J_Scarbrough wrote:
Is it true that new laptop computers don't even come with USB ports or headphone jacks anymore? I mean, those are rather necessary; how can they not even have them?

Happy 35th!

That is the reason I love Android phones. I much prefer corded headphones because wireless requires additional charging and sometimes the signal has static, and bluetooth drains my device charges. Good olde fashioned headphones cost $9.99 for a decent pair, plug into several types of devices manufactured before 2010, and I do not worry about all the additional electromagnetic waves so close to my brain.

J_Scarbrough wrote:
Is it true that new laptop computers don't even come with USB ports or headphone jacks anymore? I mean, those are rather necessary; how can they not even have them?

Everything is either wireless or accessed from the cloud.

They come with USB-C ports.
They use those for charging too unfortunately so it takes up a port.
You just get a dock and plug that into a USB-C port and then you have all the ports you want - headphones HDMI,SD card slots, USB-A, whatever

Ozoneocean wrote:
They come with USB-C ports.
They use those for charging too unfortunately so it takes up a port.
You just get a dock and plug that into a USB-C port and then you have all the ports you want - headphones HDMI,SD card slots, USB-A, whatever

I purposely got an older reconditioned machine so I would have some ports, but still needed a hub. Then another adapter because my digital camera has a certain type of card. I was spoiled as my old laptop had all kinds of ports including a universal card slot but it's gone. Was time to replace it.

Yeah, unfortunately our disposable society means we have to keep replacing expensive tech like that more frequently than we should :(

————-

Working from home day today doing graphic design I get the styleguide from a company so I can look up how to use their logo correctly…
ON THE COVER they show a use of the logo that's not supported in the guide.

I go through the 57 pages of it and find so many examples of logo usage that aren't listed in the guide as “appropriate” LOL!

Graphic designers get paid a LOT for those guides and rarely are they any good.

In all my years doing this job I've found that most GDs really aren't any good and most logos are crap for various reasons. - Granted that comes down to the client as well and their ignorant choices but a good graphic designer will guide them toward better choices

I can say confidently that I'm a very good designer. There's still a LOT I can't do or I can do but only very basically, but what I CAN do I'm good at.

Ozoneocean wrote:
You just get a dock and plug that into a USB-C port and then you have all the ports you want - headphones HDMI,SD card slots, USB-A, whatever

So in other words, they basically just rip you off by forcing you to unnecessarily buy another piece of hardware when they could have just left the ports alone, thus precluding the need to buy a extra dock in the first place? Sounds about right.

There were never enough ports. Had five on the last machine and still needed a hub. The ports were hard wired and broke easily. So in three years I was down to one. More bells and whistles are just more things to break and then find out they can't be fixed.

New one there are two. Hub and mouse. Already I've gotten better results using all those thumb drives of mine. Remember I have ten comics. There's a lot of stuff. Complex world building and history - more stuff.

bravo1102 wrote:
There were never enough ports. Had five on the last machine and still needed a hub. The ports were hard wired and broke easily. So in three years I was down to one. More bells and whistles are just more things to break and then find out they can't be fixed.

True. In built ports are often not that great unfortunately, or things like drivers or even Windows can mess them up.

On my current comp the SD card slot and one of the USB-As stopped working- but since Windows killed itself in an update and had to be totally reinstalled those work fun again LOL
But while that wasn't working I had to get a little USB SD card reader and it worked brilliantly. It's small but takes any car size, including the big old strange ones.

But yeah, no matter how many ports my Laptop has I get hubs because ports on computers are usually in awkward places and it's nasty and clunky to have a million different cords sticking out of your comp.

I'm discussing what to engrave in our wedding rings with my significant other. We're both willing to go with “Made in China” just to see the look on the goldsmith's face.

InkyMoondrop wrote:
I'm discussing what to engrave in our wedding rings with my significant other. We're both willing to go with “Made in China” just to see the look on the goldsmith's face.

Hahaha, I wouldn't do that. Congrats on the wedding ^_^

It's so cold here today. I was 5.8 degrees Celsius this morning. (42.44F)
I felt frozen :(

Damn I wish I was in such a climate right now. The U.S. of A. is trapped under a heat dome that shows no signs of lift anytime soon. We've been over 90F (32-35C) for a couple of weeks now . . . which, unfortunately, is pretty normal for this time of year since Climate Change, but I was so hoping of a repeat of last summer, where nearly 2/3 of of the season was below average (well, actually, what used to be average prior to Climate Change).

Climate change does weird stuff- longer summers, colder winter days, dryer winters… depending on where you live though.


