Be Careful What You Wish For

So, a lawyer decided to use ChatGPT to “help” write some papers he filed in court, but got in trouble when the included citations were bogus. The naive interpretation of this is that the computer program is broken, and it’s a danger to society and ought to be really regulated, and actually, I don’t disagree.Continue reading “Be Careful What You Wish For”

The Mysterious Fix

And now that we’re home and I’ve got a decently fast and wide connection (compared to the ship)…I’ve spent a bunch of time rebuilding and testing my various layers of Docker images. And guess what? Ubuntu “jammy” with OpenSSL 3 compiles my stuff just fine. *sigh*. Again, the lesson here is that people who writeContinue reading “The Mysterious Fix”

Hell Is Certain Other People

So, there’s this basic tactic of the pitch man: promise to tell the customer something interesting, but then go off and talk about other stuff. Periodically, the other stuff gets interrupted with a reminder that if the customer keeps listening, they’re about to get the really great thing, but first, there’s this other stuff toContinue reading “Hell Is Certain Other People”

More Disconnection Thinking

Here on the ship, we have satellite Internet. This means that, at a good moment, I’ve got round-trip ping times to google.com at just over half a second (~660ms) and download speeds that seem to average around a megabyte per minute. Furthermore, access to the satellite Internet is on a paid basis, so you haveContinue reading “More Disconnection Thinking”

Hobby Utility

So, we’re on a cruise ship and I got to thinking about the population and the environment and I developed a morbid curiosity. More about that below the fold. The high point, though, is that I’ve written another application — this one for the iPhone — that fills a neat, narrow niche: it’s a combination tallyContinue reading “Hobby Utility”

Satellite of Something

It’s day two of our Atlantic crossing and I’m getting the feel of the ship. It’s a really good thing I did all that setup work to enable offline coding, because the Internet is available mostly in a philosophical/mathematical sense. For example: % ping -c 5 nonbinaryreview.submittable.com ✹ PING e132729.b.akamaiedge.net (2.16.167.51): 56 data bytes RequestContinue reading “Satellite of Something”

Here’s a (docker) image for you

We’re getting closer to a long vacation with intermittent Internet, so I’m going through all my developer tools, making sure that everything’s ready. Now that I know how to get VSCode to persist its downloaded stuff between runs in a given container (make sure there’s a .vscode-server/extensions directory in the container user’s $HOME), I wantedContinue reading “Here’s a (docker) image for you”