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Comment Re:So what is it good for then? (Score 1) 54

OK, so what is it good for?

LLMs excel at writing filler text which is mandated by some ritual but whose content is unimportant. For example, your fifth-grade report on the life and times of George Washington Carver, which is required work to get a grade but not anything likely to contribute to the sum total of human knowledge.

An LLM can write a summary better than a bored student, but that's really only of value to the student wanting to cheat -- it doesn't benefit society in any way, and the real value of educating the student is lost.

Comment Re:I'm shocked! (Score 1) 14

"but, wait! there's MORE" from other shills. Downright dark pattern manipulative.

Ron Popeil had some iconic catchphrases (as immortalized in Weird Al's song "Mr. Popeil"), but I wouldn't call any of them a dark pattern.

But I will say that when it comes to buying appeal, there's nothing like dark patterns to really take the Shein off.

Comment I noticed something was different (Score 1) 80

I noticed recently that certain downloads to machines with old TCP/IP stacks and a mediocre wifi uplink were progressing much more smoothly than I was used to, with almost no collisions.

I was actually wondering if Comcast had done something to address congestion (before I knew of this story, I mean â" not confirmation bias), and it turns out that I'm in one of the pilot areas.

Comment Re:Not this again (Score 1) 126

When it the last time you wrote optimized assembler? For me it's over 4 decades.

For me, it was five weeks ago. :-) (But it wasn't for x86[_64] or ARM...)

These days compilers not only do a better job,

The ones like GCC and clang that saw continued improvement over the last decade, definitely. The 2000-era Metrowerks compilers I'm using to indulge my classic Mac OS fetish, not so much. It's trivial to beat the 68K compiler, even without being clever.

but the source code is more portable.

In most cases, my code was already platform-independent, so I leave the C/C++ implementation in place guarded by preprocessor conditional directives.

Comment What about offline play? (Score 2) 47

Among Microsoft's offers were a 10-year commitment letting European consumers play Activision titles on any cloud gaming service.

What about playing not on a cloud service? I loved the original Starcraft and its Brood War expansion, but I opted to avoid Starcraft 2 due to its online-only requirement.

(I never did finish Brood War's Zerg campaign; any time I want to spend on RTS gaming can go toward that.)

Comment Re:You shouldn't. Nobody should. (Score 1) 240

Yes, it's "just as good" as Ruby, Python, or other competing problem-space solutions in a strict Turing-completeness way, but in all pragmatic senses it has been a complete and utter rolling disaster.

Godwin's Law applies just as well to programming language advocacy: If your defense of a language requires pointing out that it's Turing-complete, you lose the argument.

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