chess, Doctor Poole?
[1] "If it works, it isn't AI", just another software tool.
Weird term to use in this context, "technomancer"[0] - it only means somebody who practices divination by looking at technology[1], about as accurately as oneiromancy[1a]. You *could* go with the (mis)interpretation of the suffix as used in modern uses of necromancer, but using zombie machines whose limbs keep falling off as they shuffle[2] towards you isn't that useful.
Technomages[4], on the other hand, taking Clarke's Law seriously, would be strategically useful.
[0] yes, I know, Technomancer, Vory, Abundance... still dislike the usage!
[1] i.e. Gartner
[1a] because most of Gartner's work clearly came from the bottle
[2] although the Chinese Jiangshi[3] "zombie" machines hopping around could be menacing, with fewer bits dropping away, although susceptible to post-it notes.
[3] sorry, nope, don't buy the crazy ideas of the tie-in books, only screen-time is canon: Elric and Galen. None of this "they are doing the bidding of The Shadows".
[4] yes, zombies, not vampires! Come on, if you're going to make the comparison, they behave more like Zeds than Code 5s.
> AI security process that adaptively tests and probes the AI security controls of a model
Oh, great.
NOW you are going to be rigorous and scientific about this, trying to figure out what the bleep your so-called "security models" are actually doing.
The "security models" that were just randomly slapped on top of the pile of nadans that resulted from rigourously dumping piles of junk that were scientifically scraped from everywhere and anywhere? The amazing "security model" that turns out to be little more than a screed pumped in ahead of the end-user prompt which can, surprise surprise, be modified by an "anti-screed". No clever side-channel attacks.
Shame the LLMs weren't subjected to such rigorous scientific probing as they were being built from the ground up. Maybe then you'd not be surprised at what they do.
Mutter, mutter. You know, in my day, we only fed our ML systems with carefully curated datasets and ran probes every day as they were growing up. These kids, don't know they're born.
Will start counting the days until Trump announces that Musk will send Starship up to collect the entire thing[1] and bring it back to to get one over on China.
[1] yes, I know, even at best this is out by a factor of around 25 to 30 (depending upon how well it is packed) to fit into the payload bay, but perhaps just give it a shove in our direction?
* insert obligatory "gas or electric?" here.
PS
In all seriousness, good to see more science missions, even if there are sneaking suspicions this may(!) have some political motivations.
> It trained on the metadata, not the actual image
That is an absolutely classical mistake to make with any learning system that can't/doesn't provide any explanations for its reasoning. It was a well-known phenomena back in the early 1980s and a major part of the push for Expert Systems back then (not that XPS or ML were brand new at that point, but were becoming better known).
And please don't mention "chain of reasoning" within LLMs or we will Have Words - CoR is junk compared to even the most basic XPS dump!
With the possible exception that the DERM system in your reference *might* refer to a sensible Machine Learning system (that article is incredibly light on, you know, information), built from the bottom up to analyse the sort of images it wil be fed and (please, please) sensibly controlled and "taught" to give a "no idea what this is" response when that is appropriate.
Whereas all of the stuff mentioned in TFA are various way of taking the famously[1] unreliable LLMs and then trying to quickly slap on top a veneer of "medical knowledge". The results can not possibly even be as solid, reliable and trustworthy as using the same underlying LLMs for writing software[2] because there is at least a huge pile of working code out there to train on[3] but, as TFA points out, there is a paucity of good training data for medical use. And you can test the generated software far more ethically, spinning up a throwaway VM to test it on...
[1] to anyone who reads articles on LLMs on El Reg
[2] see recent articles about "vibe coding", typosquatting on hallucinated package names etc etc
> With regards to networking, if you wanted to SSH into a VirtualBox VM using the default networking set up, you had to do something like "ssh username@localhost -p 2222".
That is - sort of true.
