Huh, it is different for me on every page refresh. No VPN, etc... just Firefox on Windows with uBlock, CanvasBlocker, and a PiHole. No persistent fingerprint for me!
But at the right time of a cold winter day (late evening), at the right place (I saw it in a forest) you can see spiders walking all over the snow hunting.
If you see it in person it's a really weird phenomen. Makes you realize how many spiders there actually are too.
> "Mima" is a name derived from a Chinook Jargon term meaning "a little further along or "downstream".
To keep the random learning going, Chinook Jargon [1] is fascinating in itself. A few years ago someone on this site suggested a book called You Can't Win, an autobiography of a reformed hobo/thief/addict written in the 20s. It's fantastic, especially the audiobook version on Spotify. Googling now, I'm seeing it got a (poorly reviewed) movie adaptation this year [2].
Anyway, when locked in a British Colombia jail around the turn of the century, the thief/author used it to communicate with his Chinese cellmate [3]:
> A priest visited the jail one day and gave me a pamphlet on which he had printed the Chinook language. In answer to my question he told me it contained about three hundred words—nouns, verbs, and adjectives. It was created by the Hudson Bay traders, years before, and taught to all the Northwest Indians to simplify trading with the different tribes. […]
> One day he came in with a scared-looking China boy about twenty years old. “Yank, here’s a cellmate for you.” He locked the Chinese in, thinking he was punishing me. The China boy later proved the jailer’s undoing and my deliverance. He knew some Chinook, but not one word of English. I learned from the Indian trusty that he was held for trial, charged with stealing a considerable sum of money from his employer, and that his case was about as hopeless as mine.
Sometimes I wonder if I am in a bubble. This has not been my experience at all. A few examples:
We have a sailboat and it has a turbo diesel engine, which is unusual (for a sailboat). Purely mechanical and I understand small diesel engines pretty well. But when we had loss of power and a change in exhaust and it could have been about 4 different things. Based on an array symptoms ChatGPT worked through a few tests for me to do and narrowed it down. It had a consistent and good methodology for working through this.
I am planning a large solar array for our boat. It is challenging because it is a 48v system and that has certain requirements. We have to use an array of smaller panels wired together in groups to get the right voltages. I also have partial shading issues to work out. But there are a lot of other variables too that have to be accounted for. It worked through all this well and came up with a great plan, pointing out things that were not hard to verify but things I did not initially think of. I am pretty knowledgeable about electrical stuff as well and it did not get anything wrong.
Another example is I want to come up with a way to identify a user for a system based on 5 things they could remember. Not facts, things. But how do you make a system that someone can remember (without writing down) 5 things, 5 years from now. ChatGPT came up with a good idea using memory chains that would make it easier for a person to remember.
All of these were insightful conversations that I had with ChatGPT Sol medium effort.
I also find that for answering questions that require some thinking (like how does xyz work) my default is becoming ChatGPT vs Google more and more.
And I can assure you that there were a number of MS research developed tools for finding memory bugs that have been used for decades at MS. There was never a don’t look / don’t fix policy while I was there. Quite the contrary.
Was there ever a time, apart from the short monthlong stint in 2001 after Blaster, when Microsoft developers worked on fixing memory related bugs?
Automated tools (before the advent of A.I.) can only get you so far. The bugs being found by A.I. today could've been found by eyeballs if companies thought it worthwhile.
When these tools were set up, on every code change you had to run these tools and deal with the output of anything it thought was a memory bug - part of the dev cycle before you could commit your code.
Did you have to scan the code looking for memory bug yourself with your eyeballs too? Yes, at every code check in you went through a paired peer code review before checking code in no matter your dev level. So two sets of eyeballs would look at every change.
So yes, we had to look for bugs in multiple ways no matter the type of bug on every single code change.
Then the testers would run all these tools and look at the output too (I was there when each org still had SDE Testers).
Did bugs still get missed? Of course, just like today even with today's new tools.
I stumbled into this same workflow idea. I hadn't really used anything other that Chat GPT Sol (medium) and when I wanted to start using code agents, I just asked GPT how to start. This evolved into having GPT do the brainstorming and writing the initial prompt for a project feature/change to hand over to Codex working in Sol light mode. These prompts where often a couple pages long as they had a lot of the architecture details worked out already. Codex would then come up with a plan and I'd take that back to GPT to review. GPT would make some suggestions, which I'd throw back to the agent and off it went.
I got super great results working this way. Maybe there is a better way to integrate the two modes though. But my first real project was end-to-end 100% working correctly from the first run - about 10,000 lines (including tests) of greenfield code. I did have it work in manageable chunks that I could easily review - not one-shotting the whole thing.
Now I'm thinking about plugging Deepseek into Codex to be the coding model and see how it goes.
Except the steel armature inside can turn to hidden rust and if you do something and crack the ferro hull they can be a total loss. A lot were home built so finding a quality build is another issue.
I wrote software for a company that did legal forms on a PC - used by those same users that mastered WordPerfect for DOS. Those users typically had lower powered PCs even as Windows was slowly gaining traction in the market. Lawyers were slow to upgrade to more powerful PCs when WordPerfect for DOS was their main use. I pitched that Windows was the future but my boss at the time, rightly so, argued that those users could not adopt it on the hardware they typically used.
The compromise was I developed the new software as Windows 3.0 apps and used a text-based rendering compatibility layer called Mewel that implemented the Windows API in text mode for single DOS applications. A few #ifdefs and I could compile for both Win16 and DOS Text mode. This not only allowed me to develop under Windows using the superior at the time Borland compilers, it gave the company a solid footing when the legal world finally came around and wanted Windows software - we had it finished already. Sales slowly transitioned to the Windows version and then it really took off around Windows 3.11 (Windows for Workgroups).
That company was later bought by Pitney Bowes because they were the only company with Windows compatible legal forms software for Windows. Performa (or was it Proforma - I can't remember) was the name of the software.
I was just there this week and it has of course changed a lot. I was also there in either 73 or 74 as a kid - the visitor center has also grown a lot since then.
Well worth the visit (and you really need two days to see everything - we spent 10 hrs and felt rushed and saw only about 75%). Even with the Disney-ified aspects (a few movie rides/experiences and kids activities), it still seems a lot like a museum experience. The artifacts are amazing (like standing under a Saturn V, seeing equipment from the American first space walk, and then walking on the original (relocated) launch tower footbridge that the Apollo 11 astronauts used).
The three astronaut memorials were a bit of an emotional to see in person - pieces of Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia as well as tributes to all those who have sacrificed their lives in this pursuit.
