BuildTheRobots

In this case yes, absolutely. It would have basically been going back to doing what I was doing 20 years ago, and I've grown a lot since then. Though a mix of impostor syndrome, desperation, depression and medical reasons that stopped me making a complete career change after redundancy, I'd settled for something I would have quickly hated.

Most humans involved were just glad I was doing something though...

> can you help me with my CV please. It's awful and I think the whole thing needs reappraising. It's also too long and ideally needs tailoring to a specific job i've found.

Then it asked me for the job role. I gave it a URL to indeed to which it came back with an entirely different job details (barista rather than technical, but weirdly in the right city). After correcting this by pasting in the job description and my CV we chatted about it and it produced a significantly better CV than I'd managed with or without friends help in the two years previously.

Honestly, the whole thing is both amazing and entirely depressing. I can _talk_ walls of semi-formed thoughts at it (he's 7 overlapping/contradictory/half-had thoughts, and here's my question in the context of the above) and 9 times out of 10 it understands what I'm actually trying to ask better than, sadly, nearly any human I've interacted with in the last 40 years. The 1 in 10 times it fails has nearly always because the demo gods got involved.

I've found some of my interactions with Gemini Pro 2.5 to be extremely surreal.

I asked it to help me turn a 6 page wall of acronyms into a CV tailored to a specific job I'd seen and the response from Gemini was that I was over qualified, it was under paid and that really, I was letting myself down. It was surprisingly brutal about it.

I found a different job that although I really wanted, felt I was underqualified for. I only threw it at Gemini as a moment of 3am spite, thinking it'd give me another reality check, this time in the opposite direction. Instead it hyped me up, helped me write my CV to highlight how their wants overlapped with my experience, and I'm now employed in what's turning out to be the most interesting job of my career with exciting tech and lovely people.

I found the whole experience extremely odd. and never expected it to actually argue with or reality check me. Very glad it did though.

Sorry, I completely misunderstood what they said. My mental picture was the equipment being _in_ the room attached to the patient (and safe to be so), but the person being stuck outside unable to easily intervene. My experience with MRIs is always being alone in a room which backed that up.

I'm not even thinking of this incident. My base query is why MRI patients seem to always be alone in the room. Ignore all the anaesthetics too; I've seen them refuse to let a nervous patients family member stand in the room during the scan even though it could completely calm the patient... that's what seems odd to me. This is based on UK hospital experiences; I'm not sure if it's universal.

The incident in question is sad and seems avoidable, but I hadn't even got that far yet; I got stuck on the top(ish) comment of "(Once the patient was anesthetized and the heavy door to the MRI machine room was closed and locked,) - I could only monitor my unconscious patient through a darkened heavy glass window". My thinking went "surely being in the room would be better" -> "they never seem to let anyone in the room" -> "why not?" - and then I confused you and we ended up here :)

I might postulate that while Rhubarb LTD absolutely doesn't hold and will never create a backdoor, Celery Inc does. Ignore the fact that Celery is staffed by some of Rhubarb's senior engineers working part time. Ignore the fact Celery are contracted to do security assessments so have access to all the source code, radio firmware and schematics...

I absolutely don't actually know anything about Apple, but I've seen some of the ways even small companies legally split themselves up to avoid tax or various forms of liability. Multiple phone numbers to the same phone, multiple domains and email providers to the same laptop. Multiple denials that you've ever heard of the other company let alone happen to share the same office space...

There's a massive difference between a truthful statement and an honest one; anyone that works with code should understand that.

In that case, why (in the above example) does the anaesthetist have to monitor from, or a nurse or family member have to wait outside?

I understand there's magnet safety worries, but if the anaesthetist is knocking someone out on the scanner bed, doesn't that prove them magnet safe?

A lot of people get panic attacks / claustrophobia and are incapable of getting in or staying still for a scan.

I have a lot of sympathy. I'm pretty good in confined spaces usually, but even after multiple MRIs it's still a surprisingly stressful experience. The buildup and safety questions make the pre-experience worrying. The aperture is surprisingly small. Depending on the scan, part of you might be caged in place, and it's extremely noisy and you're aware of a lot of mass and power spinning very close to your face.

Also, some of the radiologists don't help. It's not deliberate, but they're entirely desensitised to the experience (and often haven't actually gone through it themselves; which again seems crazy considering the lack of radiation). My last scan was of my lower back, but they were already set up (from the previous scan) to feed me in head first rather than feet first. From their point of view it saves a bit of faffing with the software and moving the pillow to the other end. From a patients point of view it makes all the difference in the world; it's a very different psychological experience having your legs inside with your head free, vs being stuck head first in something and having it whizz past next to your head.

I've had a goodly (read unhealthy) number of CT and MRI scans and I'm bright enough to understand which one is significantly more detrimental to my long term health. I'm also aware that on a subconscious almost cellular level, it's the benign one that absolutely terrifies me every time...

Faraday cage makes sense considering the RF sensitivities involved with MRI.

I do wonder if someone being in the room is enough to distort a scan? As there's no ionising radiation danger, it always seemed odd that you were left alone in there.

