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OK, I did it. I couldn't resist all the hype, and despite hating to give out my phone number and e-mail decided to go ahead and sign up for ChatGPT. The first thing that popped in to my head was something I had been looking for: A solar battery charger that would work well for the NiMH batteries I use in my camera and a few other devices. So my very first interaction with it was:

"what is the best solar battery charger for nimh batteries?"

It gave me 3 products.

1. Ansmann Powerline 8 Battery Charger. Not solar at all. At least it's a NiMH battery charger though.

2. Sunway Solar Car Battery Trickle Charger. Solar, but a trickle charger for car batteries. Definitely not it.

3. Powertraveller Solar Adventurer. Looked promising. Plenty of solar cell area, a bit pricey at $99 but you have to expect that with larger cells, and... not a battery charger. Just USB outlets for your devices. I've seen people use charged batteries as "reservoirs" to charge other devices, but that double-layer is so unsatisfying and of course, not efficient.

Three strikes you're out, ChatGPT.

I know this tech will get better, and a few days ago I think we were talking about monetization being a huge deal. So far it's a lousy salesman. We'll see, and now come to think of it some people have been doing technical things also. Let's see what happens when I talk to it about *designing* a solar charger for NiMH. Maybe that's the answer right there--because when I was looking at how they're charged there was this whole deal about charging being tricky if you end it early and resume. It might just be that safe, practical solar chargers for NiMH technology are not something any responsible engineer wants to market. If that's true then the truly smart answer would have been for it to tell me that. Let's see what happens when I ask it for free energy.

Just for grins and giggles, I asked it for a battery that wouldn't die. It said no such beast, then said Li-ion was the best.

I kept pressing, and proposed the classic grade-school PPM of batter, motor, generator recharge cycle. Now this was fascinating. It presented me with several paragraphs of reasoning as to why that doesn't work but never mentioned thermodynamics directly or cited a source that would take me in that direction. Students using this to cheat would sort of get the right answer, but if they hadn't actually been taught thermodynamics, they wouldn't regurgitate about PPM classes (I forget those) or which law is being violated (I forget that too, I just know it doesn't work).

So anyway, that's my first interaction with state-of-the-art AI. We'll see how it goes.

Oh, I did go back and ask it about a NiMH solar battery charger design. It gave me 6 high-level steps, which for the purpose of brevity and liability I shall not paste here. Battery tech can definitely bite you when it comes to fire safety, so as much as I hate it maybe I'm actually better off trickle charging my car's battery and relying on a 12V NiMH charger and/or USB power for emergencies. Once again, the whole "battery charging a battery" scenario; but if a little inefficiency is the price you pay for safety then I guess that's the answer.

If you still watch broadcast TV, you can't miss these Kia ads with the CGI skeletons. They've saturated the airwaves with those things, to the point where I actually thought about the ad while I wasn't watching TV (that's some serious ad saturation, my lentils).

So I was like, there's got to be something behind this because there was music I don't know, and an aesthetic that's odd. I mean, seriously Kia is the car company whose very name reminds you of soldiers lost in war. For years they've gotten a pass on that here in the USA, despite the fact that it's far worse than the infamous Chevy Nova which sounds like "no go" in Spanish. I used to ride around the DC area wondering how many PTSD sufferers were triggered by it.

Did they really just embrace that and decide to associate their cars with DEATH? I mean, seriously, when I'm considering a car Kia has never really been on my list but all else equal I'd rather not consider the prospect of entering the afterlife and being condemned to drive your econobox as a skeleton for all eternity. What kind of marketing is this?

I suppose it's arguably good marketing, because I'm talking about it. OTOH, I'm not talking about it as something positive. This has literally done nothing but repulse me from their brand and image, but wait, it gets worse.

When I dug in to discover the story behind the skeletons it turns out They come from here, as confirmed by the Kia Soul Forums. That's right. NFTs. A "Dead Army Skeleton Klub". It looks like a macabre variation of the Bored Ape Yacht Club and so yes, Kia appears to have not only owned the KIA association but also embraced NFTs, the digital assets that a lot of us are sick of and love to hate.

Like, seriously, WTF? You just can't make this stuff up.

I never wanted to buy an NFT and now I want a Kia even less than before. I hope they come to their senses and, uh... bury this campaign.

I've been thinking of taking the "rants" that I've done on various topics over the years and doing a series of more carefully thought-out (and perhaps even researched) versions of them, so that they might be more interesting and useful than the average discussion. Also, when these cyclical topics come up I could simply refer back to the essays. Each topic would be titled "The Great $topic Rant", where $topic includes but will not be limited to:

Affordable Housing
American Healthcare
Lobbying
Cryptocurrency (and/or precious metals)
Dark Mode (web design/UI in general)
...and possibly others I'm not thinking of right now.

