palordrolap

I can see a lot of smaller companies (and maybe one or two reasonably big ones) opting for air-gapped networks of old operating systems and older versions of Office. A fool’s errand, sure, and for a number of reasons, but it’s cheap, and upper management likes cheap.

Just double-checked with the help manual of the one I use (PasswordSafe) and it looks like it can do it. Never actually tried it though, which is one of the reasons I didn’t mention it previously.

At the risk of sounding like an ad (I’m not affiliated, just a someone who found it in their Linux distro’s package manager), there are versions of it for pretty much any device. I definitely can’t vouch for the feature set(s) of the other versions, though.

You could probably convince a third-party password storage program to store and auto-type details like that. Preferably one that doesn’t need internet access to work.

There’s that bit in an episode of Red Dwarf, that may or may not have been a collective hallucinated memory of the crew, where they talk about a series of mechanoids (servant androids) that were “too human” looking and which unnerved customers.

The result of that was that they made their next series of mechanoids look like Kryten, with the low-poly heads on a similarly angular body.

Even if it was a false memory, the logic is absolutely sound. You want your 'bots to be at the other side of the uncanny valley, not at the bottom, creeping all horror-show-like up the side towards us.

Clearly a cousin of The Strid. Except the Strid is usually full to the brim and you can’t see the literal death walls that lie beneath the surface.

Tom Scott made a video about it during his many adventures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCSUmwP02T8

That \\. part doesn’t look right, but what do I know. Apparently control codes are valid elsewhere, so a literal backslash followed by any character, even a space or a newline, might actually be valid there.

“Yeah, my e-mail address is abc, carriage return, three backspaces and a terminal bell at example dot com. … What do you mean your mail program doesn’t support it?”

Sometimes, when something won’t even compile, I have try to compile it a second time - and get the exact same error message(s) - before my brain will accept there is a problem and perhaps begin to see the cause.

Somewhere in my head must be a gremlin who says, “No! It is the compiler that is wrong!”

The same can apply to semantic errors (the code is valid but does not do what it was intended to do) but those take longer to track down. To make the trick work, the debugging output has to be in just the right place in order to print proof of the wrong logic and then do the same on the next run, preferably in under a minute, so that I can begin to see the error.

You haven’t watched or read much dystopian fiction (or fact, as below), have you?

My mind always goes to that one scene in Roots where, below decks on the slaver ship, the captured slaves-to-be stage a revolt and resolve to swim to the bank of the river the ship is sailing on. They succeed in reaching the top deck, a masterpiece of planning, only to become dazed both by the daylight as well as the fact there was no riverbank in sight.

Those poor bastards were from inland, had probably never been more than a few miles from their villages. They literally couldn’t conceive of something as large as the Atlantic ocean.

Likewise you’re failing to conceive all the ways that your plans won’t work. You really think you’ll get to someone’s crotch or eyes? And if you do, that you’ll not be overcome and won’t get that opportunity next time?

The only hope is a whole heap of incompetence on behalf of the captor. And in that case you will still not win the fight. Run.

And hope there’s a riverbank nearby or else you’re cooked.

They put you somewhere that you have no communication with the outside world. Now what?

Front end versus back end. The people who make programming languages are back-end developers. Their strengths lie with making something that works, not something that looks pretty.

It’s kind of easy to forget about or ignore any experience they might have if they’re asking questions like that. Sure, maybe it was a brain fart from a panicked intern who’s having orders barked at them from a powerful individual that they want to impress, but that doesn’t make it any better, does it?

not sure what they’re trying to do here

Maximise profits and minimise losses. My guess is that someone important at Microsoft thinks that this will do just that, and if not that, will make them, personally, a lot of money. That person has no-one who will dare challenge their authority and so we go down this road.

They (that individual or Microsoft as a whole) almost certainly have a stake in the companies that provide newer hardware, and if they didn’t before this decision, they will have by now.

It theoretically makes Micosoft’s job easier too. A huge chunk of backwards compatibility maintenance goes out of the window, if you’ll pardon the pun.

“Oh you have 5 year old hardware? We don’t support that.”

Sounds fairly similar to Apple’s business model if you think about it that way.

Current AIs often suffer from what’s sometimes called “the strawberry problem” and can be easily confused into doing mathematics incorrectly. There’s also the human element of “if it comes out of a computer it must be right”, forgetting the “garbage in = garbage out” principle.

The strawberry problem is a colourful name for the fact that LLMs turn sentences into something else internally and can’t then go back and re-examine the input to make checks and comparisons. Thus if you ask an LLM how many 'r’s are in the word “strawberry”, it often gives the wrong answer, unless it has been explicitly told what the right answer is. And now you have no idea what else it has and hasn’t been told is right and wrong.

As for mathematics, they have to be explicitly programmed to be able to use a proper calculator if they’re to do mathematics correctly. Otherwise you’ll get something that looks good enough to fool someone who doesn’t know any better.

LLMs are basically lossy compressions of knowledge. At a high level of abstraction, the creation of an LLM is fairly similar to how a raw image is turned into a JPEG*. There’s a necessary, deliberate bottleneck in the creation process that keeps the size down, and that’s going to show up in the output if you look closely.

Using the output of an LLM is a bit like editing the JPEG rather than the raw image. Some of the things you do will invariably enhance those artefacts.

For a JPEG that’ll do nothing worse than make an image “deep-fried” or otherwise ugly. Put an LLM in charge of people’s lives and it’ll do the same to them.

* JPEG has a lossless encoding variant, but that’s not the right analogy here.

There used to be an undocumented setting in early versions of MS-DOS that would allow the setting of the command option character to something other than the slash, and if you did that, the slash automatically became the path separator. All you needed was SWITCHAR=- in your CONFIG.SYS and DOS was suddenly very Unix-y.

It was taken out after a while because, with the feature being undocumented, too many people didn’t know about it and bits of software - especially batch files, would have been reliant on things being “wrong”. The modern support for regular slash in API calls probably doesn’t use any of the old SWITCHAR code, but it is, in some way, the spiritual descendant of that secret feature.

Here’s an old blog that talks about it: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/archive/blogs/larryosterman/why-is-the-dos-path-character

I can imagine that works well. Once.

Given the engineer’s amendment to “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” is usually “If it ain’t broke, it doesn’t have enough features yet.”, I can only surmise that COBOL must be one of those languages that are so terrible that they deter their programmers from wanting to do that.

Typing in a box on a website provided by someone else can be done by practically anyone, even the boss themselves at a pinch. Heck, some of them love doing that.

Maintaining a server (or a service on a server) requires someone with more skills, which generally costs more money.

Yeah, but then they have to pay someone to maintain it. And low though that cost may be, it’s precisely the sort of thing that C-levels like to cut when they feel like pretending that they actually do something.

It’s a hard thing for a C-level’s ego to set something up that they know someone else is going to cut later, or worse that they might be the one to “have to” cut it.

As slurs go it’s pretty low tier. A bit like the French calling the English “rosbifs”, if they even still do that.

They should be using tablets. Wax tablets. It was good enough for my great-to-the-nth-grandfather, so it’s good enough for kids today.