Atheist Discussion

So, here's what happened.

While I was reaching behind the computer to get the wireless usb connector I heard a little ding from my machine.  I counted out ten seconds and then reinserted the connector and stepped back to look at the message.

Lo and behold it was a notice from WPS Office ( an open source knockoff of Microsoft Office ) that my version was no longer functional and I should download the new version.  I did as I was told and the problem is gone.

I suspect that they put out some kind of "upgrade" (and if there was a notification of it, I missed it) and they caught holy hell from other people who suddenly found their computers all fucked up too. 

I appreciate all the suggestions but it appears this was a man-made catastrophe rather than some random Windows miscue!

(12-29-2021, 02:55 AM)Minimalist Wrote: [ -> ]Lo and beold it was a notice from WPS Office ( an open source knockoff of Microsoft Office ) that my version was no longer functional and I should download the new version.  I did as I was told and the problem is gone.

What are these open source knockoffs of which you speak?

Ah Jim lad, shiver me timbers and roger the cabin boy.

No need to roger the poor cabin boy!  I have an old version of OpenOffice that does the work for me, even though it is no longer supported. I might have bought MS Office, but wasn't willing to pony up the cash.

There's a couple of them for people who are not running a business but still need a decent word processer or spreadsheet.  I mainly use the spreadsheet for my dog rescue activities and a number of wargames use .csv spreadsheets for data.

If you put this string into Google it will give you a whole list of them.

best open source office suite

Even Microsoft has one... but you have to watch out on some of them.  They are not fully functional unless you "upgrade" to the the premium version.

(12-29-2021, 03:22 AM)Fireball Wrote: [ -> ]No need to roger the poor cabin boy!   I have an old version of OpenOffice that does the work for me, even though it is no longer supported. I might have bought MS Office, but wasn't willing to pony up the cash.

Well he could download (legit) the latest Libra Office but he said specifically he was using MS Office.

I quit all my IT consulting gigs. This was one of my favorite com cabinets that I thankfully did not have to do much work in. Note the roll of wire that lives there on the lower left.


I also like the dangling 66 block on the right, being held in place by decades of 'seismic reinforcement'. That was our term for the layers of wire that build up and are left in place as the tech changed.
Here was the threat in the upper left corner in the IT guy's tool of choice, the fine point sharpie. I can't make out that riposte in pen above it. It was like an exchange on the bathroom stall door, LOL.

Rube Goldberg would be proud.

At least the colour-coded wires made it easy to trace them.    Ha, ha.

Firefox has the "flexible space" addition in order to customise its toolbar in
order to separate the icons if you so choose.  The later versions of Firefox
however have increased the fixed(?) width of the space by around 4 times
that of the old "flexible space".

Is there any way to manually decrease the width of this spacer?

This is the "old" flexible space...


      

Disabling "end cards" on YouTube videos.

Does anybody know a way to do this?  I've tried a few  3rd party alleged fixes
for this annoying function, but none has worked.  They still show under Firefox
even if you uncheck the "show" checkbox in YouTube tools.

These are the bloody things I'm talking about...

Tim Curr...... wrong IT, my bad.

I'm buggered... well, not literally.      

I've been attempting to download a new version of Firefox,
without any luck.

I can download the complete exe. folder, but when I run it,
it crashes around halfway through the install.

I get the message "Gah. Your tab just crashed".

I contacted Firefox help, and they sent me a solution which
assumed you could actually run Firefox... double duh!

    Any ideas folks?

Firefox usually upgrades whether you want it or not!

I got my exe. problem fixed.  It turned out to
be a missing dll file which I must've somehow
deleted... dunno?        All good now.

I wouldn't know where to look for .dll files.

(06-10-2023, 01:25 AM)Minimalist Wrote: [ -> ]I wouldn't know where to look for .dll files.

They are probably in your refrigerator with the "dll pickles".

Seriously, look for a "dynamic link library" folder/file. It's a Windows thing and I have a Mac, so I can't actually tell you where that would be found.

(06-10-2023, 04:03 AM)Cavebear Wrote: [ -> ]Seriously, look for a "dynamic link library" folder/file.  It's a Windows thing and I have a Mac, so I can't actually tell you where that would be found.

