Recent content by harborsparrow

Three main reasons. The indigenous peoples were subdued or removed or wiped out or assimilated there early on. They were not huge ports of immigration. The economy had never relied on cotton or tobacco growing (which used slavery), thus there were fewer African Americans. So the...

When translating German to English, the challenge is sometimes that one German word has dozens of possible equivalencies in English, because the active vocabulary options in English are huge (English having co-opted vocabulary from so many other languages over time). The 500 core words of...

Get as much RAM as you can afford. And also as much disk space. In Windows, it is more important than getting a faster processor. Then go into the advanced system settings and set the size of the Windows swap file as large as is allowed. This prevents disk churn. Every app uses the swap...

Rule of thumb even before AI: Never send a password in email.

Although these different articles are about the same case, the written WSJ article is actually worth reading. The link is not pay-walled. It was written by the woman who oversaw the agent at first. The failures started after 70 odd people got on a Slack channel and "negotiated" furiously with...

Yes, looks like the same case.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-claude-ai-vending-machine-agent-b7e84e34?st=5XwN7g&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Peer code reviews are highly effective IF there is no negative consequence for anyone when faults are detected. The problem is, the theoretical software engineering "experts" decided to count everything, including faults found, and then managers (egged on by HR) decided to weaponize the...

Of course I would not have done it in that situation. But USGS had been very heavy handed, coming in and demanding that we send them all our data but without even understanding why our data model was more complex than theirs. So we had to do all this extra work to send them dumbed-down data...

So if we're gonna talk about passwords--I had to work on a project for my algae scientists that was funded by the US Geological Survey. I had to maintain a login on the USGS site, and their system required me to choose a difficult-to-remember password. But also, the password had to change...

Interesting and thought provoking.

My main concern about Google docs is to avoid using the file sharing any more than possible. Sharing folders and files onto one's local drive is a substantial security risk. I've heard too many talks by Rebecca Mercuri about those risks. She makes her living in part by being an expert...

The fact that a podcast narrator says a thing is meaningless. I have heard podcasters make all sorts of wrong statements while speaking with apparent total conviction. No matter the credentials of any speaker, absolutist claims about "all rivers" may be considered a red flag of caution, as I...

Given its age, I suspect the monitor first. If you buy a monitor and that doesn't fix the issue, you should be able to return it (save,the packaging untilmuou know).

This may seem off topic, but it might be related too, since we're talking about the phenomenon of software development managers possibly skimping on best practices to save money. Remember that Toyota fiasco where cars would accelerate no matter what the driver did? The very description of the...