Yeah, stuff like that continues to be the best use-case for windows virtualization. Sounds a lot like trying to upgrade the BIOS or Firmware on an older PC; often the installer is some binary that only runs on Windows of the same vintage.
Backwards-compatibility with older web browsers so engineers can build websites for them, is another. I’ve also heard of industrial automation (e.g. CNC machines) being married to Win2k or WinXP, so being able to run an old OS on new hardware is crucial.
Windows, can I run this 25 year old software I just installed?
Thank you for your service.
Oooh, rocking an HP? I too like to live dangerously.
But seriously, that’s good to know. Those are probably easier to come by out in the wild. It really looks like Thinkpads go from office deployments straight to refurb companies these days. I never see them at thrift stores, and I’m not brave enough to dumpster-dive at e-waste.
Sometimes, old machines are survivors. Beware of confirmation bias when trash/thrift-picking cheap systems though. IMO, Thinkpads can be tough as a coffin nail. Including work systems, I’m on number 8 at this point with no hardware failures in sight.
That said, I have a very lightweight Acer that’s about a decade old with the worst keyboard and trackpad ever manufactured. It also performs like a slug, even with Linux on it. Still, it refuses to break so I can get rid of it.
This essay is brought to you by Raid: Shadow Legends.
I mean, that happens with CloudWatch all the time. It’s the most plausible part about this.
I use a system prompt that forces it to ask a question if there are options or if it has to make assumptions
I’m kind of amazed that even works. I’ll have to try that. Then again, I’ve asked ChatGPT to “respond to all prompts like a Magic 8-ball” and it knocked it out of the park.
so I start a new chat frequently.
I do this as well, and totally forgot to mention it. Yes, I keep the context small and fresh so that prior conversations (and hallucinations) can’t poison new dialogues.
I also will do the same prompts on two models from different providers at the same time and cross reference the idiots to see if they are lying to me.
Oooh… straight to my toolbox with that one. Cheers.
That’s been my biggest problem with the current state of affairs. It’s now easier to research newer tech through an LLM than it is to play search-result-wack-a-mole, on the off chance that what you need is on a forum that’s not Discord. At least an AI can mostly make sense of vendor docs and extrapolate a bit from there. That said, I don’t like it.
When writing code, I don’t let AI do the heavy lifting. Instead, I use it to push back the fog of war on tech I’m trying to master. At the same time, keep the dialogue to a space where I can verify what it’s giving me.
About 20% of the time, it’ll suggest things that are entirely plausible and probably should exist, but don’t. Some platforms and APIs really do have barn-door-sized holes in them and it’s staggering how rapidly AI reports a false positive in these spaces. It’s almost as if the whole ML training stratagem assumes a kind of uniformity across the training set, on all axes, that leads to this flavor of hallucination. In any event, it’s been helpful to know this is where it’s most likely to trip up.
Edit: an example of one such API hole is when I asked ChatGPT for information about doing specific things in Datastar. This is kind of a curveball since there’s not a huge amount online about it. It first hallucinated an attribute namespace prefix of data-star- which is incorrect (it uses data- instead). It also dreamed up a JavaScript-callable API parked on a non-existent Datastar. object. Both of those concepts conform strongly to the broader world of browser-extending APIs, would be incredibly useful, and are things you might expect to be there in the first place.
The answer is: binary, sometimes with electrical switches.
As late as the very early 1980’s, the PDP-11 could be started by entering a small bootstrap program into memory, using the machine’s front panel:
You toggle the switches to make the binary pattern you want at a specific location in RAM, then hit another button to store it. Repeat until the bootstrap is in RAM, and then press start to run the program from that first address. Said start address is always some hardwired starting location.
And that’s a LATE example. Earlier (programmable) systems had other mechanisms for hard-wired or manual input like this. Go back far enough and you have systems that are so fixed-function in nature that it’s just wired to do one specific job.
Every time.
I have left this as an exercise for the reader.
Fixed:
But we do have a QA department. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide if that’s humane or not.
Same here. At first, I thought I was going to get a better Discord experience with the dedicated ‘app’. Nope. Another web app crammed into Electron, multiplying the overall browser footprint on my system. It now happily lives on in a normal browser tab where my ad blockers and user-scripts claw back local control of things.
Hey, kudos for finding multiple anti-patterns all in one place like that. I didn’t even think about “underpowered desktop as company server” as another pattern, but here we are.
Sorry you didn’t get the contract, but that sounds like a blessing in disguise to be honest.
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The amount of work I have completed with Tampermonkey in situations like this should have made that same IT department quite anxious.
Or you’d get lucky and some other program you installed happens to have the right dependencies. Just copy them to the application install dir or to
C:\windows\win32\and off you go.