apropos of nothing in particular, here is 1769 citation for the word 'literally' being used as a figurative intensifier
Frances Brooke, The History of Emily Montague, Vol. IV (1769), pp. 82-3
> I am just come from a walk in the wood behind the house, with my mother and Emily; I want you to see it before it loses all its charms; in another fortnight, its present variegated foliage will be literally humbled in the dust.
@wednesday@brion I don't know about dictionary editors, but I grew up next door to an encyclopaedia editor, the result of which was that later in life I had to unlearn cut-throat scrabble tactics before people would play with me twice.
Americans are fond of calling people Good Samaritans.
The point of the Good Samaritan parable is the Samaritan stopped to help a person he was supposed to hate, someone from another culture, one considered his enemy, and he helped after people considered allies had refused to help.
There is a difference between a good person and a Good Samaritan.
Today De Santis called a man a Good Samaritan because he choked another man to death.
@kentparkstreet Asimov produced an "American" version of the parable of the Good Samaritan in his essay “Lost in Non-Translation", published in the collection "The Tragedy of the Moon" where the real tragedy is that this collection of essays is out of print.
You can find a copy of this essay in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March 1972, in the Internet Archive.
«
When I was younger I though that world only gets better. Things are improved.… Computers not only go faster & draw less power but they become more usable & allow people to be more productive because of new features introduced.
Unfortunately it’s not true. Some things are improving but other get forgotten or get worse.
»
@lproven So long as I have an inverted T and separate home/end/pgup/pgdn keys I'm happy. I don't need separate backspace and delete keys or the insert/help key.
Macbook keyboards have been bad to awful since about 2007. Right now they're only bad.
@dentaku@NanoRaptor It's a video cable combining embedded RCA-style RGBA cables with regular pins for metadata. They had those with a variety of combinations of fat and normal connectors during the peak analog video era.
I really hate password/PIN code expiration. It WORSENS security, because you're forced to remember a new password/PIN and after forgetting it a few times will probably write it down. Or you might be tempted to use an easier to remember and less secure password.
Imagine a country on the way to a presidential election.
Presidential candidate A is criticized for lying constantly, trying to overturn the last election, stealing top secret documents from government, being involved in financial fraud, and having sexually abused a woman.
Presidential candidate B is criticized for being 4 years older than candidate A.
Then imagine, that this presidential election is a toss-up, because candidate A is really entertaining to watch on tv.
I've written some C++ code that is using the qpdf library to create a PDF file containing some vector graphics and text. I want the text to be horizontally centered around specific points on the page. This looks to be a nightmare, because PDF doesn't directly support that. I have to calculate the left origin of the text such that it ends up centered, which means I have to deal with the font metrics.
Don't even get me started about kerning.
@HunterZ@scruss@brouhaha It probably doesn't work any more but the last time I had to do anything sophisticated in PDF I wrote a raw Postscript program to render the text and then used a tool I don't think I have any more to save it as PDF.
@scruss@brouhaha@HunterZ Encapsulation is a bit loose language. I mean that PDF is based on a language that's equivalent to a subset of Postscript that isn't turing-complete. That's what I got out of it. It wasn't rasterized.
Making chatbots seem more human than appropriate has been a problem for 50 years. If you have a whole academic discipline whee making a deceptive chatbot has been a goal for 50 years, is it any wonder you get deceptive chatbots.
At least the author of Eliza was embarrassed by it.
@ShinyBlueThing@ct_bergstrom I'm talking about the tragedy of the Turing test. A major goal in AI has not been to just make a chatbot that sounds human, but to make a chatbot that is capable of deceiving a human that it is another human.
Ethically, when you start getting people treating Eliza as a real person, the response should be "we need to keep this from happening" not "wow, we need more of this, let's create annual contests for AI developers to see how well they can fool people". 1/2
@ShinyBlueThing@ct_bergstrom Weisenbaum was disturbed by people's ability to be fooled by a simple program and said as much. Today we have researchers fooling themselves into thinking their text generators are self-aware.
@ShinyBlueThing@ct_bergstrom The point is that this secondary and risky attribute of interactive interfaces has become a significant goal of AI research instead of being treated as a problem. Which is why 50 years later we have actual AI researchers sucked in by it.
I don't mean to brag, he said, bragging, but the cover to my upcoming novel Starter Villain may be the best book cover ever. Also the book is coming out on September 19 and you can totally pre-order it now if that's a thing you like to do. Also, also, the cover artist is Tristan Elwell and he did a fantastic job, which should be obvious because after all it is the best book cover ever
@amoroso@mwichary That's because the ADM3a arrow keys were based on credibly interpreting ASCII control codes. If you have a really strange vertical tab, and think about pages like in a book not like in fanfold.