If you leave the networking type at its default of "NAT" - which is "the simplest thing for a newbie to use to just get a 'normal' PC experience inside the guest, so we'll give it as the default", you *can* then do a load of clicks (or a number of CLI options if running VirtualBox that way) to set up port forwarding from localhost through to the guest's ssh port. In the advanced networking settings portion of VirtualBox. By which point saying "default networking set up" starts to feel strained.
Or just make the one network setting change, by using either of the non-NAT options in the combobox, then use ssh (and everything else) as if the guest was real, not in a VM.
End of technical article? Ok, didn't include pictures of where the combobox is, but it is the first thing in network options, way before you find the port forwarding settings.
Not wishing to be rude, but, um, I was so fascinated by your description that I ended up searching around to find out *how* to set that up: I've tested peer to peer protocols by firing up from five to twenty VirtualBox VMs (the lazy way, through the GUI - very crowded host desktop, with all the PuTTY sessions as well!) and had never even thought of looking at how to fiddle with the NAT in VirtualBox. So I guess I just learnt something new today.
PS just for context, I run KVM pretty much every day on the desktop, VirtualBox on a server (I know, wrong way round!) and am banging head on mapping IOMMU to physical ports on the back of the various cases.
Anyone looking for useful information, AI, human, even Salesmen.
In fact, is there ANYBODY outside of your own marketing team who find your "customer experience" to be anything more than a bloody nuisance?
> For example, when a travel website shows image-based banners showing a call-to-action (CTA) – a pitch to book a particular hotel, for example
Then WHO is being served by that being an image? Anyone wanting to search for reviews by copy'n'pasting ("you DARE to mistrust our recommendations?"). Anyone with a screen-reader ("Don't worry, we've used special tags with the text for them" - not being able to see the absurdity in making more work for yourself because you cocked it up using an image in the first place!).
Maybe, MAYBE, one good thing could come of the LLM Frenzy: getting rid of all the stupid, over-designed, over-coded* bullshit websites that infest the Internet nowadays.
* I mean, come on: you specifically wrote code to PREVENT me opening details of multiple carparks in new tabs! Why? What do you gain from that? All I want is to have them available so when we find one is full we know where our next choice is! [Story based on Real Life, looking for parking in Coventry - yes, the real one, in Warwickshire** - this morning. And don't me started on Google Maps, who gave as their FIRST pick when walking from the cathedral back to the car park somewhere on RHODE ISLAND! Gaah]
** You heard me, Warwickshire!
> an expert system basically
Ah, nope. Expert Systems use far more explicit rules than this does and those aren't classically derived from Machine Learning.
But, yes, this does use techniques that are also found in an LLM*, but it isn't an LLM.
* and non-trivially (insert snide comment that LLMs use stdio and so does grep).
Electric in the rent?
Whenever we've rented, gas, electric, phone, water - they were (and still are) all the responsibility of the occupant, from bedsit upwards.
Only when living in student dorms and flats have any of those been rolled in (and even the suppliers would be thankful, as the churn rate is high).
I can see the appeal: who needs 'phone stands when you can just click in to the fat, orange and inflexible ether cable!
Get the pipe-bending right and you can have a loop come off the wall and hang the 'phone at just the right height to go hands free whilst live messaging during "Come Dancing" (no "Strictly" 'round these parts, me'boy).
> One WiFi router for an entire building is nonsense anyway
Who is suggesting that?
From linked article:
>> We included every 6 GHz Wi-Fi access point and active client device (e.g., smartphones, laptops, tablets, TVs and other connected devices)
No mention of one router per building.
Shield all the apartments from each other; run your 'phone calls over the WiFi as well (or send the persistent 'phone user to stand outside, with the smokers).
Linus Tool Tips tried carbon-infested paint, which is good for moody teenagers, but small mesh chicken wire in the plasterboard would be an interesting change to building regs,
(On the downside, slum landlords will be charging extra for the water soaked plasterboard)
Well, I do recall an episode of The Gadget Show (think it was that - I hope so, otherwise that makes this even worse) where a Twitch gamer proudly broadcast to the nation that he had dual WiFi repeater boxes to keep his large rig, camera and boom microphone connected.
