We know how it works, but we can’t explain exactly how it got to the answers.

Also: Move stuff, don’t delete it. It’s faster to restore from a renamed folder than from backup.

We may have just gotten lucky. I also had a great time in Venice once by wandering off randomly and ending up somewhere I can only assume tourists don’t normally go. We bought some fruit off a boat which was both delicious and very affordable, so I assume the target demographic was not tourists. I’m pretty sure that’s not the universal experience of Venice either.

We were in the mood for a chill day, so it was nice to just chill in a park and walk through some random old neighborhoods until we stumbled across a restaurant. There’s nothing chill about Milan, though, at least not where a clueless tourist would find it.

“Just Google it” was always worthless advice, even when Google worked right. When you look up information on the Internet, you need prior knowledge in order to assess the information. Maybe this is great info? Maybe it’s dumb and whoever wrote it is a moron? Without prior knowledge you don’t know. With prior knowledge you can see what they say about the things you already know and decide from that.

I once tried to configure a Cisco access point, with zero prior experience with Cisco IOS. Simple stuff, but I knew nothing and had to Google it. I found some blog explaining it, but it looked weird. But I also knew IOS is weird, so maybe it’s right? Hard to say! I reached out to an old friend who is Cisco certified to verify, he told me to ignore that thing and showed me what I should actually do. It really made me realize how useless googling something is if you don’t have the prior knowledge to assess it.

As a European from elsewhere in Europe, I’m never going back to Milan. Maybe it’s fine if you’re into fashion, but if you’re not there’s not much to look at except a cathedral which resembles every other cathedral, and it’s impossible to get a photo of it without also having a friendship bracelet scammer in the frame, actively harassing you.

All tourist locations in Italy and France have people trying to scam you (and some non-scammers just trying to sell you cheap toys), but Milan is the only place I’ve been to where they’re straight up harassing you non-stop. Go to Pisa instead, it’s super relaxing there and you can marvel at their past mistakes in structural engineering. A far better deal.

To be fair, any modern truck built for the US market will kill you on the spot, usually by squishing you like a bug against the grill. A Cybertruck is low enough that it will probably just chop off your legs, so you probably still die, but you can have a half open casket! 🎉

Fair, I was thinking in the context of Stack Overflow.

Why not skip the middle man and ask ChatGPT directly?

You probably mean Comic Chat. It was actually just an IRC client, and I think it’s still usable (but frustratingly ineffective) today. But there is a website where you can convert IRC logs to it, I think.

Russians kept using it, just like Brazilians kept Orkut alive for years.

They were acquired recently.

Mirabilis created ICQ. AOL bought Mirabilis in 1998. Russian investor DST (which soon became Mail.ru and later VK) bought ICQ from AOL in 2010, probably because Russians were among the few nationalities still using it. Russians were over 25% of the hits, and it was the biggest instant messenger in Russia at the time. They also own VKontakte, hence why they’re directing people there.

Yeah, that was my assumption as well. I wonder how they’re going to work around that SO is getting spammed with AI-generated answers, though. You really don’t want your LLM cannibalizing itself.

Eh, tech companies also push out shitty stuff, and sometimes the shitty stuff is hardware.

Pretty sure it’s always been upfront with that it still tracks you? I always thought of it as a “don’t store history and cookies locally” thing and nothing more. Maybe I read that disclaimer with more cynicism than most?

It is in fact often intentional. It’s basically the same business model as printers. They make money from the refills, not the machine. Obviously people want to save money with generic paper, so they make sure the dispenser only works right with their paper.

What the dispenser manufacturer doesn’t consider is that whoever orders the paper doesn’t use the dispenser, so they don’t give a shit whether the dispenser works well or not. In fact, it not dispensing well saves even more money on paper!

Different goals. The goal of Apollo was to make a good app. The goal of the official reddit app is to show you ads and siphon money off you.

I guarantee you a good chunk of that R&D money is for making ads more profitable and other monetization.

Although to be fair most simulation code I’ve come across was written by Physics majors who really shouldn’t be writing code. Most of those implementations are a crime against engineering and humanity alike.

They do the job, though, and I suppose crimes against engineering are better than crimes against physics, if one had to choose.

I think you’ll find that the line between “computer scientist” and “software engineer” is rather blurred.

Depends on the engineer. Some make the software which does the math.