When I bought my Windows 11 laptop a month ago, I was able to set up a local account after turning on airplane mode. (I had entered my wifi password in an earlier step since I thought it was just for installing updates.)

People seem to hold computers to a higher standard than other people when performing the same task.

A man my ex-wife dated after I divorced her contacted me on Facebook once, calling her a “horrible psychopath”. Apparently he knew my name because she had told him awful things about me. I feel really sorry for him, but I also feel validated in a sense. I get a nagging thought sometimes that I could have prevented the failure of my marriage and made the relationship work somehow. (I don’t miss my ex at all but I’m ashamed of being divorced.) Knowing that another guy also had the experience I did with her reassures me that it really wasn’t my fault.

I thought the army gave recruits an IQ test and then trained them for what it thought they were good for.

The cluster B people can be really alluring. I met a gorgeous woman once who was extremely enthusiastic about dating me. She couldn’t get enough of me. I was an awkward nerd who had never experienced anything like that before, and I liked it. I liked it a lot. After six months of dating, she asked me to marry her. I foolishly said “yes” - I knew it was crazy but here was this sexy, smart, funny woman literally begging me to accept her as my wife.

Accepting her proposal flipped a switch. She had been high-strung before, but now completely random things would set her off and she would start yelling at me. She would yell at me in front of my family. She would even call me at work to yell at me because she remembered something and it made her angry at me. She was extremely jealous - I stopped talking to any of my female friends because even mentioning them made her flip out, but she still got mad that I wanted to spend time with my grandmother and my dog. She also started sending weird text messages to my relatives. For example, she kept telling my father that she wished she was not married to me.

The thing is, she wasn’t always awful or else it would have been easy to leave. In between her angry outbursts she was still as affectionate as she had been before, but now I was constantly afraid that something would set her off. She was tiny and never physically violent but I was scared of her. I decided to divorce her after she yelled at me for wanting to include my family in my birthday celebration; the marriage had lasted six months.

Anyway, where was I going with this… Men have to watch out too. Usually we imagine abuse as something a man does to a woman, but that’s not the only form it can take.

Would a local mechanic train a stranger who had zero knowledge?

The hacker known as Four Chan would never lie to us!

Their problem:

So apparently NetHack has a mechanic that slightly changes how the game plays every time it’s full moon according to your system clock

The model wasn’t trained on a full moon. They had a system to set up the environment for replicable results but it didn’t include modifying the system time.

It reminds me of another bug with the system time, which a friend of mine encountered. He was working on hardware and he was getting a lot of units that worked fine at the factory, immediately failed at the client’s location, and then worked again when they were returned to the factory. It turned out that when these machines were turned on, their embedded OS automatically queried some server to update the current time. The client’s internet connection had such high latency that the server’s response only came back after the machine was already in use. This generated a huge delta-t value that triggered the sanity checks and shut the machine down. The factory had a much lower-latency connection and so the race condition could never be replicated there.

As for the weirdest bug I ever encountered myself: a compiler generating bad machine code. I have often said that the worst part of programming is that the computer always does exactly what you tell it to, but that was the one and only time in twenty years that the computer actually didn’t.

This whole time I was pronouncing it “vodzhak” rather than “voyak”. (Analogous to Russian воин?)

Before anyone gets too excited: some of their electrodes are no longer able to record a signal from the patient’s brain. They’re reprogramming their software to work with fewer electrodes. No one is being turned into a borg drone.

I don’t think many actual Turkish people would be offended by this.

Anon must be a slow learner if it took him this long to figure out that Latina women are hot.

I suspect it isn’t even illegal, but I’m not an expert.

You can state what you don’t want, but no one will be paying attention. Except maybe the LLM reading your posts…

The joke is on Satan. Anon was already a soulless husk.

There’s not going to be a moment when the world suddenly goes from having oil to having no oil. Some oil reserves are relatively cheap and easy to extract. Other, very large reserves are currently so difficult and expensive to extract that doing so isn’t profitable. As the easy oil gradually runs out, the supply drops, the price rises, and sources of oil that were not profitable at the old price become profitable. This maintains the supply of oil and stabilizes the price.

Eventually oil will become so expensive that alternative technologies will be cheaper than it. This will happen with plenty of hard-to-reach oil left. So it’s true that the amount of oil is in principle finite, but that limitation isn’t really relevant.

The summer winds came blowing in from across the sea…

I think it’s one of God’s hilarious jokes that women have what men wish they had (lots of people who want to have sex with them) but the women don’t want it. They should trade places with me - no one is trying to sleep with me…

One bad quarter and they’re doing this? I don’t even.