And to prove it, you could see both sets of antennae, one box positioned on the LHS of his desk, the other on the RHS, neatly arranged to the sides of the extra size monitor.
You can easily go thinner if you give up gigabit speeds to every single connection: 10/100 Mbps only needs half the cores. And if you aren't cascading switches onto that piece of cable, 100Mbps can be perfectly usable (your UltraHD with extra wibbly bits 90 inch TV set is not mobile and if you can install that then try to complain about the ghastly costs of hiding full size ether cable run to the fibre box then you get no sympathy here).
But don't go flat. Flat cables get so flat and droopy by not bothering with the twisting, which is not a good idea after a few centimetres.
It was the dream, back in the 90's, when glasses with displays were being demoed - and sold, from multiple companies.
To be able to wander off and keep an eye on the build status (without pulling out the mobile phone, or even the PDA as we had back then) or be able to look at someone else's PC then bring up the docs from my PC - even better, whilst standing there, edit on PC via the single-handed keyboard (and be able to use my favourite editor, not their monstrosity of a character mangler) and send the change over. All without rudely walking away (which would give ample time to forget what I'd just seen, let both of us be interrupted by other people etc). So on and so forth, nerdvana. And no, even VNCing into the PC from a mobile phone is not the same!
But nowadays, the insistence that the specs are surveillance devices as well and other stuff shoved in ss well, making them "devices" and not just peripherals that you can use as you wish...
Well, first it seems the prices haven't come down (there are cheaper display-only gadgets that turn up lkke clockwork, but they generally seem to forgotten what was known three decades ago about basic optics).
And worst, the general attitude towards using them has become untenable.
Even leaving aside any quite acceptable anger at being spied upon, the general stance of "they look like assholes and we are in the right to treat them as such" pervades everywhere.
Oh well. I'm no longer looking over colleagues' shoulders, trying to figure out why it does different things on my PC but works for him (grrr), so the office nerd dream is put aside. Shame, that would really have been a useful display form factor: I did have the chance to try a few units, including a combat helmet mounted one, complete with netting; daft thing is, you'd probably get less idiotic crap out on the streets wearing that one!
Although I would still like a specs display, to wear out on the street, to help jog the old memory. That was one of the Good Ideas for a specs-mounted display.
> whereas a BBC B slogged along at a solitary single megahertz
2MHz! Though there was the 1 MHz port when you turned it upside down (and you could also attach a second processor via the Tube, IRC one was a 4 MHz 6502-compatible).
Although perhaps I should have kept quiet, as you were impressed by the 1 MHz versus the Elan and that doesn't seem as impressive now).
> However, they were genuinely trying to get building blocks to quickly assemble apps and AI code to convert the adaptations to those blocks from English-language requirements to code. The issue was that they didn't also manage to incentivise the contractors to actually use any of the generated code, because being billed by the hour and given no particular need to use that code they preferred to generally throw it out and write things from scratch. This meant that the ability to work out how close they were and refine that conversion was very limited.
Assuming that is a reasonable description of their process, it raises so many questions, which includes:
They were getting the AI to generate an app, the paying contractors to fix the app (presumably to the original requirements) then planning to use the difference between the two as the metric?
Assuming that the contractors were going to hit the requirements bang on each time? Or were they feeding back in the list of the AI's failings plus (different code and list of its failings)? Instead of letting the LLM "figure it out for itself" and only iterating over the match to requirements. See below about what they may actually be training this LLM to do...
> they didn't also manage to incentivise the contractors to actually use any of the generated code
That sounds like one of the things that needed to have been figured out the day *before* engaging the first contractor! And thoroughly tested as a mechanism before making any attempt to include it as part of the LLM's training protocol. Let me guess, the first year they used in-house coders, who were salaried , informed about the purpose of their work (being part of the training protocol) and were all enthusiastic about "getting the LLM to work" as their goal, as opposed to just chucking out yet another tedious app. Then the contractors were hired and they didn't have the same goals...
