Anyone else showing first signs of a ChatGPT addiction? I love to talk to that bot, as you can discuss pretty much anything, from geopolitics and state forms to your favorite scientific subject..

However, i keep hitting that 'too many requests in one hour' even if i'm going slow. And make a mental note of the time, to continue it later. Experience slight withdrawal symptoms, like the anticlimax from an high, and my mind is lost cause i'm still deep in the conversation but computer says no. ;)

Hello,
Thank you for contacting Netflix customer support.
Here is the transcript from your recent chat.
You
leuk, die e-mail, maar het is gewoon te duur geworden en netflix lijkt gek geworden. als je gewoon HD single sherm voor 8 euro had was er niks aan de hand. maar 15 pleurri om HD te mogen kijken nee dank je. groetjes, en als je dan toch spammed, doe op zijn minst een aanbieding.
You
hey dan
Dan Mark Netflix
Dit is onze Engelstalige chatlijn voor support. We kunnen je momenteel niet helpen in het Nederlands. Voor support in het Nederlands zijn we bereikbaar van 8.00 tot 23.00 uur (GMT+1). Bedankt voor je begrip.
You
you speak english?
Dan Mark Netflix
Yes, thank you. How can I help you today?
You
ok thanks. well, netflix screws up big time as you probably noticed too
You
in various ways. this chat is thanks to a spam/advertisement mail they sent trying to join me back
Dan Mark Netflix
Can you tell me more about your concern?
You
i took effort to put my opinion why it's in vein, and if you could forward that message to whomever responsible, please do so
Dan Mark Netflix
Let me take it as a feedback, but can you tell me more about your feedback, I understand you are unhappy, but can you confirm the reason?
You
the reason, they send mails and i just click the link for further help.
You
and your bot asks me for feedback, so, here you have it :)
Dan Mark Netflix
I see, so you think you are getting spam Emails from us?
You
wouldn't call it spam as i'm usually a happy customer
Dan Mark Netflix
Let me check on that, do you have an active Netflix account?
You
just i cut my monthly fees if i dont watch plenty or am bored, so they send this email trying me to rejoin
You
i do, but that's not relevant i think as its working fine as far i know.
Dan Mark Netflix
Oh so you want to not receive emails from us anymore?
You
nono i'm fine with your emails
You
but your employer seems to bit a bit, i must i say.. lost
You
and i do like to talk about it or give feedback
Dan Mark Netflix
May I know the email address linked to your account?
You
********************
Dan Mark Netflix
Thank you.
You
so, it wrote "Hi Rene, Here are 3 great reasons to come back to Netflix:"
Dan Mark Netflix
This account is currently closed.
You
and a button. and i clicked. and then clicked again once on the webpage to get your chat.
Dan Mark Netflix
So correct me if I am wrong, you don't want to receive any more emails? Or you wanted to know why it routes you to the chat page?
You
which i initially wrote in dutch, sorry for that
You
i got on this page:
You
contact customer service.
You
live chat.
You
here's the quote from the email: Hi Rene, Here are 3 great reasons to come back to Netflix: â Discover brand new TV shows & movies everyoneâ(TM)s talking about. Weâ(TM)ll suggest new titles tailored to your taste. â Rewatch old favorites. We saved your viewing history so you can pick up where you left off. â Download and go. That way you can watch Netflix even without WiFi. Ready to come back? REJOIN TODAY Or if you need help, donâ(TM)t hesitate to contact us.
Dan Mark Netflix
Thank you.
You
the last 2 words, contact us, got us directly to our chat.
Dan Mark Netflix
So you want to restart this account?
You
if i got a good deal or if you offered HD for $8
