I thought the McDonalds one was good and what does it matter it was AI ; mcdonalds makes artificial food and everything about the place is artificial so why not artificial ads?

I'm pro-AI but I thought the Coca-Cola and McDonald's ads were shit. The Coke one was especially egregious because if the creators hadn't been lazy they could have made it look half-decent. Instead it's janky and inconsistent and ugly.

The worst part about the Coke ad is the fake "making of" video they released to show how much manual work went into their ads. The "pencil sketches" ostensibly made by humans in the making of were also AI-generated.

I don't usually make salads with 750 calories and an entire day's worth of sodium when I cook.

Well, in these wonderful times we cannot exclude the possibility of entire flows being ran as just prompts, especially moderation and on an AI boo-boo having to roll back by a human. I do believe that's (much) cheaper than human moderation anyway, so it'll grow (even more).

I was going to say that. Also other US stuff I see: a lot of pointless sex and nudity.

<cough> Game of Thrones... the hollywood idea of a "mature" series.

How does it currently (not) work if you don't have/use socials? They don't believe you to begin with?

You have to create/buy sleeper accounts.

I went to the USA a few months ago and was pulled aside and questioned (I have no idea why)

and when I told them I didn't have facebook they looked at me like I was mad. They asked "why not" and I told them I was ideologically opposed to it, because I believe it encourages narcissism. They acted like I was a criminal.

I found this enourmously funny and kept laughing at them insisting there was something suspicious about me not having a facebook account, which of course made me look even more guilty in their eyes.

In the end they got frustrated and just let me through, but there was an underlying and quite theatening tone which I felt was like a presumption of guilt, I laughed at the time at the absurdity of the situation, just because I wasnt expecting it, but on deeper reflection its pretty disturbing.

Should’ve just said “Facebook? Isn’t that just for old people? Why would I use that?” instead of what they would perceive as a nerdy smart-ass answer.

But that is a bit of the issue: I see people use 'young' and 'old' platforms and it's all the same: stuck to the phone scrolling through exactly the same slob, ai or human, hours on end. Can't say I even find LinkedIn any different (which I also do not use, but colleagues send me stuff sometimes). So I want no part of any of them. What do I say then? Because I feel they will think I am some sort of unabomber haxor dude coming to overthrow the gov because I am not a happy insta scroller. Which is absolutely insane. Maybe I will hang a big cross around my neck and carry a bible at all times and no phone. Same purpose, so probably works.

You demur Facebook, they ask “what do you use then?” which is a more open-ended question with more flexible rooms to spin an answer. Making a stand by saying “I don’t use Facebook because I’m a techno-woke e-Luddite” closes all that.

“Ready, Kafka?”

— Dark Helmet in Spaceballs

My gov is moving 100% of documents, forms, official stuff to web based without browser plugins. Of course unfortunately if you want to download/print (...) it will be pdf, but outside that, all filling in, editing, reading etc of all citizen facing materials must be possible with a modern web browser. If PDF is only the export for the final doc, I am ok with it; I can fill ut with whatever browser on whatever device. This should be the mandatory basics imho.

I was drilled in using the GCL (and variations on it) in Eindhoven TUE and Amsterdam UvA a long time ago, nice to see it here. Not very practical these days but good for brain.

Nice, I live in PT. Will visit. I have around 30 working speccy's and especially the rubber key ones give me great nostalgic joy even though I was an MSX child.

I visited - really nice!

They also have a Philips VG8020 MSX on display.

> Philips VG8020

Ah nice, my first love. I still have it, working. I will go sooner.

3E 00 : I was on MSX and never had an assembler when you so I only remember the Hex, never actually knew the instructions; I wrote programs/games by data 3E,00,CD,etc without comments saying LD A as I never knew those at the time.

Umm... how did you manage to learn those hex codes? You just read a lot of machine code and it started to make sense?

I started out writing machine code without an assembler and so had to hand assemble a lot of stuff. After a while you end up just knowing the common codes and can write your program directly. This was also useful because it was possible to write or modify programs directly through an interface sometimes called a "front panel" where you could change individual bytes in memory.

Back in 1985 I did some hand-coding like this because I didn't have access to an assembler: https://blog.jgc.org/2013/04/how-i-coded-in-1985.html and I typed the whole program in through the keypad.

Same here. On/For the ZX Spectrum, looking up the hex-codes in the back of the orange book. At least it was spiral-bound to make it easier.

Later still I'd be patching binaries to ensure their serial-checks passed, on Intel.

I had a similar experience of writing machine code for Z80-based computers (Amstrad CPC) in the 90's, as a teenager. I didn't have an assembler so I manually converted mnemonics to hex. I still remember a few opcodes: CD for CALL, C9 for RET, 01 for LD BC, 21 for LD HL... Needless to say, the process was tedious and error-prone. Calculating relative jumps was a pain. So was keeping track of offsets and addresses of variables and jump targets. I tended to insert nops to avoid having to recalculate everything in case I needed to modify some code... I can't say I miss these times.

I'm quite sure none of my friends knew any CPU opcode; however, people usually remembered a few phone numbers.

The instruction sets were a lot simpler at the time. The 8080 instruction set listing is only a few pages, and some of that is instructions you rarely use like RRC and DAA. The operand fields are always in the same place. My own summary of the instruction set is at https://dercuano.github.io/notes/8080-opcode-map.html#addtoc....

It wasn't unusual in the 80s to type in machine code listings to a PC; I remember doing this as an 8-year-old from magazines, but I didn't understand any of the stuff I was typing in.

Typing from mags, getting interested in how the magic works by learning to use a hex monitor and trying out things. I was a kid so time enough.

I didn't know you could do it differently for years after I started.

I implemented a PDP-11 in 2007-10 and I can still read PDP-11 Octal

Claude code figures that out at startup every time. Never had issues with it.

You can save some precious context by having it somewhere without it having to figure it out from scratch every time.

But they are right, claude routinely ignores stuff from CLAUDE.md, even with warning bells etc. You need a linter preventing things. Like drizzle sql` templates: it just loves them.