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”
Author Archives: pirateguillermo
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”
Khaaaaaaaaan!
Okay, so I caught COVID a week ago, so I’m confined to quarters until I stop testing positive. This is fine. Except that the stateroom is a pretty effective Faraday cage and I can’t get online much. Tired of watching BBC adverts for BBC shows, and tired of playing video games, I started poking deeperContinue reading “Khaaaaaaaaan!”
Pigs in Space
The other day I saw a lecture on space travel technology. The speaker was talking about how fast various kinds of propulsion systems (existing and potentially possible within the next 30-50 years) could get a vessel going, and how long that vessel would take to get to the nearby stars. That got me thinking aboutContinue reading “Pigs in Space”
Small Chunks
We’re on our way home, and there are mostly sea days from now on. So, I thought I’d go ahead and do a bit of work on my server code. First up, I can’t compile my servers any more because BlueSSL (which is required by the SMTP package, which my servers use to send transactionalContinue reading “Small Chunks”
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”