After speaking to one of my friends with a box, he insists there aren't adverts...

Seriously though, this is a somewhat large CDN - how the heck is it financed?

To be fair, I've not actually played much with the VoD ones other than flick through the libraries and see if a couple of streams play. There's every chance they do break playback to throw adverts at you, I honestly don't know.

The live-tv streaming apps I've seen didn't seem to break for adverts, but I could be wrong. I don't have a box at home to play with or test so it's all passive observation.

Even so, does advertising revenue actually work out profitable after running costs?

HA doesn't care but your radio environment probably does. One of the great strengths of Zigbee is the mesh network - it doesn't matter where in my house I dump something, because all my bulbs are Zigbee repeaters it's going to get a signal and be able to route back to my HA box.

If I now get a _single_ Thread/Matter/Zwave device to replace one that's broken, ignoring the cost of a new radio for HA, I have to give very serious thought to where it's going to live vs signal availability as I build out yet another network.

tldr: HA is fantastic for coordinating disparate devices, but RF still bites.

> The term "hacker," even in the computer field, originally had a larger scope than computer security.

I've been helping run a Hackspace for a few years; I can't tell you how many times (sometimes per week or even day depending on what I'm doing) I have to have this conversation.

I've gotten quite used to going through the patter with non-tech people - try dealing with the local council, or applying for insurance or even personal jobs when it's on your CV. Thankfully a lot of the older people remember the term "hack" meaning "amateur" which eases explanations in a workshop context.

I always assumed IT people would realise the non-negative connotations, but that really isn't the case.

> Interestingly though, years later they had to similarly release an update to Gauntlet Legends for just about the same reason.

Useless tech point, but Gauntlet Legends was actually "new" enough to keep the game data on an IDE HDD. 1979 vs 1998 was a massively long time in technology terms, interesting to see some of the non-technical issues persisted.

Tangentially related, but the built-in Windows Notepad still to this day will append the current time and date to a file on opening, if the first line is ".LOG".

Have a look at Mental Omega, a quite over the top RA2 Yuri's Revenge mod that makes it easy to play on modern windows, play online and also adds a tonne of extra content should you want it.

https://mentalomega.com/

Slightly odd (age wise) Generals got open sourced before RA2. I wonder why?

The G3 an G4 towers deserve extra special design mention. From a tinkering and engineering point of view, they were _lovely_ to work on.

That does actually seem like a fair interpretation. Thank you.

The Olympics comment seemed more damning. He literally said twice they rigged the election.

> They all came in on the Olympics. And then I saw [Gulati] and we got the World Cup too. And you know, it's only because they rigged the election that I'll be your president representing you there. You know, I got both of them. I got the Olympics and I got the World Cup. And I said, you know, it's too bad. One was in 2026 or the other was in 2028. I said, I won't be there. I won't be your president.(...) But then they rigged the election and now we won. So I'm going to be your president for the Olympics and for the World Cup.(...) So [Gulati], thank you for the World Cup and everybody. Thank you for the Olympics.

https://youtu.be/TTHonqrM7Vc

I've not seen a 'just-board' USB-C interface before; that in itself is as cool as anything else.

Quick shout-out to Sandtris where the blocks disintegrate into pixels when hitting the bottom. It's surprisingly addictive: https://sandtris.com/

Kindle cover would be extremely useful.

Might be worth pointing out that "own data" actually meant "quite a large amount of OpenStreetMap".

Apollo in Real Time is an overwhelmingly awesome resource. Thank you.

Thanks for the archive link. I wonder what the DIP switches were for in the end?

Got to shout out to VueScan for making obsolete scanners usable on modern operating systems. It's not free, but is reasonably priced. If you can physically connect your scanner (scsi2usb is an exercise left to the reader), then it's likely to let you use it.

Didn't this used to be a massive issue for the apache webserver team?

Not just the weird meaning, but on my last Thinkpad the red dot and the slightly red glean of the camera lens look surprisingly like each other. Even worse I managed to get the cover in a position where it looked like it was closed, but the camera could still see.

I still have a lot of weirdness when it comes to making things actually stay asleep and wake up again when wanted. There's a lot of hardware that often boots up, or always boots but only if it's been switched on once before, or keeps trying to wake itself up for no good reason.

The absolute most consistent way I've found is using cheap zigbee smart switches or even second hand smart PDUs. Set the machine to boot when power is restored and actually switch the thing on and off from the wall. It saves a whole lot of messing around, you can force the reboot issue and for a tiny amount more in upfront costs you can have power monitoring as well. It also works for network gear that doesn't sleep or anything else that had a physical switch.

edit: Ideally give me hardware with proper out-of-band management (ipmi or AMT at a pinch), but for everything else having control of the power is as good as it gets.

> It requires loading the entire disc into memory first which is going to be slower than purpose built netboot images.

I'm not sure it does require loading the entire image. Servers (Dell/HP) that allow remote mounting iso images will use HTTP-Range requests to be able to 'seek' the disk. I _thought_ (but honestly don't remember) iPXE was capable of range requests too.