Posts by riley@toot.cat
 (DIR) Post #B4NrBPRqRr6zvELkvY by riley@toot.cat
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       A retrofuturistic story about a past future in which computers will be so advanced that they no longer punch holes into paper tapes and paper cards by dies but they drill these holes with lasers.
       
 (DIR) Post #B4NrBStFePoib6CBYu by riley@toot.cat
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       Contrary to what one might think, lasers were around for some twenty years before punched paper storage went obsolete. The possibility of using laser to cut paper, though, didn't graduate from magic to advanced technology until long after that. (It requires high power-density lasers and high-precision feedback control that would have been prohibitively expensive for virtually all kinds of paper-cutting purposes before the late nineties. A case could also be made that the invention of CO2 lasers was an important part of the equation, but, well, that turned out to be a relatively easy part of it.)
       
 (DIR) Post #B4UJAFqkc1GZWqzr8a by riley@toot.cat
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       @natty This is so much a pattern for poorly written legalese that it's probably genAI's work.
       
 (DIR) Post #B4UWuMwRsM50FUytIe by riley@toot.cat
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       @natty But D&D is probabilistic!
       
 (DIR) Post #B4YQXSeee9BqDMBvDE by riley@toot.cat
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       Tirritate Darth Pumpkin by egging him to put ICEholes on runways to control traffic with gestures like on Pyongyang's famously car-jammed thoroughfares.The pilot and co-pilot of an Air Canada Express regional jet have been killed after it collided with a fire truck while landing at New York’s LaGuardia airport, in an incident that closed the airport.The collision also caused serious injuries, with nine people in the hospital. It happened as a firefighting vehicle was responding to a separate incident, according to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs the airport.The Air Canada Express CRJ-900 plane, operated by its partner Jazz Aviation, was carrying 72 passengers and four crew members, according to an airline statement. The flight originated at Montréal-Pierre Elliott Trudeau international airport, the major airport serving Montreal. Jazz is owned by Chorus Aviation.https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/23/air-canada-plane-collides-with-ground-vehicle-at-new-yorks-laguardia-airport-halting-all-flights
       
 (DIR) Post #B4YQXWGhDAOzQD0qQK by riley@toot.cat
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       What if there were tunnels for fire pumps to safely get over the runways, like the tunnels for passengers crossing railways? :blobcatthinking:
       
 (DIR) Post #B4eQo0zRvDPwHlZSO8 by riley@toot.cat
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       tortilla, n. A small infringement of a non-contractual legal right.#dixonary
       
 (DIR) Post #B4qiAKrSkfwLP4aEIi by riley@toot.cat
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       Tirritate an LLM-generated code enthusiast by insisting that it is rude to just fix errors in such code; a polite person has to convince the LLM to fix the errors so that it could learn from its mistakes.
       
 (DIR) Post #B4qw2teUunB0LZrl7g by riley@toot.cat
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       Here, you can see some Primitive CGI(tm), implemented by way of thoughtful scene design, leveraging a fulcrum, and an advanced camera.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHu8WDPRqwQ
       
 (DIR) Post #B4zMyVIhlNkxgtTwXI by riley@toot.cat
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       @natty Just in case — are you aware of WebDAV ?I'm pretty sure that it, or even just the basic idea of having a variety of custom HTTP methods, could be easily run over HTTP/2.
       
 (DIR) Post #B5BPxNrwXWO86zdoQK by riley@toot.cat
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       Clearly, BASIC won popularity faster than Forth, because BASIC gives you a dopamine reward after every single line of code, but Forth only after every semicolon.
       
 (DIR) Post #B5DHFIdCF42roA8CUi by riley@toot.cat
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       The real kind of AI.#retrocomputing #retroai #ai
       
 (DIR) Post #B5DHFJkg4jcjHedgnI by riley@toot.cat
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       From page 54:[page begins] of key words and a preprogrammed set of instructions on how to react. For instance, if the user typed the word sister in a sentence, the computer would ask the user to tell him some more about his family. If no key words were found, the program would default to printing from a selection of stock, noncommittal replies.ELIZA was really just an experiment in how to make people think that a computer could think and understand what they were talking about. Many times the program would produce nonsense, especially when the program stored a sentence incorrectly. When conversing with the computer, people would use incomplete sentences-garbage in, garbage out. The program was interesting, nevertheless.A program like ELIZA was apt to get out of hand. One of the unfortunate effects of ELIZA was that people took the program seriously. The original program was never intended as anything other than an experiment. It was never intended to replace a psychotherapist. People tended to regard the computer as a personality and shared their personal feelings with the computer. They were caught by the illusion. Beware of this attitude as you examine any artificial intelligence programs.
       
 (DIR) Post #B5JnrbjE3ADNWU1OEa by riley@toot.cat
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       There's unconfirmed reports that a gun jamming at an opportune moment saved somebody from getting shot in an Oklahoma school.The moral of the story is clear: all gun nuts should be taught that it is gay and unmanly to clean a gun.
       
 (DIR) Post #B5SHbQ44CS4KbWe7W4 by riley@toot.cat
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       Tirritate genAIbros by spreading screenshots of chatbot scripts mixing up the Important Class Segregation, and teaching humans about synergy of the working class and union-busting the executive class.(Protip: you don't need to chat with a bot in order to make a screenshot.)
       
 (DIR) Post #B5WfHBOwBQH0rp8CX2 by riley@toot.cat
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       A congresscritter has drafted a noxious law respecting an establishment of religion, and prohibiting the free exercise thereof; and abridging the freedom of speech.
       
 (DIR) Post #B5WfoId6KSSYqGY08W by riley@toot.cat
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       @ariadne https://roy.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/roy-evo.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/mamdani-act-text-roytx_126_xml.pdf is the most recent one that I know of
       
 (DIR) Post #B7LCka87tFXTjwxhMO by riley@toot.cat
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       @tomjennings Not that long ago, it was common to self-host email systems.The War On Spam made this untenable.In retrospect, maybe a more distributed anti-spam remedy would have been a better choice.@lanodan
       
 (DIR) Post #B7jgRiMzxgQGfi7M12 by riley@toot.cat
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       Maybe Japan doesn't have a fairy tale about a goose laying golden eggs, so SoftBank has to explain exotic Western philosophy to its shareholders.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtM0Cjb0dEU&t=3407s#GooseValue
       
 (DIR) Post #B8DlEIalA9QGxVbM5A by riley@toot.cat
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       Why is there a lost+found on this HFS+ disk? :blobcatthinking: