You spent a few evenings downloading a hundred or so 1.44MB floppy imges over a 56kbps modem. You then booted the installer off one of those floppies, selected what software you wanted installed and started feeding your machine the stack of floppies one by one.

Once that was complete you needed to install the Linux boot loader “LiLo” to allow you the boot it (or your other OS) at power on.

All of that would get you to the point where you had a text mode login prompt. To get anything more you needed to gather together a lot of detailed information about your hardware and start configuring software to tell it about it. For example, to get XFree86 running you needed to know

• what graphics chip you had
• how much memory it had
• which clock generator it used
• which RAMDAC was on the board
• what video timings your monitor supported
• the polarity of the sync signals for each graphics mode

This level of detail was needed with every little thing

• how many heads and cylinders do your hard drives have
• which ports and irqs did your soundcard use
• was it sound blaster compatible or some other protocol
• what speeds did your modem support
• does it need any special setup codes
• what protocol did your ISP use over the phone line
• what was the procedure to setup an tear down a network link over it

The advent of PCI and USB made things a lot better. Now things were discoverable, and software could auto-configure itself a lot of the time because there were standard ways to ask for information about what was connected.

I obviously have a different definition of “charismatic” to many other people, because Trump has zero charisma in my eyes. He was repugnant in the 80s and he’s repugnant today.

It’s interesting when America tries to make British panel shows (like the recent HIGNFY one). The competition aspect and the points, which are only a conceit in the British version, start having importance. They care who wins and it destroys the comedy. The right answer becomes more important than the funny answer.

Yes, but have you ever seen a vice president as visible and vocal as this one?

No, which is why people saying “Buy it and don’t connect it to the internet” isn’t helping. More people need to not buy it and tell other people not to buy it.

To get them to stop they need to lose both the original sale and the additional advertising revenue. Right now their thinking is:

• People are buying our TVs
• Putting advertising on them isn’t causing our sales to drop
• Therefore it’s costing us next to nothing to do.
• It often gets us extra revenue if they connect to the internet.
• If they don’t connect, we still more than covered our costs.

There is no downside for them. Only upside. The equation needs to change for them to stop doing it.

Ta

They’re industrial boxes with a screen. Not aesthetically what I want in my living room. The displays are chosen for their longevity, not their picture quality. They’re often actively cooled with fans, so adding a noise level to their operation.

Have you asked an LLM to translate anything bigger than a few sentences? It doesn’t have enough contextual storage to keep a whole paper “in mind” and soon wanders off into nonsense.

Google translate is a different beast.

You’re still rewarding bad behaviour. They still put all the crap on and made the sale anyway.

I agree, but with TVs (or large displays" we’re at the point where there are no good options. Commercial displays are over engineered for the home and lag in technology Vs home TVs. So they’re not an option. Lg and Samsung are the display technology leaders, but their TVs are full of crap— so no. Monitors don’t go large enough for the living room.

Guess I’m stuck with what I have.

The US has an export ban from Taiwan?

Translating is the process of rewriting the paper in another language. The paper has been written (in English) by an LLM.

Check the results though. Google translate is far far better at translation than a generic LLM.

Adding extra polish like nonsense phrases. Nobody is supervising it then.

Translating them…otherwise know as rewriting the whole paper.

It’s not that the entire papers were being invented from nothing by Chatgpt.

Yes it is. The papers are the product of an LLM. Even if the user only thought it was translating, the translation hasn’t been reviewed and has errors. The causal link between what goes in to an LLM and what comes out is not certain, so if nobody is checking the output it could just be a technical sounding lorem ipsum generator.

For a company like blue sky, you bow to all governments, or you bow to none. One way you become so milquetoast nobody wants to use you because nothing interesting is ever said. The other way you become 4chan.

No, it’s rage harvesting nonsense.

…and for that you get down voted.

I think you expressed that well. If you can’t own your thoughts, you can’t own anything.