I found the Star Trek game that I'd played on an IBM 370 as an Android app a few years ago.

I met that phrase in the late 1970s. It also told me "Fie! You're no wizard!"

I lose sound or video in MS Teams whenever my laptop sleeps. Rebooting fixes it though (and now I use hibernate before I unplug my laptop so it doesn't sleep).

Back in 2006 or 2007, I checked out all of the available editors including UltraEdit. SlickEdit won out, and I still use it. I will admit that VS has done a lot of catching up, but I don't see any reason to stop using my chosen editor.

This seems like a perfect task for ChatGPT.

The new laptop my employer gave me a few months ago has three USB-C ports and what look like a microphone jack, a card reader, and some little rectangle I don't recognize. It also came with a dongle that gives me one USB-A port and one HDMI port. My manager, who loves Apple products, was overjoyed that Windows laptops have finally caught up with Mac laptops. I hate having to drag the dongle and a USB hub everywhere I go. At home, it connects to my WiFi. At my desk at work, the dock has an Ethernet port. Welcome to the future, I guess.

Well, the most recent round of warfare and carving up began in the 1990s's. It wasn't exactly pacific in the first half of the 20th Century.

The "X" is "Xmas" is the Greek letter chi. "Christ" in Greek is "Χριστός."

Yes, all those people who made buggy whips, horseshoes, and stage coaches were homeless and unemployed after that evil Henry Ford starting building automobiles!

"Merkin" was being used by people in other English-speaking countries to refer to Americans when I first stumbled across the Internet in 1996. The Australians also call us "seppos." The Canadians seem to polite to use either of those. Some of the British were shocked that "merkin" didn't make us feel insulted. We just laughed about it.

Almost as "intelligent" as a LLM-based chat bot!

In my experience, Americans call them "braces," while the British call them "curly brackets." In other words, this is something else that ChatGPT got wrong.

There's no intelligence in an LLM. It strings phrases together partially based on the frequency of those phrases appearing together in its training data. Here's an in-depth description: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-doing-and-why-does-it-work/. Yeah, they will add heuristics around it to make it seem less dumb, but how far is that going to take it? Have you seen the ChatGPT response where it's supposed to subtract 3 from 70, and it confidently answers "73"? And here is Donald Knuth's experience, Donald Knuth Asked ChatGPT 20 Questions. What Did We Learn? - The New Stack[^].

Do they allow you to add item to a wishlist?

Back in my Fortran days, I found this. (I don't remember the variable names.)

IF FLAG1 .EQ. .TRUE. THEN
FLAG1 = .FALSE.
FLAG2 = .TRUE.
ELSE
FLAG2 = .FALSE.
END IF

I replaced it with two lines that I thought were obvious:

FLAG2 = FLAG1
FLAG1 = .FALSE.

I made plenty of other changes, and the manager in charge of the codebase thanked me for "cleaning it up." (This happened almost forty years ago when 10 MHz processors had only been around a few years.)

But it gives the correct answers when you have complex variables. Dot-net can't do that.

Get a better editor!

Fortran is still used a lot. See Why physicists still use Fortran, and the bottom of this page: IBM100 - FORTRAN.

I haven't used WinZip since I discovered 7-Zip.