You
but you don't
Dan Mark Netflix
So you want to restart the account?
You
no, not now
Dan Mark Netflix
Where are you currently located?
You
netherlands
You
am i still talking to a bot?
Dan Mark Netflix
The plan that offers the standard plan with HD is for 11.99â.
Dan Mark Netflix
No I am a live person.
You
i think you legally entitled to asnwer, so please do.
You
am i talking to a person or a bot.
Dan Mark Netflix
I am a live person.
You
ok, thanks.
You
yes. ok.
Dan Mark Netflix
Again the Standard plan good for HD quality is for 11.99â.
You
and i'm sorry, and don't want to be impolite.
You
but as said, our chat was 2 clicks between my email and netflix'customer service
Dan Mark Netflix
That is fine, we understand.
You
so.
You
and netflix, in that very email, asks
Dan Mark Netflix
So you just want to report the layout of the email and why it routed you to us?
You
nah not really.
You
just i wonder what your bosses are up to and why and how it came this way cause.. they send an email with 3 reasons to come back.
You
but eh..
You
and i'd like to give some feedback on that.
You
don't get me wrong, i love netflix and watched a zillion hours and will.
Dan Mark Netflix
Let me take your concern and send it as a feedback, we are sending updates to your email to check if you maybe want to sign up again.
You
but your bosses and marketing team seems... weird.
You
so you send this email but dont even give some deal.
You
like spotify gives deals to come back 3 month for $0.99
You
and as far me goes.
Dan Mark Netflix
Sadly, that is just an email to ask you to sign up, however, we don't have any ongoing promotions.
You
i's just busy as soon i want watch some i just subsribe and wtahc, but slightly annoyed by the double display that i dont need but only has HD>
You
if i watch on monitor i like HD pls, on teli i don't care.
Dan Mark Netflix
Sorry but our plans are fixed, we cannot modify it for 1 screen at a time with HD quality included.
You
i understand.
You
yet, netflix sends those e-mails.
Dan Mark Netflix
So you don't want to receive emails that does not offer any promotions?
You
nono i'm fine with emails and promotions
You
but be fair, this wasnt even a promotion.
You
what deal?
Dan Mark Netflix
I understand that, so you want to receive come back emails only if there is promotion on it?
You
no. just send me all emails.
Dan Mark Netflix
And you don't want to receive come back emails that only has standard plans?
You
i want this like, uplifted. as customer complaint.
You
about customer trust in sanity of the ones owning it
You
i'll be back as soon i want watch some, i end monthly if i'm too busy doing other things, it's all fair deal. just.
Dan Mark Netflix
Let me take that as a feedback.
You
just. that this e-mail made me scratch my head so much
You
yes please.
Dan Mark Netflix
Feedback has been sent.
You
thanks.
You
i mean. i do think netflix i fantastic service.
You
good deal. fair price. watch funny shit. all good.
Dan Mark Netflix
We may not be able to update you about your feedback regarding our offers and emails, but be rest assured we will look into it.
Dan Mark Netflix
Thanks for the feedback and we will get back to you if ever we have any good deals in the future.
You
what exactly did you send as feedback?
Dan Mark Netflix
That you wanted to receive emails with good deals in the future and to have a low plan that carries HD quality.
You
sounds about very accurate.
You
really?
You
ok makes my day if you upthingied this.
Dan Mark Netflix
Thanks for the feedback. But currently we don't have a low rate plan that has HD.
Dan Mark Netflix
Anything else that I can help you with today?
You
that's ok
Dan Mark Netflix
Thanks for contacting Netflix. Always stay safe.

