Monday, February 01

Geek

Daily News Stuff 1 February 2021

Time Travelling AI Edition

Tech News

  • The Amazon Telescreen is now available in a choice of colours.  (The Verge)

    Those colours being grey.

    Oh, and it shares your video with 2000 police and fire departments.  Did we forget to mention that part?


  • For any X, build your own X.  (GitHub)

    Disclaimer: Does not actually contain instructions to build your own X, though it does contain instructions to build your own X window manager.


  • Why does my PC consistently find all its memory only when I reboot twice?  Why am I complaining that it seems insufficiently arbitrary?


  • Lint-picking the MIT license.  (KE Mitchell)

    A very close examination of a very short license.  There's nothing really wrong with the license, but if you're planning to use it on a project it wouldn't hurt to read this.


  • The NoxPlayer Android emulator update server was delivering malware for months.  (ZDNet)

    Apparently in a targeted attack, which is why it wasn't spotted sooner.


  • Crystal 0.36 is out.  (Crystal Lang)

    The plan was that the next release after 0.35 would be 1.0, but there were a lot of minor updates to be committed and tested so they've decided on one more point release first.

    Slightly scary is that they changed the associativity of the exponentiation operator - to be fair, they got it wrong and it needed to be fixed - but this only matters if you're chaining exponentiations and you're probably not.  If you are, use Julia.


  • Statler.  His name is Statler.



AI Text Adventure Video of the Day



As usual with modern AI, this is simultaneously impressive and, well, not impressive at all.  AI Dungeon is a GPT-powered text adventure in the classic style, by which I mean it doesn't always make a lot of sense.

But when it does - for example when Amelia tells it she uses time travel to go back one minute and the AI is able to play along - it earned a surprised Pikachu face from me at least.  I wasn't expecting that one to work.


Disclaimer: To be fair, I don't expect anything to work.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:40 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 354 words, total size 3 kb.

1 Has your bios battery vomited? Did someone sprinkle steel-wool over your motherboard while your back was turned? Did someone finally put the "random" back into your RAM?

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, February 02 2021 02:30 AM (LADmw)

2 Haven't touched this stuff in years, and was only ever a noob.

The OS probably has a fall back 'safer mode' version of the boot loading.  It probably uses that on the second reboot.  Find out where the boot load scripts/configurations are stored, and compare them.  Make a third by copying the first, then switch options in the third to the second one at a time until you find the issue. 

I have no idea what this stuff would be called, or where, 'autoexec.bat' comes to mind, so you know how out of date I am. 

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, February 02 2021 02:48 AM (6y7dz)

3 Well, all the tech forums I go to told me to delete system32.  Now I'm running gentoo for some reason.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, February 02 2021 03:29 AM (LADmw)

4 "finding all the memory only on a second reboot" seems like the exact opposite of the NVMe problem I had with my Ace WS Pro motherboard, where it would lose the drive on a second warm-boot, which made Windows Update a challenge. If you've already tried clearing the CMOS battery, maybe also try reflashing the BIOS?

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, February 02 2021 05:05 AM (eqaFC)

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Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




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