Squiffy-Marie von Bladet, PhD

"Sit, child", we for one habitually refrain from saying, "and let me tell you of the flamewars we used to have in alt.fashion.belt.onions back in the day."

I searched for “goat” on Bing the other day and nothing about animals came up on the first two pages it showed me

A sign reads "Please wait patiently for the failure of the system" with Chinese characters above.

our patience has been rewarded

I'm going to wait until someone says that 8Gb of unexpandable RAM is enough for at least *some* use cases before getting too excited about this, but it's a cute idea

this is part of why music industry is fearing the end of the 60s-80s generations of musicians

Half of British Television Always Starts Like This YouTube video by Michael Spicer

Not really that, but always a joy to re-watch:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wjnm...

(If you are really wondering, it is because they transliterate the Cyrillic alphabet according to French norms ("Пу́тин" -> "Poutine") but they do not extend the same courtesy to the Latin alphabet even when it is used Americanly.)

That's certainly not a lazy reiteration of the local consensus but a valuable and thougtful intervention. (A list of things I am in fact serious about is not appended)

I do have some unresolved issues with the calculation of the period Mercury's retrograde motion, if you are anxious to help? (And before anyone starts: this does not imply that I have a favourable view of astrology as a modern discipline.)

I considered a "sightable phase threshold" which might be reasonable in a cloudy country like this one, but in practice a lower-bound date was acceptable for my purposes (which do not especially involve fasting).

Bani Saud And Ramadan Moonsighting Confusion True to their disruptive nature, the Bani Saud again caused unnecessary confusion be claiming to have “sighted” the Ramadan moon on the evening of February 17. There was no moon to sight; their claim ...

Opinions differ, as is fitting for a religious question. In practice, the Saudi convention is to claim to have seen the "new moon" even when it is not plausibly visible, and I was happy to adopt this convention for my purposes;

crescent.icit-digital.org/articles/ban...

Oh you're one of them, never mind

I can get the dates anywhere, of course; I wanted a concise account of the calculation of the dates (in the form of code), and I also wanted it to be exported as an ical file to load into my Google calendar.

In fact, the shitty LLM I had available did a terrible job of the calendar logic and my overall conclusion was that I wouldn't let it do any of that logic again, but I have no complaints about the calendar file it made

I wanted an ical file that had Lent, Easter, Chinese New Year, and Ramadan dates and all the interesting questions about that were reconciling solar and lunar (and hybrid) calendars; to my lasting shame (apparently) I don't yearn to know the weird text format of ical in any great depth

Oh you can't read? That explains a lot.

Apparently my mission in this thread is to point out that you are a lying liar, who habitually lies about things. Have you considered simply not doing that?

Absolutely this. My brother is a surgeon; he's used Claude to write an app for his patients. It's not a masterpiece and it won't change the economy, but it is easier for them than trying to fill in timesheets of how much exercise they are able to take. Sensible scepticism has to recognise reality.

Remind me, liar, where I sought your approval?

This is a lie, and you are a liar as well as a dullard and a scold.

"Your dire repetitive, low-grade, boilerplate scolding is not perhaps as effective as you might have hoped. This is, of course, yet another moral failure of the scoldee."

You, also, know nothing of my "devotions" and can also fuck off

I am having this experience today. The LLMs I have available for coding are actually pretty crappy, but I am in the process of being considerably denounced* for saying they can do anything at all

* Obviously, not by H Farrell

It was precisely the Moralizing Scold mode that LLM haters seem have mostly adopted that made me intrigued enough to take another look, but also: go, in that case, fuck yourself

and Chinese New Year (which is what happened) so I wasn't particularly invested in artisanal hand-crafted calendar code plagiarism.

You are very rude to someone who has no obvious reason to value your opinions, btw

I would likely have done as you say if I wasn't checking out how LLM coding works on the platform I have available rn, but the goal was to get an ical with some major cultural/religious festivals in it for my own amusement and I figured I would have plenty of good times arguing about Ramadan

I offer an example of boilercode I would rather an engine write than plagiarise from StackExchange myself. If you choose not to understand what I say, I guess that's the end of that.

Suppose I wake up one morning with a yearning to generate an ical ics file using Python, and while I know many things about Python I do not know the idiomatic library for that. But even a very stupid LLM does, and can mock up an stub (that isn't interesting enough to be flawed) quickly

lfg

We from the Mitochondrian Liberation Front, for one, are delighted to hear it!

I literally turn up to our Open Days to staff a booth where I attempt to explain my little corner of what we do to all-comers, and lately we are expected to budget for "outreach" in all substantial projects