Sure, from a computer file security standpoint, case sensitivity makes sense.

As you point out, people will regard some things as functionally the same, even when they use different characters. Hence case insensitivity makes more sense for people.

And then there is the whole raft of instructions that have something like: "Enter the text above (without quotes)". Some people will regard an instruction of Enter the system name ("main_system" in this case) that the system name is main_system. And others will think the system name is "main_system"

And that's before the confusion caused by having that instruction have a . at the end. Is the period part of the name or not?

The PC/AT used the 80286. It was some of the clone machines that used 8086 instead of 8088 (The Amstrad PC was one of these, if memory serves)

I had heard that one of the reasons IBM never really fully supported the PC was that they thought of it as a hobbyist curiosity, rather than something to be fully supported like their minicomputers and mainframes. (In my first workplace, even in 1990 there was an original 1981 vintage IBM PC in one office, along with a 1984 IBM PC/AT. in another office Both included the manuals which assumed that all the peripheral cards would have to be installed by the user, rather than being pre-installed at the factory. The mindset being one of "minicomputer users will pay for an IBM engineer to set up the machine. PC users are on their own.")

I also recall that one of the early PC iterations used an 88000 chip, which would have been more powerful than their minicomputers, so the PC team were told to use something less capable. Hence the 8086.

Back then, KB was all binary
"The term 'kilobyte' has traditionally been used to refer to 1024 bytes ...
The binary meaning of the kilobyte for 1024 bytes typically uses the symbol KB, with an uppercase letter K ...
In December 1998, the IEC addressed such multiple usages and definitions by creating prefixes such as kibi, mebi, gibi, etc., to unambiguously denote powers of 1024"
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

Hence, anything built before 1998 should use the nomenclature in place at that time. Maybe.

While Betteridge's law says no, real life says "that depends"

If Copilot actually turns out to be the Next Big Thing, then "yes". If it fizzles, then "probably not"

If they go full on Windows on ARM, then "yes". If they try and sideline it and stick with Intel/AMD then power generating companies will love it, but everyone else will be looking more closely at the power vs performance metrics. If the "power at any cost" group is larger than the "best performance at the least power" then the original question may also be a "yes", but otherwise, a "no"

Quote of the day, there.

"plausible looking bullshit" = "you can fool some of the people all of the time"

"write a six-word story about baby shoes," riffing on the famous (if apocryphal) Hemingway story. They failed but not in the way I expected. Bard gave me five words, and ChatGPT produced eight"

I dabbled with ChatGPT and first asked if it knew what a drabble was. It responded yes - a story of exactly 100 words.

However, when I then asked it to produce a drabble on "something vaguely scientific", over multiple attempts, it did anything from 85 to 130 words. But never hit the magic 100, despite the "exactly 100 words" being part of the core definition.

Thinking about it, and the best way to encourage random ideas in a group of people is to have one person spouting random stuff to a room of listeners. The listeners will then either rebut the original statement, or will then go "Hmmm. Not thought of that. Sounds interesting". Either way, the LLM will be tuned either to have improved accuracy (discount the provably incorrect) or better "insight" (the random discovery that actually works, like bacon and maple syrup, rather than the ones that don't, like bacon and wallpaper paste)

So perhaps the inability to do basic counting is a feature not a bug, as it is designed to provoke further thought. Which is fine when it is used amongst a bunch of fellow researchers, but makes for errors when just taken at face value

Since many artists claim their images are being used without recompense, then they may also find that image houses are less keen on purchasing an altered picture

Artist: "But why didn't you buy my latest picture? I spent hours on it!"

House: "In the same way that we don't buy your rough drafts, or the one that got data mangled. You deliberately made your work worse than it could be, so we are not interested"

That sounds very like the business where I work, that is also "all in".

Power BI, though, have pulled back the curtain a bit too much (for the rest of Microsoft) - I tried to utilise one feature, and got a "you need the premium version for that. You only have the pro version" (or similar). A Power BI guru told me that the pro version was a lowish amount per seat per month. The premium version was all that plus a five-figure sum per premium user per month. No doubt Microsoft finance would have preferred those additional features to be available in the pro version for just long enough for people to use them and become dependent on them before the full price was revealed.

Nothing like going retro - the PowerMac G5 is only around 20 years old.

Clearly, they should go full on retro and write stuff for the Motorola 68000 series

(And maybe Intel isn't mentioned because they already have Intel versions - ransomware works by subverting whatever OS is in place, so whether it is MacOS, Windows or Linux matters less once the ransomware part is written)

The summary says they made "a bright blue crystalline fleck"

That doesn't sound like they made enough to make a short length of wire.

Interesting, but a mass production process will be needed to make it truly revolutionary

(assuming, of course, that they actually did get it right)

Unless they are getting the infrastructure in place for the first lunar colonies (which may end up being non-government funded, just for the bragging rights "We beat NASA")

I'm pretty sure that whales won't swim into wind turbine blades*.

* unless they are sperm whales falling from a great height alongside a bowl of petunias

Headline:
"Does Thanking Too Many People in the Credits Indicate a Movie is Bad? "

Conclusion:
"The industry belief that having more than the average number of people thanked in the credits means the movie is bad is flat-out wrong."

Yup. Betteridge's Law still working

I recently went from an iPhone 6S (bought second hand in near mint condition) to a (new) iPhone SE (4th gen).

While the phones are the same size, the differences in battery life and even camera image quality are worth it.

I'll probably hang on to the SE for 3 - 4 years though, as it is good enough for my needs