I would say the multivac in "Franchise" is the same Mutlivac as "Last Question" and "all the troubles of the world" (one of my favorites). There are no positronic robots in "Franchise", nor the others.

I wonder if Asimov considered multivac to be an ancestor to his positronic robots, or if the two exist in different universes. I don't recall the two ever appearing in the same story.

How old is that icon set? I swear I used that same peppers icon for a Windows app that I published around 2002.

I wonder what is the purpose of ghidralite dot com. SEO spam? Are they building trust and then will swap out the Download button with a poisoned binary.

I experienced this same thing working with offshore Indian contractors 20 years ago. Interesting to hear someone else echo my observations.

The ad felt sickening to look at, like a TV with smooth motion turned on. It's like my brain is rejecting the pictures that it sees because it doesn't match the patterns of motion that it has been trained to recognize. Or was it just regular motion sickness.

I don't think you would get the same mileage with an Ikea office chair.

This statement resonates with me. Vibe coding gets the job done quickly, but without the same joy. I used to think that it was the finished product that I liked to create, but maybe it's the creative process of building. It's like LEGO kits, the fun is putting them together, not looking at the finished model.

On the flip side, coding sessions where I bang my head against the wall trying to figure out some black box were never enjoyable. Nor was writing POCOs, boilerplate, etc.

https://imgur.com/a/jmh8EN5

Context of the conversation, I was asking it to convert a photo into Studio Ghibli style and it objected to the blender in the image so I asked if it could do one with a mason jar instead of a blender. Then it started to generate the picture, then instead it displayed the ad.

... Edit ...

Looks like this may be a existing feature I didn't know about "shopping research" connector. I can't seem to turn it off in the app .

They mentioned that before the tariffs deadline, American businesses were rushing to make giant international orders. And since then, work had been slow for my friend.

Think of all the steps required for it to learn iron farms. First it would need to observe that iron golems drop iron when killed. Then it would need to learn about water physics. Then spawning rules for iron golems. Then how hoppers and chests work. Etc etc.

But would it even bother to learn it in the first place? To be motivated to build one it would need to first learn that iron is valuable. And if its goal is to simply win the game, it would probably skip right to fighting the ender dragon as soon as possible.

Makes me think of Rory Sutherland's ideas for getting passengers to be ok with a long ride duration on the Eurostar https://www.instagram.com/reel/C98_wbssLjG/

I think in the context of an athletic accomplishment, being a grandmother does have some small significance because raising children does often hamper one's ability to stay fit during that period of their life. Her personal fitness during her 30s probably contributed to her success in her 80s.