Notices by Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club), page 2

@gloriouscow I mean, I've always wanted to be software. being hardware has caused a lot of problems.

I don't think I'm written in Rust, though. More like Visual Basic 5

is there some technical reason why every single password manager I've ever used doesn't do shit for HTTP Basic Auth?

You'd think this is the place they'd shine, since it's standardized and built into the browser, rather than having to regex for username and password fields

computercraft/opencomputers are some of the most fun environments to code in because you're always at risk of having your code exploded by a wandering angry bush

and if I tell their AI chatbot that I want to remove a TV plan, it gives me some step-by-step instructions on how to do that

on a set-top box I don't have and have never used

so I try to go through the "customize my plan", which won't let me select no TV but I'm hoping I can remove it at a later spot, and it refuses to let me continue until I enter a credit card for my mobile phone account.

apparently my direct debit info is fine for TV/Internet, but it needs a CC for my mobile phone account.

I don't have a mobile phone account with them, though.

Still, I need to enter a card for the 0$

somehow I doubt how live this live agent is

clearly I just need to tell it I want to know how to do it from the website!

"remove TV plan from website"

and there it goes, telling me how to do it from a set-top box

wow xfinity's site is terrible.
I'm trying to convince it to let me cancel my TV plan but keep my internet. I got through two chatbots and it gives me the option to schedule a callback. I hit that button and it says there's an error, and suggest I go look at support.

like, support for their website? not working?

like, there's a reason why laws are written Like That, because legal english has to establish all its terms and be very precise with what it's saying because English (like all human languages) is not precise.

so even if these AI systems worked, didn't have the environmental downsides, the labor downsides, the costs, the inability to run them locally, the inaccuracies due to just being statistical models, the closed-box nature making them difficult to debug, the forced nature of their inclusion, and the other 900 reasons why I'm not interested in AI:

I don't want to talk to computers in English, because I want computers to do exactly what I tell them.

It's so, so much worse to program in english.

Like, you've talked to other humans, right? you know how often there can be a misunderstanding?

And in those cases, you're talking to an entire sapient person! not a pile of math that's been trained on reddit and stack overflow

and programming languages are designed to do this! That's one of the many reasons they aren't just english.

and they still have problems with this, because making a language that is completely defined, explicit, and precise is REALLY HARD.

I dunno I just feel like maybe I'm an outlier in my interest in being able to precisely tell computers what to do and to have them do that accurately and without spurious errors.

I want accuracy, not a statistically-likely result. Computers are big calculators I use because they're good at math and I'm not.

If I wanted inaccuracy I could just do math in my head

look there's a billion other reasons why people are against AI and all but fundamentally the core of my personal reason is that I've already spent 30 years learning how to teach computers how to do exactly what I tell them to, so I am exceptionally disinterested in having them do things less accurately by talking to them in a sloppier language

wait I just realized I could avoid having to be smart by just being stupid harder

I'm thinking of compiling a small visual basic program and embedding it into the internet archive's emularity version of windows 3.1 inside an em-dosbox on my website

oh god
for the first time in over 20 years
writing some PHP code is the easiest path forward

do I fall to temptation?

in reality I've already written the HTML form (kinda: I copied a couple jquery-UI examples together) but I'll be happy to recreate it for fun (and to avoid writing HTML)

so I have no idea if that's obviously what my server has, we've been running that for a decade, or if that's like released last tuesday

"The package requires PHP version 8.0 or higher."

well, the last time I did any PHP, it was like... PHP 5