When I bought my Windows 11 laptop a month ago, I was able to set up a local account after turning on airplane mode. (I had entered my wifi password in an earlier step since I thought it was just for installing updates.)

People seem to hold computers to a higher standard than other people when performing the same task.

Their problem:

So apparently NetHack has a mechanic that slightly changes how the game plays every time it’s full moon according to your system clock

The model wasn’t trained on a full moon. They had a system to set up the environment for replicable results but it didn’t include modifying the system time.

It reminds me of another bug with the system time, which a friend of mine encountered. He was working on hardware and he was getting a lot of units that worked fine at the factory, immediately failed at the client’s location, and then worked again when they were returned to the factory. It turned out that when these machines were turned on, their embedded OS automatically queried some server to update the current time. The client’s internet connection had such high latency that the server’s response only came back after the machine was already in use. This generated a huge delta-t value that triggered the sanity checks and shut the machine down. The factory had a much lower-latency connection and so the race condition could never be replicated there.

As for the weirdest bug I ever encountered myself: a compiler generating bad machine code. I have often said that the worst part of programming is that the computer always does exactly what you tell it to, but that was the one and only time in twenty years that the computer actually didn’t.

Before anyone gets too excited: some of their electrodes are no longer able to record a signal from the patient’s brain. They’re reprogramming their software to work with fewer electrodes. No one is being turned into a borg drone.

They’re on the windowsill. Just open the window and help yourself…

I suspect it isn’t even illegal, but I’m not an expert.

You can state what you don’t want, but no one will be paying attention. Except maybe the LLM reading your posts…

There’s not going to be a moment when the world suddenly goes from having oil to having no oil. Some oil reserves are relatively cheap and easy to extract. Other, very large reserves are currently so difficult and expensive to extract that doing so isn’t profitable. As the easy oil gradually runs out, the supply drops, the price rises, and sources of oil that were not profitable at the old price become profitable. This maintains the supply of oil and stabilizes the price.

Eventually oil will become so expensive that alternative technologies will be cheaper than it. This will happen with plenty of hard-to-reach oil left. So it’s true that the amount of oil is in principle finite, but that limitation isn’t really relevant.

The summer winds came blowing in from across the sea…

Is it one of those kids’ cartoons that are still good if you rewatch them as an adult?

One bad quarter and they’re doing this? I don’t even.

I didn’t like the 3D Fallouts but I had fond memories of the original two, so I tried to replay Fallout 2 a few years ago. The writing is great but the gameplay has not aged well. Combat is simply tedious, especially against many enemies at once. You have to wait for them to slowly take their turns one by one, then on your turn you often just stand still and shoot once. Outside of combat, there’s a lot of running back and forth which gets quite tedious too. I guess I had more patience twenty five years ago than I do now…

My experience with the healthcare system, and especially hospitals, is that the people working there are generally knowledgeable and want to help patients, but they are also very busy and often sleep-deprived. A human may be better at medicine than an AI, but an AI that can devote attention to you is better than a human that can’t.

(The fact that the healthcare system we have is somehow simultaneously very expensive, bad for medical professionals, and bad for patients is a separate issue…)

Note that you can turn the ads off quickly and easily. I agree that there’s someone off-putting about an operating system with built-in ads, but a tech-savvy person will see them once and then never again. (A person who isn’t tech-savvy probably won’t care.)

The summoning circle is broken! You’re free!

The real target was inside you all along.

Because people disagree about whether a certain ideology is desirable, you could have an accurate portrayal of it accepted as positive by its supporters and negative by its opponents. The supporters aren’t necessarily missing “satire” - maybe they see the same thing that the opponents do, but they like it.

I figure the title is meant to be interpreted as “D’Artagnan and the Three Musketeers”. He’s the main character and the book is about his adventures with them. What does bother me is the total lack of muskets.

I don’t know about Oregon, but I see how people ride their e-bikes here in NYC and it makes me suspect that most e-bike/car collisions are the e-bike’s fault.

I agree that compromises between the interests of drivers and pedestrians are necessary, and in a big city with more pedestrians than drivers, it is reasonable for these compromises to favor pedestrians. I don’t agree with the frequently expressed view that reducing the number of drivers and increasing the number of pedestrians is in itself a good thing, and that’s what this article sounds like to me. The emphasis on the health benefits for people who stop driving feels like being told “eat your vegetables, they’re good for you” which, as an adult, I’m offended by, but this is an emotionally charged issue for me so maybe I’m overreacting.

I’m interested in the claim that LTNs do not, on average, increase motorist travel times. That could change my mind about this issue.