I got caught up watching a documentary about the local pop music scene here in Perth and how there were so many Australian bands and performers that had their start here -The Hoodu Gurus, Inxs, Euroligers etc. Even AC/DC has some connection here, I don't know what really apart from Bon Scott dying and being buried here XD

They even mentioned Effigy- They could have made it big but were betrayed by their label. I didn't listen to them when they stated, I remember hearing them on the radio but wasn't really interested at the time XD
But in the early 2000s I shared an art studio with their lead singer, Peter, and discovered that he used to be in the band because another friend at the studio mentioned it (Peter never did). I listed to their whole album and loved it. I still listen to it.

When I knew Peter he was a very ordinary, friendly guy, with short hair, and paint smeared. dirty clothes. working on painting commissions in the studio to make his money. But the version you see in the music videos and the version you hear singing the songs is this thin, effeminate fellow with long hair and a high breathy voice, wearing frilly shirts and tight trousers. XD
Such a different persona.
I say that because I'm always the same no matter what I'm doing, haha!
When I was in the studio working on my art I was never in paint smeared clothes, I was always dressed to the nines.

-Getting dirty in an art studio is a choice, not an inevitability.

Anyway, He was a cool guy and a great singer.

This bullshit is why people don't understand the current AI trend 🤣
Chat GPT couldn't beat my cat at an exam let along any university student if they were on equal footing.
What they don't say is that Chat GOT is using the internet and available databases to steal that info to answer the questions.

Of university students were allowed to do that for exams then they could beat any test ever made.

If you cut off Chat GPT from its sources they it can't pass anything, not even gas, while a bit percentage big the UNI students WILL still pass.

The problem is: suppose there is an exam for a university student in 19th century german philosophy, and the question is to explain Hegel's philosophy.

The purpose of this exam is to see if the student memorized a lot of stuff, and hopefully understood it too (it is much easier to remember stuff if you understood it). This, for a human that has to phisically read stuff through eyes, is a very hard task.

On the other hand, one could simply copy-paste wikipedia's page on Hegel, and if the teachers didn't realize it s/he would get an high result, without needing to memorize/understand; this is the reason copypasting stuff is forbidden.

ChatGPT, in this case, is acting like a sort of better version of copypasting, since it produces a result that is a mix of all the stuff that is written about Hegel on the net, and didn't need to read or much less understand it.

So obviously it outperforms a human on this, but this is a test that was crerated to makes stuff difficult for humans, so it is a test that is already stacked in favour of chatGPT.

It is like saying that a car outperforms humans in moving fast on a road: true, but also sorta irrelevant.

marcorossi wrote:
It is like saying that a car outperforms humans in moving fast on a road: true, but also sorta irrelevant.

Genius level analogy!

I'd say it's a study I'd like to see and dissect, but I haven't got time for this, so I'll say right away it's bullshit without bothering to prove what we all have known all along anyway.

In fact, a couple of months ago I took some time to test ChatGPT by feeding it old graduation exam questions from my subjects Geography and English. Then I marked the outcome, pretending it was a student. That thing very narrowly passed one of the two Geography exams with what I think translates as a D- and failed miserably in English on both tries (which is usually about analysing a literary text). In other words, it wouldn't have graduated and not be allowed to study at a university.

It's because these exams require working closely with the supplied materials, and don't forget to cite it correctly, as well as using certain methods and finally stating an opinion and justifying it. I used to find some of this a bit technocratic before, but that has changed, because these three things can't or won't be done by AI, not by this particular AI anyways.

One day, not to far off, we'll find ourselves in a Blade Runner like world where you have to undergo Turing tests to prove you're not a replicant. The constant rain is already there, at least in my part of the world. That's just what warmer oceans produce.

I'd like to look at that study. I'm pretty sure that it's got a lot of internal validity issues simply by the fact that it's trying to compare completely different things- a human brain that works with learning through processing, and a computer that has been coded to retrieve human-written texts from the internet and mash them together in a new text without any further processing required.

It's not even apples to oranges, since one is a brain and the other is a program. It's like comparing apples to an apple-shaped metal paperweight.

One of my facebook friends just decided to leave, because apparently the ultimatum Meta brew up reached him: you either pay a monthly fee to use it Ad-free or you use it for free but give them permission to use and sell all your data for Ads, probably AI as well, etc. He couldn't log in unless he picked an option of the two. What's infuriating is not that corporate giants can do whatever the hell they want, that's something to expect in the XXIst century. What's infuriating is that using facebook was so comfortable for everyone in the non-english speaking community that there is literally no alternative where you can just share photos and news with friends and family. You either go global / federated or you pay. Or you use instant messaging apps (other than messanger from now on of course) to talk to people 1on1 but no profile, no timeline, no personal image to your community… We've had plenty of time to create a decent competition for facebook and the best anyone could've come up with was the politically charged dumpsterfire that was Twitter and now is also owned by a megalomaniac billionair. And no, Mastodon or bluesky ain't no place to go private with friends and family. Not that I could convince a single person to join either of those.