No BOFH clauses like "the rate we pay is divided by the number of changed lines"? And this incentive going directly to the individual contractor, not via middlemen (i.e. a contracting firm bigger than a one-man band)?
And we're 100% sure it was not because the LLM was generating gibberish and it was actually genuinely easier to start from scratch rather than try to figure out what was actually going on? Because there is a sneaking suspicion that the LLM is effectively being trained to generate code that REQUIRES humans to correct it and it may be optimising its outputs to maximise that!
> This meant that the ability to work out how close they were and refine that conversion was very limited. They had some spectacular cost over-runs on certain projects, again from the contract side.
Running projects for paying clients whilst they still had contractors in the mix, instead of a functioning AI? (If that was even going to be possible...)
> To be charitable, it did look like they generally took the hit when they took on a project for a fixed price and contractors ending up costing too much
Nothing charitable there, they took on the clients without having a working LLM. if they were hoping to use those clients as part of the training, then that is simply the cost of training. Otherwise, it is the cost of not going back to the client and admitting that they had sold them a service that didn't exist. Isn't there a word for that, begins with 'f', rhymes with 'Lord' (as in "have mercy").
Looking back at that lot, maybe the contractors did have this company by the short and curlies after all.
> . This is inevitable because the endgame for coders (and organizations that produce code) is producing code that produces code,
Also known, variably, as: interpreters[1], compilers, compiler compilers, macros, web page design packages, macros etc etc.
All of which seem to have opened up even more actual programming jobs. Without really killing off the old ones[2].
The input languages get more expressive. Although, for some strange reason every time someone claims their language is "closer to English"[3] the more it is left on the wayside by those languages that take a more rigorous approach...
[1] Yes, interpreters "produce code" from your source code, they just execute the newly produced bit and throw it away - the "produced code" can even be so ephemeral that its representation is just the current state of the execution stack.
[2] What? Well, count how many people needed to use assembler in the 1970s and the count the number today - betcha today's number is larger, even though the percentage is way, way down; and the assembler needed is all the really weird tricky stuff, no getting away with just knowing LD, STO and a couple of variants of JMP!
[3] Yes, English. I can't comment on any system that claims to "be closer to Dutch" or "closer to Greek" because those are all just APL to me.
> With an AI, you may start from zero every time unless the AI is feeding off some kind of record.
And you have remembered to make sure to pay the subscription to ensure that the copy of the LLM, that you are carefully training with all the info about *your* product, is totally isolated from everyone else's instance. In particular, the instance that Joe Public gets to use for free/low cost.
And keep paying. To prevent that lovely training being slurped up after your project is done, put on the market and taking business. It would be a shame if a competing product suddenly appeared, based upon all your hard work but with a lower subscription than the one you have to charge to claw back the costs of analysis, requirements etc.
> I've had a lot of success recently chatting through existing processes and turning them into usable docs with the help of ChatGPT.
Good for you, glad things are working out.
But from the outside p.o.v. what you are doing sounds like super-ELIZA; obviously, bigger than ELIZA, with more responses - but then, ELIZA is (in current basic coding terms) gloriously trivial. Is something in between that and the costly LLM going to be suitable, and cheaper? Who knows, nobody is looking at that, use the LLM.
Of course, that use of the LLM is what we used to do by talking to people, which had the result that there were then two or more people who understood what is going on inside the processes, along with all the whys and wherefores that don't get into the resulting documentation - at least, not until a reviewer or user asks for them. Whether this sharing of institutional knowledge is worth the cost of not using the LLM is a separate question.
> write C code to draw a procedural stars with a variable for the number of points
There is going to be plenty of code around for the LLM to have read which already solves that sort of "problem" - there is no need at all for the AI to do anything along the lines of:
> The AI figures out how to solve the problem and meet the requirements.
