• 0 Posts
  • 36 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: February 2nd, 2024

help-circle






  • Ok, going to scream into the abyss here…

    I had Netscape on my 486DX2-66 with a 33.6 modem. Win 95, along with ICQ, mIRC, some NNTP reader I can’t recall… You get the picture.

    Everyone I’ve told this to thinks I must have been out of my mind. But for a period of time that I recall as months I had some sort of phenomenon where Netscape would stop loading a web page (could take 10s of seconds, you know) unless you MOVED THE MOUSE. Continuously. The animated “N” on would freeze and if you didn’t move the mouse the page would just be blank, or partially loaded. Move the mouse, it resumes. Stop moving the mouse, it stops. I used to have to move my mouse in figure-eights, cajoling the machine to not give up and keep downloading.

    You’ll think I’m crazy, too. But when I share this story I keep hoping someone, somewhere had the same experience. And maybe, someone who knows what was going on will chime in on some obscure IRQ conflict in Windows along with some optimization used by Netscape in one iteration caused this bug for a brief moment in time.














  • Aside from coding assistants, the other use case I’ve come across recently is sentiment analysis of large datasets from free text survey responses. Just started exploring it so not sure how well it works yet, but the ridiculous amount of bias I see introduced in manual reviews is just awful. A machine can potentially be less inclined to try fitting summaries to the VP’s presupposed opinion than some lackie interns or self serving consultancy.