Not the same thing, but I still have my old Voodoo 2 3D-accelerator card (not the same thing as a video card back then).

When I bought my Windows 11 laptop a month ago, I was able to set up a local account after turning on airplane mode. (I had entered my wifi password in an earlier step since I thought it was just for installing updates.)

I spent those years in dll hell.

People seem to hold computers to a higher standard than other people when performing the same task.

I don’t think you’re interpreting the phrase correctly. It’s not about harming someone in order to make money vs not harming them at all, but rather about harming someone in order to make money (or attain some other reasonable goal) vs harming them simply because you wanted to. Consider the analogous situation with animals: shooting a deer because you want to eat it vs shooting it because you like killing things. The deer probably won’t like you any better in the first case, but most onlookers will.

That’s just from the debris of all the drones they shot down, duh.

(Sarcasm, just in case.)

I get that that’s why they want ordinary users to create online accounts but irritating the small but vocal number of power users that this change affects seems like it costs more in goodwill than it gains in data.

I eventually got to create a local account on my laptop by putting it into airplane mode using the keyboard shortcut. Why is Microsoft so desperate to force even power users to use an online account?

The funny thing is that that wouldn’t take much energy - less than a hundred (kilo)calories according to my very rough estimate. The silicon would boil.

I view the author list of industry papers more as a sales-and-marketing thing than as a real list of contributors, but shouldn’t that be “Neuralink and E. Musk” anyway? The equivalent of the P. I. putting his name first like that is unorthodox.

Sometimes when I open my mouth really wide, I somehow spray a little stream of saliva, like from a squirt gun. It makes me feel like the dilophosaurus in Jurassic Park, but so far I haven’t been able to do it on purpose.

Hah, my grandfather had heart problems and very high cholesterol so we gave him such a hard time for eating unhealthy food. But now I have been a vegetarian for almost twenty years (I try to avoid eggs and dairy too) and my cholesterol is just as high as his was, unless I take medications. So we should have just let him eat whatever he wanted to…

Edison was apparently quite successful, to the point where some languages other than English have a word that sounds like “hello” (for example, Russian “allo”) which is used only when answering the phone.

At least you don’t have my “sky-high cholesterol no matter what you eat” gene.

Also artificial sweeteners have an unpleasant chemical aftertaste that lingers for a long time. Apparently that’s generic too…

I don’t disagree; I’m just talking about relative risk.

Their problem:

So apparently NetHack has a mechanic that slightly changes how the game plays every time it’s full moon according to your system clock

The model wasn’t trained on a full moon. They had a system to set up the environment for replicable results but it didn’t include modifying the system time.

It reminds me of another bug with the system time, which a friend of mine encountered. He was working on hardware and he was getting a lot of units that worked fine at the factory, immediately failed at the client’s location, and then worked again when they were returned to the factory. It turned out that when these machines were turned on, their embedded OS automatically queried some server to update the current time. The client’s internet connection had such high latency that the server’s response only came back after the machine was already in use. This generated a huge delta-t value that triggered the sanity checks and shut the machine down. The factory had a much lower-latency connection and so the race condition could never be replicated there.

As for the weirdest bug I ever encountered myself: a compiler generating bad machine code. I have often said that the worst part of programming is that the computer always does exactly what you tell it to, but that was the one and only time in twenty years that the computer actually didn’t.

Apparently it’s still going to be legal to possess them with a prescription, but can doctors in Louisiana write such a prescription?

about 0.3% of people who used mifepristone to end a pregnancy experienced a major complication, meaning they required hospitalization, surgery or a blood transfusion. Surgical abortions done in the first trimester of pregnancy, by comparison, resulted in major complications 0.16% of the time

These pills are more dangerous than a surgical abortion? That’s not what I would have expected.

When I was in California, I saw perfectly peeled lemons lying under a friend’s lemon tree. He told me the rats did it - they ate the peel but were very careful not to bite into the sour inside.

Too bad I’m not a celebrity, because my shirts now don’t just look like my shirts from twenty years ago, they are my shirts from twenty years ago.

Maybe this is a dumb question, but why would Ukraine target a minesweeper?