Questions? Call 1-844-505-2993
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So i became one them naggers that complains 'this news just click bait'.
3 days of /. entries. None of them news for nerds that matter.
Of course, it could be that there's just no news that matter. Or that i got saturated with internet 'news'. Or news in general. Leaves the question if there's anything that matters at all.
Y. I became one of them. Them naggers that complain about news being newsworthy. To /.'s defense, 'Microsoft' 'Apple' or 'Bitcoin' not even in the headlines. Still. Not worthy reading. Let alone commenting. Maybe reading off-topic comments. Yay. Universe AI can't entertain me anymore i guess.

Did google just horribly screw up the gmail interface. Wtf they thinking. And i thought i was tipsy but seriously, this dynamic CSS/script/UI so wrong, don't even have words.

Let's hope it's just an experiment aka bad dream. Anything else, time to start looking for a sane mail client.

Seems to me, ask /. has disappeared from the interface. And thinking about it, don't recall reading any asks recently. Am i missing something or did a key thing that made /. /. disappear?

Nevermind whatever i wanted to post in ask. Seems them not interested anyways, so why bother. Rather head on to EEVBlog or some, even if it's software related. Sad day to realize most predictions about /.'s future came true. I'm too small for big things, i think.

A while ago, Tom Scott had a video about AI generated subjects for new video's. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DTfVYxnhuEdU

Today's /. makes me think it's just that.. Allow me to quote, as up to this very moment::

Elon Musk and Apple Deny Wild Story That He Tried To Replace Tim Cook
Elon Musk Backs Epic in Fight Against Apple Over App Store Fees
Russian Hackers Continue With Attacks Despite Biden Warning
China Orders 25 Tech Giants To Fix Raft of Problems
Google and Microsoft Clash Over Documents in US Antitrust Suit
'The War Has Changed': Internal CDC Document Urges New Messaging, Warns Delta Infections Likely More Severe
Amazon Hit With $887 Million Fine by European Privacy Watchdog
IBM's AI Can Predict How Parkinson's Disease May Progress In Individuals
TSMC Will Start Making 2nm Chips As Intel Tries To Catch Up
YouTuber Won $10,000 Bet With a Physicist Over Wind-Powered Vehicle

Last month, i posted here i'd quit using Firefox, reason being the next fuckup by Mozilla, which i really don't even bother to recall what that was, since they have had plenty, a bucket full. Had to pick an alternative, and i went for one that was already on my system, and totally unknown to me: Microsoft's Edge.

After a couple of days, i posted here what a delight that was. How Edge was snappy, well performing, had a clean interface and did everything i wanted. And so after one month, what's the verdict?

I still use Edge, and i'm quite content with it. It just works. I did not encounter any website with issues. I might have seen a rendering glitch left or right, but it's hard to blame the browser for that without further investigation.

So, not complaints at all? Yes, i have some. Most are related to video playback. A minor issue is that, when dragging the video over several monitors, it displays half video on one, and a black square on the other monitor. It's a thing i didn't experience for over a decade, and seems tied to Edge. Not that i double-checked a recent chrome build. But VLC does not do so, and Firefox does not. Also, it's a really minor thing, barely an issue.

What is an issue is video's playing audio out of sync. Had that on more than one occasion. And to make sure it was not the video source, a page reload typically fixes it. Longer video's are more prone to the issue, but had it happen on shorter video's too. Not daily, but in a month it happened on several occasions.

So, is that it? Yes that's it. Am i happy? Not really but it's acceptable. Do i miss Mozilla? Like a headache. And yes, i do feel guilty about that. But for now, the pragmatic me just goes for the best user experience. I'm not turning back.. Thanks Mozilla, so long and thanks for all the fish, i promise i'll check what you have to offer in a year from now, ok? Meanwhile, i follow the herd.

So, Mozilla's decisions slowly alienated me. After last weeks blunder, decided was time to switch to something else that was at least safer. With pain in my heart, i decided to try the most popular alternative, that was already on my computer and was not Google's Chrome: Microsoft Edge.

Importing browser data (passwords, history) from Firefox and Chrome was a breeze and worked out just fine. And then the premature conclusion after 2 days browsing on my somewhat older hardware: what a delightful experience.

Microsoft edge is snappy, pages load fast, i did not realize Firefox was that sluggish, thought it was my hardware. There's no features i miss, ad blocker works just fine, video's play smooth, printing pages is fine and the layout is clean and goes out of the way. Also, i can just customize a personal new-tab page without defaulting to using an extension. So as far usability and user experience goes, Edge wins head and shoulders here.