@PaulEberhardt and @Tantz_Aerine : Exactly!!!!

———–

@InkyMoondrop - I resigned for Facebook a couple of years ago and closed my profile and yet recently Facebook opened it up again!! >:[
That annoys me because it took a lot of preparation and work to do that (transferring my pages like Drunk Duck to a new management account etc )and now Facebook just restores it as if nothing happened.

I took a quick look but had no desire to use it again.
When I left I did it quietly and didn't tell anyone, haha! Though I stayed on messenger.
I've been much much happier without it!

Scarborough is an older thing than Simon and Garfunkel :D

I love that it's an old traditional hate song where an ex lover basically says “If you see that person tell them we can never be together again!”
People mistake it for a love song because of the style, but it's absolutely not. The singer lists a series of illogical, impossible tasks and says “if you can do that you can be a true love of mine”, which is a poetic way of saying “get F***ED!”
Or, to be less crude and more accurate: “Take a long walk off a short pier”

———-

I finally worked something out:
The old suits of armour in British manor houses and American mansions popularly depicted in old TV shows and ghost stories- I'd always been a bit mystified by what that tend was based on since of the style of armour depicted not that much of it exists in complete suits and what does would be pretty rare and NOT in that condition and not displayed so casually.
So what was the trope based on?

It was based on a REAL fashion. They really DID have suits of armour all over the place in those sorts of houses, except they were fakes. It was popular to decorate your place with reproduction suits of armour in the old days. Usually the swords and shields were too.

There were other exotic items to indicate you'd traveled. And they were almost never real because even if you had been there you were sold a cheap fake made for tourists.

Fakes made for tourists. I went to England and got this suit of armor!
You know it's tin?
Shine it up. No one will ever know.
Stamped Birmingham tin works inside.
Wow, great center of Medieval armor production!
Nice sword on the wall.
Wilkinson fine cutlery ltd.Ltd. DISPLAY ONLY. DO NOT SHARPEN.

bravo1102 wrote:

There were other exotic items to indicate you'd traveled.

I went to England and got this suit of armor!

Nice sword on the wall.

Went to the Royal Armouries in Leeds. Impressive and real. They don't let you take the stuff home with you.

plymayer wrote:

bravo1102 wrote:

There were other exotic items to indicate you'd traveled.

I went to England and got this suit of armor!

Nice sword on the wall.

Went to the Royal Armouries in Leeds. Impressive and real. They don't let you take the stuff home with you.

They have a deal now with sword maker (I think it's Windlass?) and they're making battle ready replicas that you can buy AND take home and cut up things without them snapping in half and stabbing you hahaha!

-Years and years ago when I was younger I made my own sharp sword out of a piece of mild steel. I used it to hack plants like a machete (they needed pruning so I wasn't just being silly).
Because it wasn't a real sword with a temper it got all bent up and wonky. I got tired of constantly straightening it after a while and just kept slashing with this bent up home made sword…
Till I missed the thing I was aiming for and the sword kept on the trajectory of its swing and the point of it drove directly into my kneeeeeeeeeeee.

The pain was very bad and I collapsed. But then I dragged myself up fuelled by pure red rage and limped to the shed with the blade in my hand. I stuck it in the vice and slowly, deliberately hacksawed it up into tiny pieces.

I couldn't walk for a about a walk after that and I had on going pains when the weather was cold for years after but it's all better now haha!
-I should have had antibiotics or at least sterilised that wound but I didn't do anything to it at the time.

It's still more stylish than fridge magnets, I'll grant them that.

bravo1102 wrote:

Till I missed the thing I was aiming for and the sword kept on the trajectory of its swing and the point of it drove directly into my kneeeeeeeeeeee.

OUCH !!

Youth, wasted on the young.

PaulEberhardt wrote:
It's still more stylish than fridge magnets, I'll grant them that.

Had all fifty states at one point.

plymayer wrote:

bravo1102 wrote:

Till I missed the thing I was aiming for and the sword kept on the trajectory of its swing and the point of it drove directly into my kneeeeeeeeeeee.

OUCH !!

Youth, wasted on the young.

LOL! I love how you misquoted that to Bravo hahaha!
He's such a young whipersnaper

I learned something interesting the other day- a guy down the road from me used to always park his car on the side of the road across from his house, till he made a nice garage for it. It was a pretty grey gull-wing Mercedes. Very old.
I knew it was a fancy car but only just learned that they go for 1.5 to 10 million dollars O_O

A Flock of dreams might actually be finished…

Pending approval from Ozone of course.

Hey! It's been awhile since I've been here.

I hope 2023 and 2024 has gone well for all of you!