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There was an Ars Technica article about ChatGPT. I commented that ChatGPT was going to put BS artists out of work, for example, marketing people. The comment was massively downvoted, and one person replied that I obviously know nothing about marketing. Assumptions, assumptions...

My wife ran a whisky business, specializing in single cask whiskies, for more than 20 years. I helped her with a lot of marketing texts. So I asked ChatGPT: "Can you write a marketing text to sell single-cask whisky?" Here is it's response:

"Indulge in the ultimate whisky-lover's experience with our single-cask offering. Sourced from the finest distilleries and aged to perfection in a single oak cask, this rare and exclusive whisky boasts a unique flavor profile that cannot be replicated.

Each bottle is a one-of-a-kind masterpiece, with its own distinct character, aroma and taste. The single-cask aging process allows the whisky to take on the nuances of the wood and the environment, creating a depth and complexity that is unmatched by blended or mass-produced whiskies.

Whether you're a collector, a connoisseur, or simply looking for a special gift, our single-cask whisky is the epitome of luxury and exclusivity. Don't settle for anything less than the best, try our single-cask whisky today."

Wow. That is better than you would get from almost any marketing agency. ChatGPT is still only a prototype, but it is the harbinger of change. Marketing, non-investigative journalism, pop-sci articles - it is already capable of generating all of those. Moreover, it writes better than most people, eliminated the need for proofreading to catch grammatical and typographical errors.

If you get into more serious topics, then it does need some help. Here's an example: "How is uranium created?" ChatGPT replied:

Uranium is created through a process called nuclear fission. Nuclear fission is a process in which the nucleus of an atom is split into two or more smaller nuclei, releasing a large amount of energy in the process. This energy is typically released in the form of heat, light, and radiation, and can be harnessed to generate electricity. The process of nuclear fission occurs naturally in certain types of radioactive materials, such as uranium and plutonium. It can also be induced in a controlled manner in nuclear reactors.

This is wrong, but probably not a lot of people know the real answer. However, ChatGPT is able to correct it's own mistakes. I told it: "That's not correct. Nuclear fission splits uranium into smaller atoms. But how is uranium created?" It replied:

I apologize for the confusion, you are correct that nuclear fission splits uranium atoms rather than creates them. Uranium is created through a process called nuclear fusion in stars, specifically through the r-process in Supernovae. Uranium is a heavy element and is not formed through the fusion of lighter elements in the way that the light elements are created in stars. The process that creates heavy elements like Uranium is called nucleosynthesis.

And that is the correct answer. So ChatGPT can handle even more difficult and advanced topics, with a bit of supervision.

Many years ago, we used an issue-tracking service called FogBugz. It was an amazing service for the time. Since I'm no longer developing commercial software, I haven't thought about it in years.

Well, times change, and apparently the people behind FogBugz sold it off back in 2018 or so. Today, I get a notice that my free account has been turned into a paying account, and they they are levying charges against the account. I should please update my payment details. Which is fascinating, because (a) I haven't used the software in more than ten years, (b) our account no longer exists, and (c) they can't just start charging people, when there is no contractual relationship.

If the new owners were legitimate, they might send out an email asking if we would like to rejoin the fold. No, instead they spam old customer lists, in hope that someone will think it's a legitimate charge and pay by accident.

Note the new owners' name: IgniteTech - where old software goes to turn into a spam-farm.

Having come from the Unix world, 25 or 30 years ago, it was obvious to use Linux on PCs. I had Windows as well, and some years I used Windows more, other years Linux more. Frankly, both sucked, in different ways. In the early days, Linux driver support was pretty awful. Meanwhile, Windows was pretty much a rattle-trap catastrophe with malware and bluescreens. Both have improved over the years. Probably 10 years ago, I decided to go basically full-time Linux, except for Adobe applications and games.

With Steam, even most of my games now work on Linux, and I thankfully no longer need any Adobe applications. I haven't booted into Windows for months.

So...is Linux trying to drive me back into the arms of Microsoft? A couple of months ago, I upgraded to Ubuntu 18.04. On both of my machines, Ubuntu now starts up with error messages, some system problem or other, and asks if it should report this to Canonical.

