Zompist Bboard Again

Two recurrent nightmares of mine: 1. I’m back in high school and I have basically done none of my calculus homework for the entire year. 2. I’m back in university and there’s some problem where I can’t graduate unless I pass this one class that I keep failing (Symbolic Logic, which I did actually h...

(Yes, I'm mainly thinking of people who call everything bad in politics "fascist".) Yeah, there are numerous forms of authoritarian politics and lumping them all into fascism is careless if understandable. It feels good to characterize your opponents in the harshest terms possible, but yo...

Comic Sans and Palace Script. All others are abominations unto the LORD.

A gentle reminder that convincing malloc that his fears are not related to the real world has never worked. <sarcasm="very heavy indeed"> But surely AI will improve someday to the point that it will be able to do even that? </sarcasm> More realistically, I think that when AI creativity do...

So you would argue that software engineering is fundamentally much harder and more complicated than art or literature, such that automating it the same way is simply not feasible? "ChatGPT, write me libraries in three unrelated computer languages, with full documentation and fully comprehensiv...

It's actually the computer equivalent of one of those optical illusions where the same shade of grey looks darker next to white than against black.

This is not about established collective nouns, but about things which don't have them yet. In British political discourse it is common to hear about "measures" coming in "packages", or sometimes on "rafts"; what other such things are there?

Board and Table Games from Many Civilizations.

Raphael wrote: ↑Tue Sep 19, 2023 2:55 am

alice wrote: ↑Mon Sep 18, 2023 2:17 pm My father died peacefully yesterday after getting steadily worse for a few years.

My condolences.

Thankyou.

My father died peacefully yesterday after getting steadily worse for a few years.

Flew down to Exeter for a week's holiday. Flight was delayed by an hour, meaning an extra hour of hanging around a busy and noisy airport. Minor but annoying issues with the hire car. All this while suffering discomfort after an ME episode. Result: a nasty attack of anxiety and the first day ruined,...

I cannot imagine that generative AI would actually accomplish anything non-trivial (i.e. beyond doing what people used to do manually, i.e. searching StackOverflow) as software development goes any time soon if it cannot write a working factorial function on the first or second try. A few months ag...

Oh, I disagree with malloc, but lots of people are worrying along similar lines. I've had similar debates a few times IRL. It's time to come "out of the AI closet", as it were: the ZBB member you know as "alice" was actually replaced by an LLM several months ago, and none of you...

It looks like the answer is number 3: alice's Welsh is lacking.

I think it will survive as a medium for writing, and in its softer and more absorbent forms for wiping and cleaning.

BTW, for more uses: # is sometimes used in phonology to mark word boundaries, which is why I support that in the SCA. I did actually already say that :-) For those who were confused by zompist's reference to the "typewriter", it was a mechanical device somewhat like a laptop with a built-...

Programming Languages: - heading marker (in markdown) (Maybe this is derived from IRC too ?) - comment marker (in some programming languages) Also in shebang lines in Unix scripts. And comments in Unix scripts generally. Also: - C and C++ preprocessor directives - catenation in C macros - length op...

I noticed this bilingual description of a programme on S4C in my EPG: <names of presenters> sy'n crwydro tref lan mor Fictorianaidd Llandudno y tro ma. <names of presenters> explore the VIctorian town of Llandudno this time. Now my Welsh is not up to much, but I do know that (1) Welsh is typically V...

And when he has done that, to find out how to turn a pearl into a ruby, and then how to make a python rust.

bradrn wrote: ↑Thu Aug 31, 2023 8:07 pm

alice wrote: ↑Thu Aug 31, 2023 2:24 pm I've successfully ported my SCA library to Python.

What was it in before?

Ruby.