Context: I'm working on a project to install new computers in schools in my area. That means I'm getting to see so many cool (and so, so many uncool) computer rooms.
I was to a specially cool school the other day, one in which I noticed something; a box full of diskettes in a shelf. I asked the person in charge about them and she said "oh, I was gonna throw them out!", so I was like "omg omg omg can i take them??"
We took a look at them together and she gave me all the diskettes that didn't contain any information of (former) students and employees. Behold!
Now, imagine my excitement when, while the principal was looking for some paperwork we had to sign, the woman in charge told the secretary she had given me those old diskettes, and the secretary rushed to her office and brought me this!
Look at it. No clue what the text written on it is supposed to mean, but i don't care. So beautiful.
Since my diskette hoard has expanded so massively (from 1 diskette to all these), purchasing an external diskette reader seemed reasonable. It arrived yesterday, and i finally put my windows 98 machine to use :D
youtube
This is only one of all those funky diskettes, I'll set more stable VMs up and test more of them!
Holy shit holy shit holy shit GPT3 is fucking blowing my mind. This AI is better at coding than I am. I just asked a stackoverflow style question about wrangling some data I’m currently analyzing for a paper, and it gave me a beautiful, elegant, ANNOTATED, well-explained tidyverse solution in R.
This is absolutely incredible. I am completely floored. Do you know how much this is going to democratize software development?! Anyone who has taken an intro class in data structures and processing and can speak the language of online help forums can get this thing to write code that reliably does what they want it to do. This makes evaluation in computer science courses harder, but think of the intelligent, creative people who don’t have the resources or opportunities to take those courses but can watch some lectures on YouTube and learn to use ChatGPT. This is going to change the world. I really hope we can make sure it’s for the better.