If you are not familiar with the fascinating story behind it, I recommend this podcast episode [1], it's one of my absolute favorites (along with its sequel)! I found out about it on this very forum a few years ago, hope to propagate the favor to somebody else out there.
I haven't tried it, but I saw people generating VBA script code with ChatGPT that can be then input into PowerPoint macro editor to automatically generate also the layout. I would be surprised if it made reasonable design choices though, and I expect you are still better off generating content and layout in two consequent steps.
Yes, pretty impressive.
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Write a Christmas card in a sarcastic tone
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Dear family and friends,
Merry Christmas to you all! I hope this holiday season finds you well and ready to spend time with your loved ones, just like I am so excited to spend time with mine. Because nothing says "joy and cheer" like being forced to spend time with people you only see once a year and pretend to like.
I'm sure we'll all have a wonderful time reminiscing about the good old days and catching up on each other's lives, even though we all know deep down that we don't really care about what's going on in each other's lives. But hey, at least there will be eggnog.
I recommend one of the recent videos by Dave Beazly [1]. He lived through and contributed to the raise of Python in scientific computing first hand in the 90s, and offers some interesting insights. Plus he's always quite an entertainer.
Just recently bumped into a podcast on the xbox hacker scene (https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/45/) and was really fascinated by the dedication, ingenuity and talent of these people. I am also amazed that you don't hear often enough stories of them receiving job offers from the companies they targeted/"hacked".
Please note the Word was at its latest version of the Microsoft 365 package. I definitely sympathize with your approach (as a nerdy engineer) but unfortunately I don't see my wife's profession compatible with such plain text acrobatics...
Please note that the problem was not the lack of frequent saving per se, which was done. The problem was that it took just one corrupted save (the last one) to destroy the benefit of all previous saves. Unless you meant save in different files, which would become cumbersome very quickly.
As a tennis enthusiast who only recently got interested in the TV pro tour competitions, I wanted to catch up on the historic efforts of the Big 3 (Federer, Nadal, Djokovic) in the last two decades of Grand Slams. Instead of manually searching on YouTube for each match, with high spoilers risks and possible poor results to navigate through, I thought: why not automatize the whole thing? A weekend of Python later, here I am.
Although it's nothing fancy, I'm sharing the outcome in case any other tennis enthusiasts might find it useful. One interesting experience for me was filtering the noise across the available Youtube videos. For example, I discovered a whole genre of (worthless to this project) videos of video-game matches with identical titles to legit videos of past matches. So I started blacklisting channels when coming across poorly rated videos, but then some videos of official channels were being blacklisted, so had to introduce whitelisting as well... For minimizing spoilers, I'm redacting titles and removing players names, but then aliases (e.g. Rafa) or channel names (e.g. RogerTV or Djoker Nole) might give it away, something to be improved upon.
In any case, hope you like it, and feel free to provide feedback to make this collection more useful!
"If you just want to see what I did, best to read the makefile directly."
Sometimes I'm amazed by the power of a good makefile that allows replicating a perhaps fairly complex set of inter-dependent targets. I wish this approach was used more in academic research, even though fitting data analysis and modelling within a standard makefile can get tricky (e.g. some passages going through remote cluster computing, some models involving large number of files that would need to be listed as dependencies)
Thanks for the hint, indeed my big mistake was not keeping emotions in check. I think the mistake was driven by: 1) they are relatives of mine 2) Covid19 is a tough topic, so politically manipulated that it hurts me to know that people are actually dying from misinformed decision making. Your suggestion also reminds me of the book never split the difference (saw it recommended on HN few times), about a hostage negotiator sharing his lessons learned. one was keeping your voice calm like that of a night dj. hard but probably the most strategic thing to do!
Thanks for the suggestion! Once a colleague and I were asked to argue in defense of the other person's view by our supervisor and the exercise really brought the conversation to a more constructive level (although there the probability of being wrong was more symmetric).
I will try to think about how to translate your CNN bet in Italy where we live, this type of misinformation here seems to be spread mostly through rumors, click-bait articles, whatsapp chains and facebook.
I'm an enthusiastic user of SSHelper, a tool that starts an SSH server on your Android phone. For me it is the fastest way to rsync pictures from my phone to my PC. Today I've realized that soon it won't be possible any more. Another recent HN post complained about the lack of Android push solutions that do not require the cloud. My concerns go in the same direction. Manufacturers want us more and more to rely on cloud services, where a more intimate LAN + SSH combo would do the job.
What are the alternatives for the tinkerers of us?
A side note: "Dubious" comes from Latin, sharing the root of "duo", which means two,in this case referring to the possible indecision between two things or ideas.
Indeed, thanks. Do you have any recommendations on which ones are the best? They have so many. Also, looking for Italian versions of those games, as some of my friends would be more comfortable playing in Italian, I found out that Quiplash is soon released in multiple languages [1], hopefully soon!
You confirm you are completely oblivious to what is happening around you, good for you. Even visual proof is not enough. Enjoy your "hospitals are not at full capacity" fairy tale, maybe you are lucky enough to not need to find an hospital. If you knew at least one person in the first line you would know better. But please do keep reading your comorting fairy tales if that helps you.
Thank your god you don't live in Bergamo (Italy) [1] right now and stop writing about things you don't know, you are just disrespectful to those who know better who won't write you here because they are either busy 14h/day saving lives or just trying to survive.
Today, one colleague of mine was claiming that he was not able to clone my repository. I'm on Linux, he's on Windows. In disbelief, I fire up my Win VM and try. Indeed, I get "cannot checkout to invalid path aux/foo/0001-bar.patch". At first I thought Windows cannot support 5-character extensions, but then I realized it just doesn't support "aux". Coincidentally, I also had a aux.py somewhere in the repo, which was also badly received. I meant to use aux for auxiliary stuff, and the name didn't sound too crazy at the beginning, but then it is for Windows after all. Just a tale for precautionary naming.
[1] https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/45/