.dll files are all over the place.  A lot of the ones for Windows itself like to hang out at \Windows\System32, and ones for specific programs will usually be in the directory where the program was installed.

(Springy G takes off tattered, dusty MCSE hat, and sets it on fire because She is so done with IT)

One of my caregivers was here this morning, as usual, and as we were chewing the fat, he up and asked me if there was any way to, say, "plug in" more memory for his laptop, which is a Dell Experian (?) 3576. The alternative being to take it apart, put in memory, and put it all together again. I have no clue.

(07-06-2023, 07:31 PM)c172 Wrote: [ -> ]One of my caregivers was here this morning, as usual, and as we were chewing the fat, he up and asked me if there was any way to, say, "plug in" more memory for his laptop, which is a Dell Experian (?)  3576. The alternative being to take it apart, put in memory, and put it all together again. I have no clue.

Memory modules are fastened into the motherboard so, you’d have to have it opened and match the modules inside…if there is an open slot.  Otherwise, replace all of them with larger ones.

If it’s running out of memory when running an application, that may be due to a shortage of hard drive space as some applications use the hard drive to swap memory back and forth.  In that situation, he may benefit from a clean install of the operating system and being judicious in how many programs he reinstalls.  Yes, a pain in the butt but opening the case isn’t needed.  Heck, if he hasn’t shut off and turned back on his computer in a while, that can cause memory problems, too.

Operating systems are much better at handling memory issues these days but still aren’t perfect.  Some programs can hog a lot of memory until you fully close the offending program.  Older systems can have more problems even if they can run a newer program, they might not run it well.

If all this is beyond your skill set, he should take it to a computer store and discuss it with them.

(07-06-2023, 10:14 PM)pattylt Wrote: [ -> ]

(07-06-2023, 07:31 PM)c172 Wrote: [ -> ]One of my caregivers was here this morning, as usual, and as we were chewing the fat, he up and asked me if there was any way to, say, "plug in" more memory for his laptop, which is a Dell Experian (?)  3576. The alternative being to take it apart, put in memory, and put it all together again. I have no clue.

Memory modules are fastened into the motherboard so, you’d have to have it opened and match the modules inside…if there is an open slot.  Otherwise, replace all of them with larger ones.

If it’s running out of memory when running an application, that may be due to a shortage of hard drive space as some applications use the hard drive to swap memory back and forth.  In that situation, he may benefit from a clean install of the operating system and being judicious in how many programs he reinstalls.  Yes, a pain in the butt but opening the case isn’t needed.  Heck, if he hasn’t shut off and turned back on his computer in a while, that can cause memory problems, too.

Operating systems are much better at handling memory issues these days but still aren’t perfect.  Some programs can hog a lot of memory until you fully close the offending program.  Older systems can have more problems even if they can run a newer program, they might not run it well.

If all this is beyond your skill set, he should take it to a computer store and discuss it with them.

Taking a quick gander at a Youtube video on the subject, while it does require some disassembly to upgrade the memory on the Dell Inspiron 3576 (not Experian), the disassembly and reassembly is fairly easy. The only complication you might find is that while the machine in question does have two memory slots (presuming we're looking at the same model), it's not uncommon for manufacturers to populate both slots with smaller memory to reach the total RAM quota of the build, in which case you'd have to lose half the current memory in the process of adding more memory (and due to timing issues, it's probably advised that if both slots are currently filled, that you replace both with a single memory stick or two matched sticks). That's not absolutely necessary in every case, but it's not uncommon either.

The AI is amazing. Amazingly bad!

I was watching Bill Maher a couple of weeks ago and he was promoting his newest book at one point. And he mentioned an AI review he found that was positive about his book. The problem was that the AI said you should "memorize" his book.

Now, as Maher said, no one expects you to "memorize" his book (shades of Fahrenheit 451). But I suppose the AI actually does (or at least can scan the whole thing on demand). I know there are more common examples of AI errors (6 fingers on human hands, etc).

But what examples are your own favorite AI lunacies?

(08-05-2024, 09:10 AM)Cavebear Wrote: [ -> ]The AI is amazing.  Amazingly bad!

