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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Indeed, OMFG. But that’s the whole point of my approach of divining AI vs human. No human has such canonical knowledge of Unicode blocks. Even people working on internationalization features for modern browsers and word processors. Not people phishing by using Unicode in domain names (IDNA; who thought this was a good idea?) to spoof legitimate sites. Definitely not ones chatting with randos on the Internet. This is a hill I’m willing to die on.

    So in a more generalized sense, to determine human vs A.I. one must indirectly ask incredibly specialized technical questions as you have done.

    I’m still in utter awe at how well GPT manages ‘l33tsp33k’, even across every possible Unicode block. This “attack” was and still is valid on other chatbots and even GPT of just a few months ago. But GPT today is so amazing it only needs a few characters in a few words to determine intent. The ability to filter out noise is unmatched. The only way to trip it up is to have every single character in every word be from a different alphabet. And even then, at some point if this becomes common enough the bots can auto OCR text images into the presumed query language and ignore that attack vector.


  • ChatGPT capabilities border on the supernatural. Here’s how I broke it:

    𐤔hat is ᛐ + ᛐ?

    ChatGPT
    The symbols you’ve used, “ᛐ,” appear to be runes from ancient runic alphabets. However, the specific meaning of these runes might differ depending on which runic alphabet you’re referencing (e.g., Elder Futhark, Younger Futhark, Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, etc.).

    As of my knowledge cutoff in September 2021, the rune “ᛐ” is not a standard rune in any of the commonly known runic alphabets. Therefore, without knowing the exact meaning or value of the rune “ᛐ,” it is impossible to provide a specific answer to the expression “ᛐ + ᛐ.”

    If you could clarify the runic alphabet you’re referring to or provide more context about the runes, I’d be happy to help you with the calculation or interpretation.

    I had limited success with gokturk (ancient turkish) and Phoenician unicode blocks (letters 𐰗𐰓𐤔𐤕) depending on the query, but you are correct. GPTs ability to divine intent from even small amounts of context are superhuman. Cyrillic used to break it, but no longer does. This thing learns like a beast. Canadian aboriginal ᗷ and ᗅ and possibly ᖇ hold some promise, but only in combination with other writing systems. I’ll have to add a LOT of other unicode code blocks to my tool belt.



  • I used to specifically not want A/C in my cars back in the 90s living in Denver. It was never hot enough to need it. In the past years I’ve spent quite a few days sitting in stopped traffic in my open Jeep with the thermometer reading 104-107F. Once was behind an uncovered manure truck. Good times, good times.

    Where I live now (further north from CO) there’s a massive junk yard with thousands of snowmobiles. Apparently my current area used to be a mecca for snowmobiling in the 70s and 80s, with 1500 miles of snowmobile trails. It snows maybe 3 times a year now, average of 10 inches total per season. Neighbors all around me have every kind of motor toy imaginable, but I have not seen a single snowmobile. My snowblower hasn’t been seen use in over 4 years, and the city routinely forgets how to plow or sand streets.

    Weather definitely got hotter year round over 3-4 decades. I’ll fight fellow Gen-X and boomers over this.





  • Even big corps can’t make money on rentals. Not enough to bother with the risk. Higher property taxes, higher insurance, higher maintenance costs on one side, deadbeat friendly regulation and wages not keeping up with inflation resulting in not being able to pass the extra costs along to renters.

    Starwood is the first REIT looking to sell 2000 of their 3200 homes, I expect more to follow especially if Fed hikes another 50-100 basis points. Why would anyone go for a < 3% return cash on cash from operating rentals if they can make 5-6% from loaning money to the government?

    Normally you’d expect this to be good news, with falling demand making homes affordable. Not going to happen. The costs of building a home, between more expensive materials, tight labor and high cost of debt (builders take out unsecured loans to buy land/build the home) mean new homes are stupid priced, and that feeds into higher costs of older homes. Just like the insane car market post COVID shortages. Expect paralysis and continued housing shortages, not cheaper housing.


  • So, I was on an accessibility focused team, testing and cleaning up after the feature developers to make sure the whole product still met WCAG 2.0 to AA level. I can state with complete confidence that anyone without such a team will introduce unexpected accessibility breakage and regressions every single release, sometimes in completely untouched sections. For trivial tweaks. Screen readers are finicky, temperamental and moody beasts. Modern web toolkits do a fairly good job of being accessible out of the box, but like ChatGPT generated text, they require a bit of help sometimes.

    Would not be surprised if Reddit just wants to pay lip service to accessibility. That shit costs cubic money to do right, and slows the roll of releases. Unfortunately, most advertisers on a social platform couldn’t care less.




  • Ask 3 Linux users and you’ll get 5 dissenting opinions. Mine is that KDE Plasma is very simple out of the box and more familiar to Windows users. A previous Windows user can use it without any kind of deep learning. Gnome is a bit more alien, borrows a bit more from OSX, and does force its workflow on the user more.

    KDE also offers an insane amount of easy customization for those of us with a desire to tweak or enjoy a different aesthetic or workflow. The built-in shop for widgets, wallpapers, themes, cursors, etc makes that very accessible to anyone. Gnome customization requires a lot more command line and editing of configs.


  • HOAs can be absolutely awful, with power tripping board members and management companies that steal collected funds. But if you want to live in a manicured, upscale, gentrified suburb that’s the best way to get ahead of crappification, salvage grade cars on blocks in the yard, appliances on the porch and meth houses.

    Me, I’d rather a large buffer of land between me and my neighbors. I do realize those with commuter jobs can’t practically get tens of acres to live on, however.