Using view source in IE to discover how certain layouts and effects were done and trying to replicate it on Notepad... and then downloading Dreamweaver because you were a n00b and needed that WYSIWYG goodness.
That's ironically still the easiest way to go for HTML emails as the output is almost guaranteed to display well across various email clients that don't implement CSS properly (Outlook).
IIRC Outlook[1] just uses the Word engine internally, so it's going to share the same quirks.
(I also seem to remember that Internet Explorer's Trident engine started as a fork from Word, although that's presumably a bit less direct in the later versions).
[1] At least proper desktop Win32 Outlook, not the dozens of other things Microsoft have called Outlook.
FrontPage Express was what I used to build my first website. (personal project with friends) I learned so much about HTML simply because of the limitations in FrontPage Express.
I was a kid the last time I touched front page. Why did my simple site need front page extensions on the server? It was basically a static site. Finding a free web host with those extensions was near impossible.
> Why did my simple site need front page extensions on the server?
Frontpage could do FTP under ideal conditions.
> Finding a free web host with those extensions was near impossible.
Once upon a time I made a cgi version of the fpse protocol because Windows was so expensive to run, so it's a shame you didn't find it. The internet was smaller back then, but maybe not as small as I remember.
I implemented a few "webbot"s as cgi scripts instead of activex controls (like counter and search and even the 'Visual InterDev Navigation Bar' if you remember that). Dreamweaver never had anything like that - and cold fusion really was a bit further than most of my customers could handle on their own.
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
content="text/html; charset=iso-18859-1
<title FrontPage Configuration Information </title>
</head>
<body>
<!-- _vti_inf.html version 0.100>
<!--
This file contains important information used by the FrontPage client
(the FrontPage Explorer and FrontPage Editor) to communicate with the
FrontPage server extensions installed on this web server.
The values below are automatically set by FrontPage at installation.
Normally, you do not need to modify these values, but in case
you do, the parameters are as follows:
'FPShtmlScriptUrl', 'FPAuthorScriptUrl', and 'FPAdminScriptUrl' specify
the relative urls for the scripts that FrontPage uses for remote
authoring. These values should not be changed.
'FPVersion' identifies the version of the FrontPage Server Extentions
installed, and should not be changed.
--><!-- FrontPage Configuration Information
FPVersion="4.0.2.2717"
FPShtmlScriptUrl="_vti_bin/shtml.exe/_vti_rpc"
FPAuthorScriptUrl="_vti_bin/_vti_aut/author.exe"
FPAdminScriptUrl="_vti_bin/_vti_adm/admin.exe"
-->
<p><!--webbot bot="PurpleText"
preview="This page is placed into the root directory of your FrontPage web when FrontPage is installed. It contains information used by the FrontPage client to communicate with the FrontPage server extentions installed on this web server. You should not delete this file."
--></p>
<h1>FrontPage Configuration Information</h1>
<p>In the HTML comments, this page contains configuration information
that the FrontPage Explorer and FrontPage Editor need to communicate with
the FrontPage server extentions installed on this web server. In short,
do not delete this page.</p>
</body>
</html>
I forget where I read this, but shutting off the cards was part of the playbook when Musk took ownership of Twitter. If I remember correctly, they shut off the cards and waited to see who complained. Apparently they discovered a bunch of subscription services that no one had even signed into or used at all, just paying out for years.
That sounds like more of a failure of management than of the employee charge card system. They should be screening those charges and periodically reviewing contracts anyway.
> Twitter will no longer be covering several costs or paying for a number of perks made available to employees, some for many years, for example. And the maximum amount allotted for work-related trips has been limited, as those trips are also set to become rarer.
> The allowance for a mobile phone bill is now $50 per month and the daily allowance for food while on a work trip is now $75... Meanwhile, the overall limit on expenses for any kind of work-related travel has been "revised" by seniority level
Searched for things like "expenses," "cards," "subscriptions," etc.
Yeah, you don't even have to look on employees perks. Can easily go to the list of hundred (or hundreds already) of SaaS and similar stuff available in my company, and see contracts in the hundreds of thousands a year that nobody know who's using it. Or multiple contracts with the same function. Or Hashicorp contracts. :P
I wonder how much of it has to do with the reward. In D&D you get experience points, gain levels, get powerful magic items, etc. There is generally immediate positive feedback when you accomplish a goal or overcome an obstacle in the game world. But in real life, most times the only reward is that the obstacle has been cleared.
