The best thing I ever did for my father was to buy him a kindle and an access point and show him how to use Project Gutenberg to get books. He loved the old writings (he being a GED holder who was in the Navy during Korea yet had read the entire Harvard Classics). He had a special rolled up towel he used to prop it on his lap in his favorite chair and he read and read and read. When he passed he was reading "Legends of the Jews" from 1931.
I had some small e-correspondence with Michael S. Hart back in the 90's as well, and made a few modest contributions to the project, which made my English major undergraduate heart swell with pride and joy.
I guess this is only to say that PG is special to me for these reasons, and I am glad to see it still thriving. <3
this is so great to hear! Distributed proofreaders (the org that actually does transcriptions) is still looking for volunteer should you feel the urge/inclination :)
https://www.pgdp.net
I loved Pegasus. Specifically because to move it to another machine you just had to copy the PMAIL folder and make a shortcut. No registry awareness, no dependencies.
I stopped reading once the author claimed it was a lie because the SecSrv knew technical terms, then claimed it was a lie because they didn't know the technical terms. It's too early in the morning to be purposely confused.
In Mass Effect, there is a distinction made between AI (which is smart enough to be considered a person) and VI (virtual intelligence, basically a dumb conversational UI over some information service).
What we have built in terms of LLMs barely qualifies as a VI, and not a particularly reliable one. I think we should begin treating and designing them as such, emphasizing responding to queries and carrying out commands accurately over friendliness. (The "friendly" in "user-friendly" has done too much anthropomorphization work. User-friendly non-AI software makes user choices, and the results of such choices, clear and responds unambiguously to commands.)
A bit of a retcon but the TNG computer also runs the holodeck and all the characters within it. There's some bootleg RP fine tune powering that I tell you hwat.
I mean it depends on what you consider the "computer", the pile of compute and storage the ship has in that core that got stolen on that one Voyager episode, or the ML model that runs on it to serve as the ship's assistant.
I think it's more believable that the holodeck is ran from separate models that just run inference on the same compute and the ship AI just spins up the containers, it's not literally the ship AI doing that acting itself. Otherwise I have... questions on why starfleet added that functionality beforehand lol.
I helped interview a guy recently who was (a) ESL, and (b) Typing in our questions and reading the answers at a breakneck pace to the point where it was almost pathological; we could not get a word in. In unspoken horror and synchronization, we got through the formal part of the interview as quickly as we possibly could.
I feel this in my soul. I work in higher education, and every major contribution I've made has been ripped from my hands and either dashed like the first copy of the ten commandments or handed over to someone shinier. I'm still proud of all I've done.
I had some small e-correspondence with Michael S. Hart back in the 90's as well, and made a few modest contributions to the project, which made my English major undergraduate heart swell with pride and joy.
I guess this is only to say that PG is special to me for these reasons, and I am glad to see it still thriving. <3
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