I asked ChatGPT to generate a Seinfeld episode for me. It generated a story where Kramer starts to collect mustard sauce, and becomes obsessed to find the perfect one. I thought the idea was hilarious. But then I asked it to generate the dialogs, and they were crap. (But, then again, it was a Seinfeld episode, maybe the dialogs were on point).

That's how Joshua Wars II started.

When I taught programming at college, I actually had to teach students to read error messages. Not once or twice, but multiple times every semester.

I tried it to see what kind of results I could get with it. It happens that I have some different implementations of the Fast Fourier Transform that I use to benchmark these kind of things. What I found out is:

It doesn't implement every Python module. I couldn't get the array module to work. But this might be in their future plans.

It can get a little picky with variable types. For example, multiplying an integer with a complex won't work, or trying to print an integer using a floating point format. Maybe they're working on it too.

It can take some time to compile and run.

While the scripts indeed run faster, it was nothing close to 10x the speed, much less 100x. In general, I got a 2.5x speed up. It was outperformed by Pypy in every test I made.

Just for the record, I have the same algorithms implemented in C, and Pypy performs comparably to C. Disclaimer: they are not optimized, instead, I made an effort to make the same operations as much as possible, with the intent of comparing speeds. Also, not a scientific assessment, so take it with a grain of salt.

In Brazil, there is a door manufacturer called "Fuck". This is their page, but they seemed to have changed their name by adding SA to the end (which, in Brazil, means a private limited company). They have nice door models -- every single one of them with women names -- Catarina, Cecilia, Polyanna, etc.. So, when you want to buy a door, you just ask to "Fuck Catarina", or something like that. I'm pretty sure it's intentional.

One in a million. We're doomed.

Here is mine:

Just like every other woman with whom I chatted before. Sounds perfectly human to me.

And then he threw a chair.

So, it IS an accident?

I have this book. When I was trying to learn to draw, I used to read it every day. The author describes a kind of a "zen state of mind", where you lose your ability to think rationally and even talk. I spent a lot of time trying to achieve this state of mind. Never could. There are parts of this book that makes sense: the way you described, for example, that what we know about the world affects how we interpret what we see. But that magical state where you turn into a fantastic drawer, like the pictures shown in the book, I don't think make a lot of sense. In fact, today we know that you cannot dissociate left and right sides of the brain when interpreting or imagining images.

The book, however, helped me with the section that was called, I think, "letting the left side help", where the author describes how to measure and stablish proportions. Turns out, however, that this is not related to left or right side of the brain: any book on drawing I read later had the exact same techniques. I learned how to draw using them, and turns out that what you need is actually a lot of practice and knowledge. She presents a nice technique for copying pictures and nothing else. In the time I got more knowledge about sciences, all that book said sounded incredibly pseudo-scientific to me.

The reasoning is flawed anyways: no matter how much people repeat something that is wrong, it doesn't become right. It just doesn't follow -- if the studies were all biased and badly conducted, no matter how many of them exist, their conclusions are wrong.

Following their reasoning: respectable (to astrologers) astrology journals have published much much more studies on the relevance of astrology than respectable psychologists published on video game violence. Thus, according to their arguments, astrology must be right. Same for every pseudoscience out there. And, here is one thing to think about: there is a lot of criticism on how research is conducted on psychology -- many people consider it borderline pseudoscientific.

... the answer was 42.

Don't worry. Rats are already the most intelligent species on Earth. Followed by dolphins, and then humans.

No, no. This one is already done. Nimoy is rumoured to play Smaug, anyway. Wouldn't it be nice if Smaug sang this when he is having his talkings with Bilbo?

This sucks. Don't get me wrong, I loved how they portrayed their respective characters in the LOTR movie (except, maybe, Elijah Wood couldn't convince me as Frodo, but, then again, he could never convince me as any character in any movie). What I wanted to see was some diversity -- different people with different acting, different characterization. When I was younger, I would like the unified choice, but these days, I think that difference in portrayals could only enhance the appreciation of both the movies and the books. Having the same actors and the same director is basically the same as having only one artist making illustrations of the book.