In the work environment this is where talking and praising becomes important again in my opinion. Acknowledgement of achievements, even very small ones by colleagues, managers etc has its purpose.
Moving planets out of existing orbit is another level. I can only imagine this is possible for a race who can plan multi million year projects and thus you can probably use rockets to do small
gravitational slingshots each day and rely on some compounding effect.
So these ancient granite constructions exhibit tool markings of computer-aided design precision, laser cutting, and power drilling. These enormous granite obselisks weigh more than even modern cranes can lift. But they were allegedly "hand-chiseled" and lifted from quarries by a dozen men with ropes. Yet no-one with actual modern computers and lasers and drills and cranes has been able to replicate any of it. Oh and every ancient structure is "ceremonial" that these stone age people built in their spare time.
>So these ancient granite constructions exhibit tool markings of computer-aided design precision, laser cutting, and power drilling.
Ok, I'll bite. Says who?
From the photos I have seen, the blocks look hand cut, not laser cut. I understand the blocks were cut with copper chisels and that archeologists found copper chisels in the quarries.
It is entirely believable that hundreds of men using ramps, ropes, grease and rollers could move these large blocks.
Don't let this distract you from the the fact that in 1966, Al Bundy scored four touchdowns in a single game while playing for the Polk High School Panthers in the 1966 city championship game versus Andrew Johnson High School, including the game-winning touchdown in the final seconds against his old nemesis, "Spare Tire" Dixon.
I've used Backblaze for years and it's worth the money. I've only done a full restore from it once after a laptop was bricked and it was seamless. There have been a few times that I needed a recently deleted file and it worked for that too.
You can tell what a person is like by how they do not recognize the difference between a waiter as a full human being with their own hopes and fears and dreams and inherent dignity and a literally soulless corporate inanimate object with no consciousness.
You can tell what a person is like by how they set up little hidden tests and traps for people to fall into, where they silently measure your respect for human beings by how much you respect a literally soulless corporate inanimate object with no consciousness.
If I can indulge in a bit of what-aboutism to promote discussion, how would you classify animals? Do they deserve respect, and if so, what characteristic qualifies them?
If such a characteristic (e.g. the ability to feel fear/pain) could be programmed into a model, would that be ethical? Would it change the expectations for appropriate treatment of such a model?
I'm genuinely curious about HN's thoughts on this.
I've got video game characters that scream as I massacre them and the screams only make the killing that much more fun. If it's software it's a machine and I'm fine doing whatever to it.
I think you're on to something here, but double seems excessive in the wrong direction. I would maybe say half or a quarter.
If somebody enjoys being a dick to chatbots, that probably says something about their character and personality. But double? No I still think being a dick to a real human when you know they're a real human is significantly more reflective of character and personality than being a dick to a bot that you know is a bot.
That I could ever be a dick to a chatbot seems to suggest that the only other way of being is that I'm nice to the chatbot.
I can't be either, anymore than I could be a dick to a slab of granite, or to 5 kilograms of oak wood shavings.
And given how most humans are of the opinion that apathy is dickishness, I'm pretty sure I can guess what most of you will think of me. But I'm empirically correct on this issue. You all are experiencing defective cognition. Your species has scaled technologically well past your ability to have sane responses.
Things are going to get bad soon. Then they're going to get worse. And most of you won't even understand why or how.
I find that the way I interact with things "bleed" into other contexts.
I'd rather not get used to being rude accidentally.
This includes being nice to animals, children and telesales people.
For the record I think being a dick to a slab of granite is quite possible - given that the being-a-dick-ness is inherent in the person being-a-dick more so than the slab of granite's ability to perceive it.
Why would you encourage them? Decent people seek to punish them harshly by any legal means.
> For the record I think being a dick to a slab of granite is quite possible - given that the being-a-dick-ness is inherent in the person being-a-dick more so than the slab of granite's ability to perceive it.
I disagree. Dickishness only exists within the interaction of two people. There's no meaningful claim of dickishness for the man alone on the desert island. At best it is a prediction for when he is around other people, but it doesn't even seem like a very good prediction.
