I ran BeOS as a daily driver for a few months in the early 2000s. I had a winmodem and Linux couldn't connect to the internet for me, but for some reason, BeOS had drivers, so I used it. It was faster and the desktop environment felt more polished than KDE/Gnome.
Of course, at that time, it was impossible to know which OS would win the wars, so BeOS became my favorite. However, Linux developed very quickly during those years, I got into college and started using UNIX there, winmodem drivers appeared, and that's what I ended up using.
But BeOS still holds a very dear place in my heart. It really was superior to anything else during that era.
I do hear my heartbeat from my left ear. The ear doctor said that the ear can be sensitive to the blood flowing from nearby arteries, and that there's nothing to do. Stress affects the heartbeat volume. I just got used to it, but it can be annoying sometimes, especially when you're trying to enjoy the silence.
The doctor also told me that it's not an ear problem, but rather a brain problem. The brain is supposed to filter out this noise, in the same sense that it filters out the sounds from a (normal) digestion, our breathing, etc. I do have some (undiagnosed) hypersensitivity, so that sounds consistent to me.
nozzlegear: it gets better with time, the less you think about it. I know it's not a great consolation, but trust me, train yourself not to think about it, and it will go away for extended periods of time (and will come back from time to time)
I built a chatbot startup in 2015. It integrated with Whatsapp (which was possible at the time with some hacks), and had:
- Multimodality: Text/audio/images input and output. Integrated OCR.
- Connection with an asterisk server, it could send and receive voice phone calls! I used it to call for pizzas to a local place via whatsapp. This was prior to Google's famous demo calling a hairdresser to book a haircut.
- It understood humor and message sentiment, told jokes and sometimes even chimed in with a "haha" if somebody said something funny in a group chat or sent an appropriate gif reaction
- Memory (facts database)
- Useful features such as scheduling, polling, translations, image search, etc.
Regarding the tech, I used external models (Watson was pretty good at the time), plus classical NLP processing and symbolic reasoning that I learned in college.
Nobody understood the point of it (where's the GUI? how do I know what to ask it? customers asked) and I didn't make a single dime out of the project. I closed it a couple years later. Sometimes I wonder what could've been of it.
An actual explanation of what the software does, from their Github repo
> WinBoat is an Electron app which allows you to run Windows apps on Linux using a containerized approach. Windows runs as a VM inside a Docker container, we communicate with it using the WinBoat Guest Server to retrieve data we need from Windows. For compositing applications as native OS-level windows, we use FreeRDP together with Windows's RemoteApp protocol.
Banning them is a bit harsh and unrealistic, as they allow the platform to be monetized.
Here's my random idea: all commercial accounts must be labeled as such, and people should be able to opt-out from seeing any post by such accounts - except ads because, as I said, not allowing a platform to monetize is unrealistic.
Not war and peace, which was episodic, but smaller novels were thought out in Tolstoy’s mind before being written wholly. He mentions this in his diaries. Zweig mentions the same, too, but of course his novels are generally much shorter than the two Tolstoy’s masterpieces.
I’ve read Tolstoy’s diaries and he mentions the thought process he uses to write small novels. First he thinks about what should happen, then he writes (or dictates) the text. Thinking takes a few weeks, sometimes a month, then writing is pretty quick. There is some editing, but nothing like we do nowadays.
Bigger novels such as war and peace were written episodically.
Novels were dictated, that is absolutely correct, but on top of it, the whole plot was developed with a high level of detail before dictation started. There was some editing, of course, but nothing like we do today, where writing books is basically an iterative process. We lean on the written word too much for our thinking (not being critical, just that’s how we are taught)
While I agree with the underlying message, "writing is thinking" is only circumstantially correct. It wasn’t always like this.
We learned to think by writing only after writing became cheap. Yes, we’ve trained our brains to develop ideas by editing raw thoughts on paper, but it is just one of the possible methods.
I have read a lot of late 18th, 19th and early 20th century books and diaries, and it is plainly clear that writers such as Tolstói, Zweig, Goethe and others developed full books in their mind first, then wrote them from cover to cover in 20-30 days.
Thinking used to be detached from writing. That is a fact. We just lost that ability in the modern era thanks to cheap writing technology: pen and paper, then computers. I'm not saying the current approach is wrong, but don't assume that the only way to think is to write.
Socrates argued that writing would destroy people's memory. He wasn't 100% wrong, yet here we are. The criticism towards the use of LLMs is so deliciously ironic. The analogy with writing... writes itself. Kids that grow up with LLMs will just think differently.
I think this is just the first step for a full-featured agent that not only does searches for you, but also executes whatever was your goal (e.g. a restaurant reservation, etc)
Preview is one of the most underrated apps in macOS, and the one I miss the most when I use Linux or Windows. It's a great little toolbox for quick editing and convenience features.
(Edit: seems that the statement above applies to ChatControl 2.0, not the approved text. Apologies.)