I had a problem with all the math questions where someone would have 6 apples and share them with 2 friends and the teacher expected that to mean 2 people with 3 apples each instead of 3 people with 2 apples each.

Is it someone who show signs of being a Nazi? Then you must ensure everybody understands it was not a Nazi salute.

Is it someone who never showed any inclination of potentially being a Nazi? Then you must tell everyone it was a Nazi salute.

I forget what I went to the store for so I browse every aisle until I see something that makes me remember it (usually the thing itself).

A Media company owned by Telefonica.

I once worked for one of the largest media companies in my country and there was a project where they wanted to replace reCaptcha with a partner’s system that made users watch ads and ask a question about the ad instead of typing some hard to read text.

Testing such system, I quickly realized that the captcha part of it could easily be bypassed by anyone with minimal JS knowledge (the answer was available in a global JS var), but the answer would not be accepted by the server unless the entirety of the ad video had been successfully streamed to the video component.

I still remember clearly the response I got when I reported to the PO that the system was unfit due to being easily bypassed with JS:

“no user is gonna be coding anything just to avoid typing the answer on the input”.

Shouldn’t have expected much more from the same company that had me wait for the responsible person to get back from their 1-month vacation when I reported that their customers’ full credit card information was included in the output of a publicly available URL that only required an order ID.

But I later found out that most orders in that particular project were actually made by bots with stolen credit card information (the bots would use this company’s shopping cart to validate which cards were still working so they could use it for something useful afterwards). In the end we were mostly just leaking information that had already been leaked before.

Where did he expect to keep the tech devices while naked?

Company trying to be cool by occasionally gathering employees on touristic destinations instead of an office. Employees really love it, as it’s just like a vacation if you just ignore that you can’t pick your own accommodations, or when/what to have breakfast, lunch or dinner, or that every “leisure” activity has specific start and end times and is mandatory, or the fact that everyone is still expected to work too.

Last time I shared a hotel room with a coworker, they said I make “puppy noises” while asleep. No idea what it was, my wife also doesn’t know what they meant.

This feels like something that an infinite number of monkeys with typewriters would write.

Search WAS good when it was a simple search. Sites were indexed by the search engine and if you searched for the words you wanted to find, the results would be exactly that. In that context, it worked perfectly.

But the problem was that most people used search engines in a different way. They weren’t searching for specific content, but searching for answers to questions. And for that, search engines would only show results that had that same question and then you’d need to hope that the question had been answered.

Over time, search engines kept shifting into trying to better support the questions and answers format, making the basic content search worse as a result. Where we are now, neither or them works too well. Google is now better at understanding what people are trying to search, but worse at finding it.

AI is just expanding this with yet another layer: it might make Google better at understanding what you search and maybe even might be better at finding it than the engine is now, but it’ll add the ability to misinterpret the results too.

Honestly I’d be pretty happy if I had a simple indexed search again.

I rarely go farther from my home than I can go in a few minutes in my bycicle, so I never felt the need for a car. But once every few months I would need to go somewhere that is two hours away by bus, often with inconvenient bus timings (like either 6am or noon) - so I sometimes take an Uber instead.

When people her about me taking an Uber for such a “long” trip they call me insane, say that I’m wasting money and I should just get a car and those trips would be much cheaper. They never consider all the other costs involved in owning a car.

But then after a while people in my town started giving up on Uber and it became hard to find a driver whenever I might need one, so I finally got a driving license and bought myself a bike. People now were like “you’ll see how it changes you, you’ll use it for everything, you’ll go out a lot more often and to everywhere with it”. By the time I had a trip to make it was no longer turning on due to being stuck in a garage for so long. The counter showed less than 20 kilometers when I sold it.

But that’s the opposite order in which my generation experienced it.

I used to think that there was a big difference between being “let go” and being “fired”, in terms of what actually happens.

I remember one past job when the company decided on a Friday to let someone go but thought it was best to wait until Monday morning to give them the news. Then he started the day and immediately got sacked.

It’s an exaggeration. Browsers use a lot more RAM than one would expect, but there’s not that much of a difference between each one.

I’ve recently been working with some niche tool that has very little documentation on the web but is open source and has a ton of discussions on public email groups. Chatgpt is sometimes able to figure out what param I need to send for specific stuff in that tool even if there are zero Google matches for the param name, but more often than not it just hallucinates stuff or mention things that no longer exists. I’ve created the habit of always asking things like “is that right?” or “is that answer up to date?” before even reading the first response from it and it often replies with things like: “no, that param only exists in some other similar tool” or “no that API has been deprecated” and shit like that.

If it were up to me I wouldn’t even be using chatgpt at all due to all the time it wasted with random stuff it makes up, but whatever training data openAI used, it surely had more information about the niche stuff I’m working with than the web does at this point - so sometimes it can still save me time too.

I once asked chatgpt for the name of an anime that I couldn’t remember. I described the whole premise of the anime and then some details of the final episode. Chatgpt says “Stein’s gate”. I say “no, it’s not as famous as that”. It then says “Erased”, and proceeds to describe it, showing that I was actually very effective in my description of it.

I asked “why did you say Stein’s Gate if I described Erased so well?”: “you mentioned time travel and Stein’s gate is a popular anime about time travel”

“but I also mentioned a lot of other stuff that don’t match anything with Stein’s gate, like the details about the villain or how the time traveling works”

“yeah my bad I just went by popularity”

“next time, how can I phrase my questions in a way that would make you consider the whole input instead of just using some key information in it?”

“you could have mentioned details about the villain or how the time traveling works and I would have used that to rule out Stein’s gate”

“but I did”

“yeah sorry about that, next time try giving me details about the villain or how the time traveling works”

I’m enjoying Zen browser in general but still facing several issues with it from time to time. Nothing major, just small nuisanses here and there.

I use it alongside Vivaldi since I often have to be logged in into two different sessions for the same site and it’s just easier to have two browsers for that. Vivaldi is a lot more stable and so I use it as the main browser - but everytime it updates I need to modify a JS file to tweak something in the UI to make it the way I like it to be. When using vertical tabs + tab groups + two layers of tabs (one sidebar showing the tab groups and a second sidebar showing the tabs inside the selected group), the maximum tab width is applied to both sidebars together instead of individually, so I modify the JS file to double that max width. I’ve automated it by now but it still annoys me that I keep having to do this.

But I think Vivaldi is probably the only browser that even has the ability to show tabs in that way, so I can’t complain that much.

It’s an old joke about mixing up the words Polyglot and Troglodyte

And everytime you like it, a random wired device goes wireless.