#computing & technology

[mostly-funnytwittertweets]

[yodaprod]

Burger King Internet corner, New York (1998)

[53v3nfrn5]

Heiko Hellwig: Silicon Cities (2017)

[prokopetz]

Okay, so: there's a local restaurant whose online ordering process involves various selecting various sauces to be included with one's order – so many units of teriyaki sauce, so many units of hot sauce, so may units of peanut sauce, and so forth.

The idea is supposed to be that you can select any combination of sauces you want, as long as it adds up to no more than four units. However, what the app actually required is that you select exactly four units of sauces; it wouldn't let you submit the ordering form if the total wasn't exactly four.

Just today I discovered that they seem to have fixed it... not by correcting the errant validation rule, but by adding a "no sauce" option, which counts toward the required total of four.

Thus, it's now possible to place an order with, say, two units of teriyaki sauce rather than four by entering 2x "teriyaki sauce" and 2x "no sauce". Similarly, an order with no sauce at all is 4x "no sauce".

This is quite possibly the least intuitive ordering process I've ever encountered, and I've literally worked in e-commerce.

[thisisrealy2kok]

[silvermoon424]

This is a subject that really interests me because I (28 years old) had computer classes in grade school where learning how to efficiently type was a big focus. As a result I have a very high WPM (words per minute) count and am an excellent touch typer.

However, I've heard that they started phasing out computer classes in a lot of schools because it's assumed that kids/teenagers already know how to use a computer in this day and age. But smartphones are more popular than computers now, and as result a lot of Gen Z/Gen Alpha kids are able to text very quickly but their typing skills aren't as good.

[chaotic-minds-think-alike]

Ok I caved, my beloved war computer

[waveretro]

[noosphe-re]

"There was an exchange on Twitter a while back where someone said, ‘What is artificial intelligence?' And someone else said, 'A poor choice of words in 1954'," he says. "And, you know, they’re right. I think that if we had chosen a different phrase for it, back in the '50s, we might have avoided a lot of the confusion that we're having now." So if he had to invent a term, what would it be? His answer is instant: applied statistics. "It's genuinely amazing that...these sorts of things can be extracted from a statistical analysis of a large body of text," he says. But, in his view, that doesn't make the tools intelligent. Applied statistics is a far more precise descriptor, "but no one wants to use that term, because it's not as sexy".

'The machines we have now are not conscious', Lunch with the FT, Ted Chiang, by Madhumita Murgia, 3 June/4 June 2023

[calicos-stimboards]

day 6: board based off fave aesthetic

event link

🐠 🖥️ 🐠 / 🖥️ 🐠 🖥️ /  🐠 🖥️ 🐠

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[mostly-funnytwittertweets]

[yodaprod]

1993

[53v3nfrn5]

Peter McFarlane: ‘Circuit Board Fossil Series’ (2012)

[prokopetz]

Like, I'm not saying that this is a good thing, but it's kind of bleakly entertaining how over the course of my life my skill set as an online researcher has gone from being:

Hugely valuable in the late 1990s and early 2000s because the discoverability of information in public-facing databases was fucking terrible and nobody knew how to organise anything; to

Effectively useless throughout the 2010s because search engines enormously and rapidly improved and computer literacy was at an all-time high; and

Back to being hugely valuable once again because SEO bullshit and the proliferation of AI-generated content have degraded online discoverability back to pre-2000 levels and computer literacy is in accelerating decline due to mobile devices deliberately obfuscating basic functionality so that app vendors can sell it back to you with embedded advertising.

[thisisrealy2kok]

Power Mac G4 (1999-2004)