Now, for privacy. Edge has some settings which i assume it obeys. Besides, it's a weird choice anyways: do i want my spying data sent to Microsoft, Google or Firefox. Well, Google needs to figure out how to customize advertisements without easy access to all my data, decided that much a while ago already. And Mozilla is not really transparent how they use my data either, they rather try to offer me a VPN subscription so they can spy on that, too.

Of course i checked other browsers, but actually they appear to have issues. Like the Brave browser is just being hypocrite. Other offerings have similar issues as they need to make a coin somehow. So, there are no proper open-source browsers other than Mozilla with proper html5, style and multimedia support.

Now, this is not a review, but as a last note: Mozilla has some serious issues winning my love back. Of course i'll watch them. Of course it'll have a special place in my heart. But they on a path and direction i don't like, while Microsoft's new direction actually seem to be totally acceptable, and as software quality goes, they actually delivered. So for now, i am just enjoying my newfound snappy system. It's like i have a new computer for free, so i want to thank Mozilla for that.

So long and thanks for all the fish.

Seems Alphabet is suffering from the Mozilla complex: Change for the sake of change but not necessarely for the better because users want it, but because developers or GUI designers went drinking too much on a friday night sketching revolutionary disasters.

Youtube, this new layout is horrible. It fails to use my screen real estate properly, and it hides my most favorite part of Youtube: the related videos. Yes, i know i can scroll down. But the new layout is now just wasting black space where those nice suggestions were. And bigger or fullscreen video's were always an option.

Not sure which successful competitor has such layout that you wish to copy. But please undo or give the option to undo. It may seem minor to you but in my view it makes the site way more uncomfortable. Has nothing to do with 'getting used to'. It's just a bad design. Not that i have the illusion anyone at Alphabet listens or gives a #2.

So, today Google decided to brighten my day with the following message

Right. Yes i seen payment failed for the $2 i pay them monthly for storage space. I appreciate that service but i forgot to up my paypal balance, hence.

However, now they're telling me that because of that soon i can't send or receive e-mail? So my free gmail account is tied to my payed storage space?

I'm close to calling this a scam. But google wins - i'll use another cloud service for my collection of files, photos and backups. Google drive sux on Linux anyways it's a windows only thing. Google's standard 15GB is plenty for my mail and google docs storage.

I won't even bother to contact them. Someone at Google marketing should get a training in customer-centric thinking. Bet they don't realize i'm not in love with them, i'm a pragmatic person. They have some good stuff. But apparently also rip-off stuff and i don't like that attitude.

As programmer, sometimes i like to bother myself with a theoretical question without the urge to implement it. Here's one.

How to leak some bits, let's say one byte, of information from a custom application without any networking capabilities to a fictive attacker-controlled server. Solutions for any (windows/linux/*) platform acceptable. Bonus points for steganography as in: staying as unnoticeable as possible.

One of the most obvious solutions would be a route via DNS. Have the client do a DNS lookup, where the lookup ends on a host controlled by the attacker. By selecting the interval of the lookups one could send information. If we select the interval longer than the TTL of the DNS record it'd not be cached by any DNS proxy, and we can encode multiple bits in the interval duration itself.

If we could control more details of the DNS request itself, it's easy to send even more information (like encoding it as a subdomain name) but has the drawback of possibly gaining attention from a network admin and would on inspection reveal the nature of the DNS request. So, a time-delta based approach is preferable.

So the trick is to get the host computer make a DNS request to a user selectable domain from an application with no network capabilities.

Of course other routes than DNS acceptable as well. As long as we can trigger the host to make the connection, not the application and preferably not easily back-traceable to our application.

We could just launch another application - a web browser, a mail client, curl, with some url-based request. That seems a bit too obvious but would surely be a workable approach. So i'll add to the challenge: without (directly) launching another process. Having said that, it would be acceptable if it's stealthy enough, like repeating the action frequently for some plausible reason but to only once every so often send out data.