Installed printers randomly appear and disappear. Plugging in external hard drives or other devices - sometimes they appear, sometimes not. Re-plug and pray. Just now, I rebooted my PC after an update (which seems necessary more and more often - shades of Redmond), only to have the machine freeze. Hard reset, reboot, and it seems to be back. On my laptop, suspend/resume no longer works, even though it worked just fine under previous versions.

Where's that Linux reliability? I just want to get stuff done - I don't have time or desire to switch to a different distro or fiddle with settings or chase driver problems. I just want it to work.

So there's a new semester starting, Java 11 (the next LTS version) has been released, so - for the sake of my students - I wanted to update all of my Java installations and examples to Java 11. They were previously at Java 8, or in some cases 9 (to show the new module system).

Java 11 - what a fricking mess.

First, let's talk about the API documentation. For as long as I can remember, the Java documentation has offered a hierarchical frame-view that shows packages in the top-left, classes in the bottom left, and details on a particular class on the right. This provides a convenient overview, and allows you to move around within the hierarchy. With the advent of the module system, the top-left was adapted to show modules - same idea, works just as well. This has been eliminated in Java 11. Instead of a hierarchy of views, you have a search field. While it is a very intelligent search field, it hardly replaces the overview one had with the three hierarchical frames. Why remove something that has worked so well, for so long, and is so ingrained in the way people work?

Second, JavaFX has been removed. As someone who spent too many years fighting with Swing bugs in desktop GUIs, JavaFX has been nothing but a huge relief. Simple concepts like focus-change work in JavaFX, whereas they never did in Swing. I won't pretend it doesn't have problems, but it is massively better than Swing ever was - and deserves to be part of standard Java. According to Oracle, removing JavaFX from Java "makes JavaFX easier to adopt". Um...because people now have to hunt down and install external libraries?

Third - I'm working on behalf of my students here - so I'm updating various kinds of installations, to create a walkthrough. It turns out that, as of Java 11, Oracle says that non-commercial users should use OpenJDK. But OpenJDK on Windows does not come with an installer - you are supposed to unpack the files in the right place, and set environment variables and (if you need them) registry entries manually. Seriously?

Meanwhile, Ubuntu has seen fit to lie about what version of OpenJDK they have in their repositories. In a post from February 2018, they document the fact that they have an SRU called "OpenJDK-11" that actually delivers Java 10. As of today (9 Jan 2019, four months after Java 11 was released), installing OpenJDK-11 still gives you Java 10.

Then we have tooling. Because JavaFX is no longer part of Java, you have to do a lot more fiddling with module-paths and command line parameters. This is not fun - and for students just learning, it is frankly a catastrophy. In Eclipse, of course, there is e(fx)clipse, which is supposed to handle all this for you. Sadly, Eclipse 2018-12 (the current version as of this writing) is delivered with e(fx)clipse 3.3.0. Which - this has been known since September - borks your Eclipse installation to the point that it no longer starts. To fix this, you have to re-install Eclipse and specifically fetch a patched version (4.3.1) of e(fx)clipse.

And this patched version? It does nice things like define JavaFX as an external library, but as far as I can tell, selecting this library does absolutely nothing. You still have tie JavaFX via a self-defined user library, you still have to pass module parameters to the VM - the plug-in seems to actually do nothing at all.

All in all, is seems that many different parties have conspired to make Java 11 a total disaster. I'm just trying to imagine how I am supposed to walk fresh, never-programmed-before students through an installation process with the kinds of problems described above. What an utter mess!

I appreciate Ubuntu. After dabbling with Devuan, I appreciate Ubuntu more.

I'm a techie, and like playing with things - including different Linux distros - but ultimately I use by computers to get work done. It's time to move on from my old Xubuntu install, so I figured I would try Devuan, since they just released Devuan ASCII. A new version ought to be up-to-date, being a Debian derivative, it ought to be reliable, and not having systemd can only be an advantage. So...

First, the installation process is needlessly confusing. It clearly has only been tested by people who have installed Devuan before. It defaults to wanting to take the whole disk (dangerous). When you insist on manually picking a partition, it doesn't display the partition names (dangerous). Then some of the options are just weird: picking my swap partition (there's already a linux swap on the disk), it offers to format it to ext3, ext4, etc..

