Did the cards not have some sort of index system so they could be automatically sorted back into the correct order? Holes on the edge maybe?

Yes, it was common to have cards numbered beyond columns 66/72 or whatever the fixed line length for the language was. You would put them in a sorter.

Another useful technique was to draw a line diagonally across the top of the deck with a marker pen or similar. Helped a bit as a first pass for any post-drop sorting

First think about the practical, legal and PR challenges of putting self-driving vehicles on public roads.

Putting autonomous robots in amongst humans is that problem, on steroids.

Edit: there’s a reason why industrial robots all have a hazard zone marked around them, and some even have transparent safety screens or cages

This concept of making the best use of any available data to infer useful probabilities seems like a crude form of some ideas behind current LLMs, BUT they (Peters, Graham, Robinson and Woodhead) were doing this work 20 years earlier.

Bayes theorem dates back 250 years.

This is what engineering is all about. Applying what it long known to solve new problems, or old problems better.

LLMs are a triumph today because someone made a keystone observation

You’re employing someone to order it for you online and be accountable for any issues in that process.

It’s work. How much do you want to pay them for that work?

>why the stasi didn't build a large pit somewhere in a land fill, put all the records in it and burn the lot.

In hindsight, that would obviously have been the most efficient, but it needs trust and cooperation between regional Stasi offices to give up control of their records.

But The Stasi did not have foresight, was not efficient, did not have cooperation internally. (If they had all those attributes things may have gone differently. So it’s good they were still incompetent at the end)

What about modern devices (such as laptops) that have a fixed battery? They shouldn’t rely totally on software to force a hard power off because that’s not safe. If the software hangs you cannot power down

The EC (embedded controller) controls the hard power off on a modern laptop, not the OS at all. That's why you can still power down in the event of a device lockup (thankfully).

It's all fun and games until the EC locks up.

Have had it happen on the Essential Phone and my MIL's Chromebook (don't remember the model). At least with the Chromebook, you can open it with a screwdriver and pull the battery. Better than waiting however many days for the battery to fully die so the EC resets.

Some laptops have a battery reset button for cases like this. For example lenovo has a pinhole where you can press a tiny button using a paperclip.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20250107-00/?p=11...

This is legally dangerous for the company because those words have generally well understood meanings, so a lawyer could argue that they promise a certain level of service. It’s safer to use vague words to describe the product variants.

Windows used to have a method to map out bad memory areas with bcdedit. Did that ever work? Does it still work?

With the increase of soldered RAM it must be more important than it used to be ten years ago.

Just search for “bcdedit and ‘bad memory’” for more documentation

>the complete obliteration of the basic assumption that ‘someone wrote this so it is at least worth a cursory glance’.

The OP is not disputing that a lot of writing already had less than zero value to the reader, even decades ago. So that is not their conclusion.

They are really only saying that problem suddenly got MUCH worse.

You said it perfectly - “All writing now is noise”

I was a little cranky when I replied. What I meant was that this flood of LLM-noise already started around GPT-4.5 for many people. I was surprised to read about this now. But it’s good to have a discussion about it at large, anyway.

The other big wallet hardware maker, Trezor, already responded they will majorly cut back their authorized suppliers network.

They want to be certain they have the resources to properly personally verify the operations and trustworthiness of every authorized distributor that they’re vouching for.

https://xxcancel.com/Dantoshi/status/2110000117856248141