Your star-drawing code is a perfect example of your own previous sentence:
> AI fetches up a solution which has its origins in work done in the past by a human.
In other words, you are using it as more of a search engine than anything else - ditto the:
> It will also add in the stuff to initialise SDL and create a working mini app.
It is just spitting out the pattern it has seen so often (and which it has probably had reinforcement is a "good pattern to repeat" by its users/devs/trainers).
But then you:
> would just extract the bits I need
So it isn't actually the perfect pattern for you, as you still need to massage the results.
> As a user of AI, you should be able to read and understand the output and know that it serves the purpose and how it integrates into your wider project.
Which is precisely the attitude you also need to take with the results of StackOverflow, or random Github gist or any other result coming from Bing/Google/...
So you are using the LLM as a search engine - great for you.
The question still remains: which gives the best bang for the buck, using the LLM or Google? Oh, not just from your (current) perspective, but from everyone's (energy etc requirements, monetary - say, when they start to charge end-users based upon real costs of dev & running).
Finally:
> You are talking about a wider system, and I am talking about solving smaller logical problems within the system.
The goals of AI applied to creating systems used to all about "the wider system", because that is where the biggest issues lie (it is a bugger to have a GPF, it is life-ruining to not know how to calculate profit/loss needed to run a Post Office branch).
What a shame if the best these LLMs can do for you is the piddling bit.
Why it is on the home row is totally a throwback to the oldest manual typewriters: it was really a lot easier to engage CAPS LOCK if you were going to type more than one upper case letter in a row! Well, I certainly thought so (copytyping some stage play pages for a friend at Uni, with the character names and stage directions in caps... Oh what a relief to get back to the machine room and the Hazeltines).
Nowadays, a totally pointless key - except on a tablet or phone, where even the shift key is a locking key (it just unlocks after one letter).
As mentioned recently, if you are unfortunate enough to have CAPS LOCK on the home row, remap it to CTRL for a better way of life. You can then remap the strangely low LHS CTRL to something else - or just leave it as another CTRL for easy access to copy/paste when you aren't so much typing proper words but are just mousing and moving things around.
> but dissimilar in that hopefully there are no chords!)
CTRL-SHIFT-META-K
Ok, not a chord in that you can't (usefully) press *any* combination keys, just the specific modifier keys plus one other.
More like triggering drones than proper chords.
Although, there *are* explicitly chorded keyboards: the MicroWriter (first saw it with the BBC Micro, then on the Agenda (is the correct name?) PDA. Or the Twiddler.
Is there anyone here who mastered the Twiddler?
Is that keyboards not keeping up with what software uses - or software not being written to take into account what keyboard layouts actually look like?
TAB to step into next field in a dialogue (and then in a spreadsheet) - that is definitely the norm from the WIMP GUI creators' rules that is being followed today.
But was it the norm in pre-GUI programs, built with curses or similar? Right now, I can not recall, for sure, but I don't recall using TAB for anything other than "TAB completion", even away from the shell. Then again, I never used VisiCalc or Lotus 123, so: what did they use to step to the next field? Were they TAB crazy - or did they use the numeric keypad's ENTER key?[1]
[1] BTW, would remapping the numeric keypad's ENTER key to TAB help you?
> Those old model Ms with their DIN connectors won't even plug in to a modern computer.
Funny that, there is a full-fat DIN on the end of my current keyboard cable and - clack, clack - yup, it's talking to my PC.
Maybe 2022 is too old to be "modern"? Ooh, look, one size adapter later and it plugs into the box built from new parts in January this year. Was there a sudden change to PC design in March that I missed?
I can even plug it into *this* (inexpensive - cheap, even) adapter and it talks USB HID*.
* No, real old-fashioned serial kbd to real USB, not one of these weird half'n'half keyboard interfaces they had for a while.