A quick brainstorm: file IO, generating an error message, trigger an online 'help', multimedia (video codecs), trigger an update process, IO on a file server, trigger a virus scan lookup, edit a document or IM with an url, use the clipboard, ....

I didn't find a valid way yet that's acceptable according to the conditions set by the challenge. Did i mention no user interaction required? Although abusing something that users do anyway usually would be acceptable too i guess.

Maybe to be continued. Or not.

I'm very worried. Not about the Corona virus itself. I am worried about the vastly increasing amount of corporate censorship.

While it has been steadily increasing the last couple of years - comments on mainstream media not getting posted or deleted, the Corona issue seem to have accelerated things. Youtube is deleting video's that do not represent mainstream opinions. I seen examples of video's removed, some of them i'd watched right after publishing.

One of them contained nuanced information and a properly executed interview. I see zero reason for YouTube to delete it, yet it did mention a few corona-related opinions that are not necessarily mainstream in every country. And it got deleted.

Governments all over the world have been pushing this self-censorship of companies over the last decade. Facebook, YouTube and others have armies of moderators that will delete 'undesirable' content. Recently France put the thread of a big fine if Facebook would not aggressively moderate undesirable content. It's growing, partly because of legislation partly because companies' own initiatives.

How is anyone able to form an opinion if half of the narrative gets removed? I'm perfectly able to make an opinion of my own, thank you. I do not blindly believe what people say mainstream or sidestream. You don't have to pre-filter information for me to protect my brain against subversive influences.

I'm worried, very worried. Not to get ill from a virus. But to me it seems society is ill. Mainstream media are parrots of each other and a select few. We are no longer expected to think, all the thinking is done for us. Does that sound like animal farm, brave new world or China's humanitarian issues? Yes it does.

Stories that put all might in a hand of a few with the plebs blindly following and being guarded from 'bad' information are of all times. And overnight, we not only live in a movie scene. We also live in the wrong SF story on the wrong planet far away from home.

I do not necessarily think governments use the wrong approach in the crisis. They are rightfully being careful, and guided by (medical) general consensus. It could be worse. I'm actually impressed. However, meanwhile our stream of objective information suffers. We get told what to believe and what is correct and people regard it as objective because it's the only narrative they hear. I'm scared for our future, as it seems society is shaped permanently by this.

"I might as well get corona now before they run out of hospital beds"
This is not only a very selfish thought, but also wrong. If you'd get infected now, by the time you get ill (2 week incubation, 1-3 week intensive care) the hospital might already have run out of beds.

"5 feet distance / 1.5m distance not works"
Nothing works 100% but it significantly reduces the risk. Best is to avoid others altogether, the 5 feet distance is in case you have to do the unavoidable (grocery shopping, deliveries etc). Having meetings sitting 5 feet apart with a bunch of colleagues is still not a good idea.

"I already had flu-like symptoms, i'm already immune"
The normal flu also still goes around, same for common cold. Without testing, one cannot distinguish between flu, allergies and corona. You'll only know once it's too late.

"We might as well go on as normal, this is bad for economy".
My personal opinion: screw economy. Most developed countries have plenty reserves to buffer some economical damage. Worst predictions assume around 10% economic loss, and that's if the lock-down lasts a full year. The economical damages of people not being saved that could have been saved are much bigger than any temporary loss of production. And, at least in my view, people are more important than economy. Be very worried about the poor countries as they may not have the buffers or resources to act adequately. Don't worry if you are living in a rich country as we're all in the same boat.

The price of isolation is a very small price to pay compared to the outcome when too many ignore it. Experts say so, i go by their opinion. I'm a computer ''expert'', not a virus expert. I often wish people/politicians/companies would listen more often to experts. This is the time to listen to the people that actually know a thing or two about the matter, and they advise to please have social isolation so we can spread the damage over time and meanwhile hope or pray for a solution like a vaccine or cure. Please don't be the one that knows it better than the experts. No-one likes what's happening, but please remember that you don't do it for yourself, you do it for others.