During installation, I am informed that some hardware components of my system require non-free drivers. I have no problem with that. But I am asked to "insert the media" with the drivers, "ok or cancel". Um...what media would that be? If the drivers aren't in the ISO image, I have no idea where to get them. But if they are in the ISO image, why ask me to insert media? What will happen if I cancel out? Very confusing.

People who know the installer inside-and-out, and are just testing functionality, won't see any problems with any of this. For people new to the distro, there are a lot chances to seriously screw up along the way. The experience is totally unsuitable to people who aren't extremely technical.

This continues into the next phase of installation. You were able to pick the installation language, but there was no way to pick the next level of detail. Lots of us in Europe install in English, but we don't want US time/date/currency formats and we need an international keyboard. XFCE is installed, but is completely empty - there's not even an application menu. Seriously? A freshly installed system, and the user can't even start an application? Great user experience!

Want to hook up to a wireless network? It was set up during installation, but those settings aren't carried over into the installed system. Instead of detecting what the network actually supports, the user is confronted with a huge list of all possible security protocols. The individual access points are listed - do you have to set up each individual AP? Um...

Ok, we can get past all of this. LibreOffice it pre-installed, that's nice. But not the languages, and the installation process in LibreOffice itself is painful (Ubuntu has a Language Support setting that handles this nicely). And...what's this? LibreOffice 6 has been out for months now, but Devuan's brand new release only has LibreOffice 5.2, which was end-of-life more than a year ago?

This is the point I stopped. Xubuntu 18.04, here I come...

It looks like a triumph of the designers...over the users. It's Android 5 Lollipop and the associated app changes. For those who haven’t had the privilege yet, we have:

– Integrated private and business email and calendars. These used to be separate, but now both appear in the Google apps. It will be very easy to accidentally send business email from your private account or vice versa. If you create a new calendar entry, will it go to Exchange, or to Google calendar? I would have thought it obvious that most people prefer to keep their business and private lives separate. Now, doing so will be a huge effort, or else will require the installation of third-party apps.

– Reduced UI functionality. Just as an example, the font size in Mail and Calendar is now huge, with no option to reduce it. There is no longer a zoom function, so you cannot change the size that way either. To compensate for the huge font,, they have reduced the days you can see to 5, so as you scroll through your calendar, it is no longer by week – the day on the left is Monday, then Wednesday, then Friday. You can turn the phone to landscape to see a full week, but then you can only see 4-1/2 hours of your day (again, no zoom option).

– Arbitrary UI changes. Designers just cannot leave well enough alone. Just as an example, at the bottom, the “back” function used to be a curled arrow pointing left and the “home” function was a house. Now the “back” function is a triangle and the “home” function is a circle. Huh? What brain-dead designer thought changing things like this was a good idea?

A sign of the apocalypse? Until now, Google’s software has clearly undergone a lot of user testing. This time, I cannot imagine anyone but the designers would like the changes they’ve made – they just ake no sense for the typical user.

Now we're a few weeks in, and most stories when I come here are re-treads of things that I read on Slashdot a few days earlier. There's no point commenting on them, because I've already commented on the ones I'm interested in on Slashdot. Everyone else seems to feel the same way, because I rarely see a story with more than 10 comments. For a site that is meant to be all about the comments, that's an abject failure.

How could this have been solved? Well, as I proposed around launch time, the editors could have made a point of commenting on each story to prime the pump. When a story scrolls off the bottom of the front page with fewer comments than there are editors, then it's a failure. It means that either editors are posting stories that they're not interested in (in which case, why are they posting them?) or that they don't actually visit the site (in which case why are they editors?).

The only stories currently on the front page with more than 12 comments are 'people opting for dumb phones instead of smartphones' (which I'm just about to read - sounds like a typical rehash of the 'I have no self control so I'm going to use crappy technology to limit my exposure to stuff' story) and 'SCOTUS Signals Support for Corporate Religion?'. Where's the tech news? Are there any people here interested in discussing tech stories?

It feels like the staff gave up after the public temper tantrum between two of them and the community followed.