Posts by Hero Protagonist

Re: Bad design

The difference between Administrative State and Operational State

Re: Vital detail missing

Roasted guinea pigs Shirley, unless they happened to jump into a vat of oil to escape the flames

Re: Ah, the equivalent of a modern day rollback!

Nowhere in the story does it claim that it was Walter’s idea, he just appears to have been there and lived to tell the tale.

Cliques

*Clichés

Re: before my time

Spent a good chunk of my career using those terminals! Loved being able to open a couple of 60 row by 80 column windows on the 5620, which was a tall portrait orientation screen.

Did you have the GEBACA (Get Back At Corporate America) game? Corporate logos flying around the screen that you had to shoot. I think it was the AT&T logo that when you shot it, spawned the logos of the Baby Bell companies that were divested in the 1984 breakup. And then there was Crazy Eddie, who spewed out a stream of words like his TV commercials, and you had to shoot the individual words. Good times!

Re: First time on the internet...

That’s what she said!

Re: nice story

“Actually, my comment on safety of nuclear power was a joke. Apparently, a dozen of Reg commentards can't spot one, this friday.”

That should be your signal to tell better jokes.

Ohm my god, watt a collection of electrical puns, each one a precious joule. I think I’ve diode and gone to heaven!

Re: Effect as a verb

> For old times' sake, I leaned over a shoulder and clicked a few buttons. Sure enough, that message had reverted yet again to "effect."

So what you’re telling us is that you were unable to effect a permanent change.

<ducks>

Re: "it's game over"

Nope, it’s a don’t-has-bean-anymore!

Re: “anything but common”

There’s common sense and then there’s uncommon sense, but mostly there’s common nonsense.

Re: Jack Dorsey

So what you’re saying is, you don’t know jack?

Re: he/she

The singular “they” has been used for hundreds of years. To quote another song co-written by Mr. Henley: “Get over it!”

A scenario where yes/no/cancel makes sense: you exit a program with unsaved work, it asks you if you want to save your changes. Yes means save and exit, no means exit without saving, cancel means don’t exit.

Re: American Song Contest aims to tap Eurovision formula

Ooh, you’ve just hit on how humans are more like bananas than like bees (per another thread in this comment section) — we both have Peels!

Re: Like primitive man putting his hand in fire

“Don't forget this is war, and the first casualty are innocents. OK, truth.”

It’s also said that the first casualty of war is the plan, and that certainly seems to have held true for Russia.

Re: Rumour has it .....

+1 for creative icon usage

Re: All aboard the next part of the gravy train trip

Hmm I wonder if I mark your words now, will I still be able to find them in 40 years to check?

Re: Along the same lines but in reverse, I suppose...

“…and push back in after starting”

Re: The chicken or the egg?

Well the contents of the egg is identical at the DNA level to the chicken that emerges from it, so the egg came first.

“ the screen cleared and slowly filled with block art”

Maybe the client was just unhappy that it took too long to display?

Re: Wood Panelled Offices

And presumably tried to set you up with their daughters?

Re: Box ticking

They forgot to include blockchain

Re: Ah, a first time user

I also took a typing class in probably 8th or 9th grade (early 70s), and learned to use both the left and right shift keys as appropriate. When faced with a keypunch machine in college, however, I had to unlearn the use of the right shift key since the keypunch only had left shift (I don’t recall what took the place of right shift), and to this day 40+ years later I still never use right shift.

Re: Lovers or dolphins?

“This is how AI, that was trained on dogs, sees a supermarket”

You have completely misconstrued what that video is. In the comments, the creator says he used DeepDream to create it. The Wikipedia entry for DeepDream states:

“The software is designed to detect faces and other patterns in images, with the aim of automatically classifying images. However, once trained, the network can also be run in reverse, being asked to adjust the original image slightly so that a given output neuron (e.g. the one for faces or certain animals) yields a higher confidence score. This can be used for visualizations to understand the emergent structure of the neural network better, and is the basis for the DeepDream concept….After enough reiterations, even imagery initially devoid of the sought features will be adjusted enough that a form of pareidolia results, by which psychedelic and surreal images are generated algorithmically.”

So it’s not how the Ai “sees” the original image; all those “false positives” are intentionally generated by iteratively modifying the source image. It’s more like a video effect of “make everything in this image look like a dog.”