I was watching Bill Maher a couple of weeks ago and he was promoting his newest book at one point.  And he mentioned an AI review he found that was positive about his book.  The problem was that the AI said you should "memorize" his book.

Now, as Maher said, no one expects you to "memorize" his book (shades of Fahrenheit 451).  But I suppose the AI actually does (or at least can scan the whole thing on demand).  I know there are more common examples of AI errors (6 fingers on human hands, etc).

But what examples are your own favorite AI lunacies?

A photo of three men and seven arms
An arm around someone that doesn’t jive with anatomy.
I saw an AI attempt to show an alien character and it ignored half of the descriptions thus looked nothing like the supposed alien.
Lots of six fingered hands.

Just off the top of my head…

I decided on a whim to try an image generating AI. I said, "Make an image of the Cookie Monster from Sesame Street eating floppy disks instead of cookies".

It made an image of Cookie Monster eating cookies with one little floppy disk in the middle.

I revised it several times, ending with something like "... The image must contain zero cookies, such that Cookie Monster is eating floppy disks, and only floppy disks." And while it eventually gave me a mix of cookies and floppies, I never did get it to show me what I so precisely requested.

Meanwhile, while my AI code assistant is pretty good at saving me time with writing boilerplate code (such as for mapping UI elements to database table fields), in virtually all other contexts it's CLEARLY guessing at what I'm trying to do. I spend so much time correcting its output that I just ignore it 99% of the time.

ONE time it took a different approach to a single line of code that was new / novel to me and I went with it out of curiosity, and it worked fine -- although it's questionable whether its version of the code was more self evident or performant than mine.

I reckon your Cookie Monster experiment was more like
utilising machine learning rather than artificial intelligence.

Until you loaded further date, it couldn't successfully handle
your "Make an image of the Cookie Monster from Sesame
Street eating floppy disks instead of cookies". And even then
it got it wrong. There was no way it was mimicking human
intelligence.

(08-12-2024, 03:02 PM)SYZ Wrote: [ -> ]I reckon your Cookie Monster experiment was more like
utilising machine learning rather than artificial intelligence.

Until you loaded further data, it couldn't successfully handle
your "Make an image of the Cookie Monster from Sesame
Street eating floppy disks instead of cookies".  And even then
it got it wrong.  There was no way it was mimicking human
intelligence.

Yes "AI" is a misnomer, it is all ML (machine learning). It has knowledge, but not understanding. Although you'd think that by now, they would have trained it on the concept "instead of".

I also suspect the model I was using was free and therefore not a particularly state-of-the-art example. Paid AIs, you might have to be drop-dead explicit to the point where the prompt engineering is almost as expensive as figuring it out yourself, but ... normally adding some qualifications like I did "should" work.

I wouldn't say there's no way to mimic human intelligence; it's surprising what has fallen out of ML without it being intended or expected, suggesting that the human mind is rather simpler than we like to think that it is. My example notwithstanding, I've seen decent responses to prompts like "write an essay arguing for x in the style of Hemingway". To write like Hemingway probably just requires a knowledge of his corpus and some analysis of word frequencies and common thematic elements, but the result is more or less equivalent to "imagination" for practical purposes. As in , "pretend you're Hemingway writing in favor of x".

On the other hand, there have been some hilarious outputs when someone in control of the model fat-fingered a configuration point. My favorite is when someone asked if it's ok to give your dog Honey Nut Cheerios. The response was coherent for a few paragaphs, and then:

Quote:For more inventive, yet more consistently fair, hound festivities, you might consider high-fiber, steam-hoofed, laced in the line pick-offs like dog-head rattle, fresh vegetables (carrots, green beans, or pureed pumpkin for dissertation), or arm-sketched, rare toys in the medley of apples (pitted, for the act is grand) unsung or effete short-spooning fall to the tail of a new adventure. Yet, checking with your vet for postured over-distance or guised, safe, and informative finish, over a gleam in the twang that says, 'divvy this round of lore or lend a moan to my kind-leek, cosmo cavalcade', gives you heel-in to commence, let's prate, or mild walk-over in the kind of twin of feel, fine-tune, and fine-to-live.

It goes on and on like that.

No I don't think these chatbots will take over from humans ...