Today i was testing something at work - an embedded device that will typically be disconnected from the internet, however it has a GPS unit that's controlled by our application. As part of that i need to set the system time, so we can log our data with a correct time stamp. So far so good and no rocket science here.
While testing it, i discovered something obnoxious. I tried setting dates in the past and the future. And to my surprise, it would not set a date in the far future, like.. 2099. Or 2050. The furthest it would go was 2038, setting it on January 1st 2039 failed.
Now, the reason behind it may be overly simple: it's a 32-bit device, it probably internally uses 32-bit Unix time which is set to expire January 19. 2038.
I'm very unhappy with that situation. First of all, having a 32-bit device is no reason at all not to use a 64-bit timestamp for timekeeping. It's not like using another 32 bits is going to slow down the device significant. Secondly, 20 years is not that far in the future at all. Yes, i hope to have retired by then, or maybe i enjoy my job so much i'll still be working after the legal retirement age. But again, 20 years is not that long. My Commodore-64 is almost twice that age and still works as well as on day 1. Among my tools are items from my stepdad and my granddad, all working as expected. My hifi set has components from the 80's and i've collected older stuff from the 70's and they all work well.
But now, 2019, i'm designing and creating a measurement device using electronics. And i already know it will break within 20 years, well before it's technical life span. And i'm uncomfortable with that. And apart jumping hoops, like doing my own time tracking, there's not much i can do to fix it. Not looking forward until 2038 might have sounded reasonable in the 90's. But we're nearing the 2020's and selling equipment that won't last another decade feels unprofessional, and leaves me with an unsatisfying feeling for the day.

My anti-love for our friends in Redmond has just grown by another order of magnitude today.
Not only did it decide, without asking, if i wanted to run the update now - ignoring any settings regarding updates.

It automatically did so, and left my entire system in an unbootable state.

Inspection showed it not only screwed up the MBR or overwrite it with NT loader (it actually failed to install a bootloader even for the windows partition). It also removed the ID's from it's own NTFS filesystem, letting Grub2 list it as 'msdos/unknown'.

Worst of all, it decided that the ext4fs in the extended partition space was useless, and just wiped this entire partition from the partition table.

Cheers. It left my PC ultimately de-functional. And, having an SSD installed i did not have significant hope of recovering my Mint installation.

Little googling on smartphone learned me this problem is anything but new, and similar issues seem to exist since windows 8.

This lets me believe that this is not a glitch. It also makes it obvious that either the quality control of MS is a big big mess, either this act of sabotage is done purposely. Come on, since windows 8.0 and a million hits on Google, this is an obvious issue and an obvious error.
Besides, destroying the boot loader i could see as accident or glitch. But purposely deleting a partition? That can only be done on purpose.

Another thing that bugs me is - this was just a maintenance install. Not a fresh install of windows or whatever 'normal' event a human could consider as the right time to make a proper backup before letting an black-box installer toying around with the file-system. This was an installation aggressively pushed by Redmond _and_ it fucked up.

Anyways, fortunate for me others made it easy to fix both issues. Grub2 documentation happily points to a live CD 'supergrub2disk' that can fix the boot issue. But before doing that, i wanted to try recover my partition. fdisk, gparted and parted showed empty space. Parted's 'rescue' command stay silence in all dimensions, despite giving it sector-accurate info. The tool 'testdisk' eventually was able to recover it nicely in the blink of an eye.

So.. Lessons learned today - always keep a boot disk at hand, don't throw them away after installation - sorry for that bad habit, but the occasional times i install linux on my desktop we're years and many major releases further.
Second lesson was how to use some tools. And it's amazing that the community actually has great working tools to recover even from errors created by this buggy software called MS windows.
Third lesson, about time to copy some data and delete this dangerous windows installation entirely from my SSD. Not only do i hardly use it, even when i do _not_ use windows it manages to destroy my data and make me spend hours of work not the way i planned to spend them.

You have been warned if you dual-boot installation: Microsoft Windows - Not an OS but a computer destroy system.