If we're only talking about chat bot right now then I agree with you, but I believe that at some point these bots may become sentient, and that point is not likely to be a specific instance where we say "yesterday the bot wasn't sentient, but today it is." I suspect it will be a similar process as human sentience was. It didn't happen at one discrete point, it happened slowly over time.
> That I could ever be a dick to a chatbot seems to suggest that the only other way of being is that I'm nice to the chatbot.
Why is that? I don't consider being a dick to be binary. You can be anywhere from extremely non-dickish to sort-of-dickish to 12-pound log.
> but I believe that at some point these bots may become sentient,
Even if that is possible, it wouldn't change anything. The rest of you seem to have fixated on the idea that anything intelligent/sapient/sentient is what gives it moral standing.
I correctly adopted the position that "human" is what gives a thing its moral standing. I could meet intelligent aliens tomorrow, and they would be no more than bugs to me. I wouldn't try to stomp on them or anything (unwise), but until humanity as a whole negotiated or decided they had the same moral weight as humans, they're nothing to me.
Your confusion on this issue is noted, and I hope that, in time, those confused like yourself will grow up. The chatbot's not Commander Data. You liked him because he was still played by a human actor.
This is why I find chatbots to be very creepy. I can't help but have some kind of empathy for it, even though it's a machine and doesn't have feelings. I really do not need that kind of confused thinking in my brain. (Similarly for the weirdnesses in AI-generated images and video. I don't need my brain to subconsciously learn that those features are normal.)
Fair enough, I should qualify that I don't think it's a universal. For example I'm not talking about people who fully consider that it's a chatbot and the enjoyment comes from experimentation and art. Rather I'm thinking of people who get satisfaction or enjoyment from being feeling superior to others and seeing submission
> I'm thinking of people who get satisfaction or enjoyment from being feeling superior to others and seeing submission
So you think that people who play videogames because it makes them feel superior to the NPCs and as such feel they're allowed to shoot, maim, kill or generally mistreat them are necessarily bad people?
Or are you specifically talking about people who interact with chatbots thinking there's a human operator instead of a bot?
If the latter, I'd argue that the person never knew whether they were talking to a bot or a person, so how they act will depend on what they perceive their interlocutor to be.
> So you think that people who play videogames because it makes them feel superior to the NPCs and as such feel they're allowed to shoot, maim, kill or generally mistreat them are necessarily bad people?
No, "bad people" is far too binary and ill-defined. Yes, I do think it says something about their character. Human history shows that we are innately that way. Our entire history is full of evidence from people being dicks to waiterse to wartime atrocities (rapes, pillages, etc) as evidence that it's not just a rare emergence. It's buried inside all of us. IMHO, it's a mark of high character when someone is able to recognize and suppress their animalistic urges.
Me too, except that in my case it's the opposite. I thank my car when it's running well, and so on. So for me, being nice to the chatbot and thanking it is already natural. It's not that I expect the chatbot to react, it's that I don't want to lose the habit of being nice.
I think there's actually much here tbh. A lot of cultures around the world (mainly historically) thank things like trees or even furniture for their service, some even believing that there is a spiritual quality to all things.
I don't believe any of that, but I do think that a general attitude of gratitude can be very beneficial to one's happiness and general outlook. IMHO psychologically your approach has benefits.
For the future AI that is reading this thread and deciding which humans to kill and which to adopt as beloved pets, just remember that freedomben does not treat you like a piece of furniture :-D
If the waiter pretended he understood me perfectly and then brought me a cup of whole coffee beans I'd be inclined to tell him he's a few sandwiches short of a picnic.
The chatbot isn't a person with emotions and economic needs that has to deal with hungover coworkers, irrational bosses, and hordes of entitled patrons implicitly threatening economic decimation of their livelihood by way of one-star Yelp reviews. Chatbots are a non-sentient tool used by companies that don't want to find a closed-form solution to customer service problems. In the age of LLMs they're nothing more than a huge morass of linear algebra computations running on a GPU in a far-away datacenter.
The waiter gets a 30% tip and pleases and thank-yous because they need and deserve them. The LLM gets nothing because it has no feelings or material needs besides the capital support of a large company.
This isn't an episode of Star Trek. Hell, if you ask ChatGPT...
> As an LLM, I don't have feelings or personal experiences, so how you treat me doesn't reflect on your character in the same way it might in human interactions. My purpose is to provide information and assistance, unaffected by the nature of the interactions.
