This guy just built a preemptively-multitasking OS for the Intel 8088 chip, the one from the original IBM PC, which also features an early Mac-like UI: https://os8088.com/

https://chatgpt.com/share/6a7e8991-399c-83ea-bc65-2cf9a536fa...

Why don't more people do this, or trust it? Do they not want to get upset when their sacred cows are toppled? Do they not realize that getting their cows toppled actually makes them more correct? I don't know, and I'm starting to not care.

My statement to you is: I don't care what you believe or care about. I only care if you have actually faced the evidence against your beliefs and care. If they still stand after that from a good-faith point of view, then you can have them. Otherwise, they are just "partisan", and I have zero interest in partisan politics anymore, because it's way too bullshit-infused at this point, driven by a media whose profit only comes from outrage, and mired in people who are obsessed with identity politics.

(A friend once told me, "you are the most persuaded by evidence and argument of anyone I know... and that's a sad thing for humanity," so there's that.)

That said... My personal take (since I find this particular point unaddressed by the larger conversation around this) is that a lot of intangible value was lost by USAID going away, such as American goodwill. This then turns into fodder for terrorists... Which is, of course, very nearsighted. And the bill for that may come due one day.

Are you really trying to compare my experience as a NON-certified security professional, with yours?

Mostly understood re: the rest. Musk knows what damage he caused, and he knows it likely because it hit him in the dollars.

*people

Also, that's not what strawmanning is. I never denied that Grok didn't act bizarrely offensively over a fucking year and a half ago (so did other LLMs, btw... and so have many other experiments over the years, remember Microsoft's?), which is an eternity in this space. I know Musk is polarizing, but give me a fucking break. Don't assume malice when social incompetence serves as an exculpatory factor.

Apparently, you are unable to comprehend that your opinion of things has been tainted away from the truth by an algorithm incentivized to outrage you. That what you call your "values" are, in fact, driven by someone else's greed for eyeball attention. Do you think civilizations that become anti-Western-values over time are more driven by facts and empiricism, or by catchy slogans that twist the truth and a media that uses cherry-picked examples which immediately trigger emotions?

Facebook has a far longer (and worse) laundry list of offenses and I'm sure you still use it. Or Threads, or Instagram.

> My organization has outright banned Grok

That's too bad, as it's currently the only model that won't consistently flag honest good-actor security questions, in my experience. So I'd ask you who you work for, but I wouldn't want to expose them to extra security scrutiny. ;)

Oh, there's also this: https://artificialanalysis.ai/articles/grok-4-6-benchmarks-a...

Just today I had to switch another agent to Fable with the instruction, "Please clean up the mess that Opus 5 made, thanks"

The other day, Sol called Opus 5's handoff (a skill I have that is basically a compaction, but just written to a file not tied to one LLM) "incoherent", that was a new one.

Opus 4.8 or Fable (at great expense) are the only ones that aren't frustrating for me.

I used Grok 4.5 for a security review the other day and it did a FANTASTIC job. I mean it thoroughly ROUTED my app's security, identifying attack surfaces I'd never even considered, and I LOVED it! (Guess why I had to use Grok to do the security review in the first place?!?!)

I'd suggest trying it out with something like that first, if you haven't used it before.

All I remember was being more blown away than I had ever been before or arguably since. I mean... this was so far beyond the green-on-black text-based UI's I was all too familiar with that I was just mindfucked. And I think that's what sold my folks on doing that crazy act.

A couple of years later they also started selling Amiga 500's. I was, for whatever reason, much less impressed.

Anyway, I spent much of the following summer coding in Microsoft BASIC for the Mac, which has its own backstory I only became aware of recently... tl;dr Cutthroat Microsoft tactics, as usual https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html

    B: not part of the language.

2) When your tooling around a language works better when it's not actually written in the language... That should tell you something. And yet...

https://github.com/pmarreck/aedicule

It's almost as if YouTube should be the responsible party here, and yet... isn't.

I'm on the verge of building my own frontend to YT and using open source tooling to download only what I approve of, since their algo keeps shoving shit en masse at my kid.

Oh, and I have no idea what this app does, and don't care to sign up just to find out. Not cool.

https://webassembly.github.io/spec/core/text/index.html

Also, who tests the expensive testers? ;)

In order to make it work, I had to re-implement some math, so I avoided floating-point altogether (IEEE754 is a personal pet peeve) and went with mantissa and exponent fixed-point decimal. Or should I say binary, because the "decimal place" is the number of bits, not the number of base-10 decimal places.

Apparently this is the only deterministic, cross-platform, cryptographically-secure procedural RNG that has many types of distributions (uniform (default), normal (Box-Muller), exponential, Poisson, log-normal, beta... all with configurable inputs AND which will plot the distribution for you in the terminal!) AND is guaranteed to give you the same values... Everywhere. (Because how the fuck has this not existed yet??) Implemented in both LuaJIT and Zig with C FFI. So there you go. MIT license. Enjoy your deterministic but still very random numbers, on every OS, identically.

(It sources the best-in-class recommended source per OS if you want true random. It will do that too.)

And you missed an even MORE relevant excerpt!!

    Man and Slave
    
    The problem, and it is a moral prob-
    lem, with which we are here faced is
    very close to one of the great problems
    of slavery. Let us grant that slavery
    is bad because it is cruel. It is, how-
    ever, self-contradictory, and for a
    reason which is quite different. We
    wish a slave to be intelligent, to be able
    to assist us in the carrying out of our
    tasks. However, we also wish him to
    be subservient. Complete subservience
    and complete intelligence do not go
    together. How often in ancient times
    the clever Greek philosopher slave of
    a less intelligent Roman slaveholder
    must have dominated the actions of his
    master rather than obeyed his wishes!
    Similarly, if the machines become
    more and more efficient and operate
    at a higher and higher psychological
    level, the catastrophe foreseen by
    Butler of the dominance of the ma-
    chine comes nearer and nearer.