Never say never, but I'll probably shy away from: Trump, Abortion, LGBTQ, etc. All of these things have controversies; but some are too much an invitation to a slug-fest.

Question to the audience: What topics (aside from the big political ones) do you find yourself frequently "ranting" about, which might benefit from having a well-researched "The Great $topic Rant"?

Ways To End the Russo-Ukrainian War That Just Won't Happen,

*because they are too cool for reality*.

1. Recognize the Luhansk and Donetsk People's Republics. Immediately declare war on them.

2. NATO declares war on Ukraine, invades with everything they can bring, fires a few Nerf darts at Ukrainian soldiers. Turns tail and runs, leaving everything they brought. Pity. Russia has shown us this just might work.

3. Sudden outbreak of common sense.

4. Putin is visited by three ghosts.

5. Countries bordering Russia leave NATO (if they are members) form a new alliance, and march right in.

6. We all wake up.

I'm in the middle of installing KDE on a FreeBSD machine. I was trying to figure out why one of the required files isn't on the server, and a bunch of messages popped up telling me that sshd had dutifully rejected some failed login attempts. There were multiple invalid attempts from user-IDs that one might commonly have (admin, oracle, etc.) all from the same IP. I'd rather just find my file now. It's good to know my passwords are reasonably secure... but maybe time to shut down any unnecessary services first. Since Windows doesn't do an "in your face" alert in to a console like this; I kind of wonder how often this has been happening all along. Are these Bozos why I get lag in games? I'll come back to this later. The IP? It's in Beijing and has a listed abuse contact.

I'm sure I'm not the only one to get this kind of thing. What do the rest of you do? Is there any value in contacting the listed abuse contact, or is that just another way for them to realize they have a "live one"?

1/1==1|1, so what's the problem?

I just got through watching this long but interesting video from just over six years ago, in which Johnathan Blow puts forth his ideas for the (then un-named) Jai programming language which is currently under development but not released to the public. There is a brief overview of the language available.

As someone interested in language design, I can't believe this has been out here this long and I haven't heard of it. He works in the domain of video games, but what he discusses has broad applications and many of the things he says should resonate with people who work in other areas.

The unfwics programming language (a hobby project I've been working on-and-off for years) has reached a point where I decided to give it a subversion repository. It's still private.

I just recently named it, and since like most such projects it's likely to remain esoteric I wanted a name that would be unique. Thus, Unique Name For Which I Can Search.

The name also fits with one of the key features of the language--the ability to mix prefix, postifx and infix freely. It's not prefix, postfix, or infix. It's "un-fix". Actual paste from command prompt:

+1 2
1+2
1 2 +
dump stack
#       0;  3
#       1;  3
#       2;  3

This works because where Lisp has an "eval" function, unfwics has in "infer" function which infers how the tokens should be re-ordered before interpretation. So far, it just seems to be slightly more complicated.

Aside from that, I'm aiming for it to be both interpreted and compiled, memory safe (it's currently reference counted), light-weight, and come with a translator to C that would allow it to run "unsafe" and fast (not even working on that yet). The current interpreter is incremental so in theory it could have "green" threads. I was inspired by reading about and studying Lisp, Forth, Erlang, Joy and probably a few others.

The Covid quarantine gave me a lot of time to work on this. If you hate this kind of thing, don't look at it. If you love odd new languages you'll have to wait a bit--it's still too full of stuff that's obviously wrong so I don't want to turn it loose; but just having a repository makes it feel a bit more real now. I haven't done any professional programming in 10 years so it feels funny to be committing again after all this time too...

Unprecedented moves are being made in the oil markets as the lack of demand has caused the demand for storage to exceed capacity. At this hour, various sources are quoting oil at NEGATIVE $6 and some change per barrel. Yahoo Finance can't handle this. Their quote shows a roughly $25 price decline, but continues to quote it at $0.05 despite the last price being in the teens. Nobody knows the web developers are naked until commodity prices go negative.

Update -- Yahoo Finance somehow fixed their glitch. The WTI Contract is now quoted at -$18.20 on a drop of $36.47. Other sources are stating the futures contract closed at -$37.63. This doesn't mean global oil prices are negative. It's just a widely quoted contract for delivery in Oklahoma. World oil prices at various locations are still in the 20s, and later dated contracts for US delivery are in the 20s for now.

A reminder of why we're here., my comments on the infamous Beta.

Feel free to post your motives for bailing on "that other site" below.