I made my own webmail client in 2001. The killer feature was a Heart button that one-click opened a new mail addressed to my then-girlfriend-now-wife. I've never seen that feature replicated then or now. And since it was hard-coded to my girlfriend, it was clearly (hopefully!) not broadly applicable.
The different prompting strategies needed to improve results for different models is fascinating. I usually tell ChatGPT the role it should play to get better results e.g. "You are an expert in distributed systems". The same approach with Gemini returned "as a large language model constantly learning, I wouldn't call myself an expert."
Why hate on that game? It had both great puzzles (challenging yet approachable) AND was pushing the envelope of CD-ROM as a new technology, specifically the use of video + celebrities.
I hate on it because I personally didn't like it. I found the puzzles trivial, the butchering of canon painful (worse than Zork Zero), and the graphics comically awful. 7th Guest, Myst, and even Gadget were better in the GFX department for 1993.
There was a lot to love about Return to Zork, but it was made in the Sierra model of suddenly killing you whenever you made a mistake that, in most cases, couldn't even have been foreseen to be a mistake.
Oddly, the text adventures were nowhere near as punishing.
Infocom wasn't that punishing, but back in the day a lot of other IF was. It was very common for a while to have some random "guard" who would kill you - this was entirely a random number generator that you would be killed when walking into the room. Players hated it: the only thing you could do is save often and restore and try again, which was a big waste of time (really bad if you were loading from floppy on an 8 bit computer and so had to insert disk A again).
Except for Spellbreaker, which had an early path in the game that seemed like an easy solution but would break the game until the very end and you had NO idea what went wrong. (Incorrectly using Girgol to solve the ragweed problem, when you need it for the VERY LAST PUZZLE in the game to freeze shadow you before he jumps into the tesseract). I think Starcross had a path like this too, but I don't recall. And Infidel never allowed you to get the full score because you were ... an infidel. But that irony was lost on 15 year old me.
It's a good point, but the challenge is we sometimes just get street1 from a utility without city/state/postal. We tried USPS and geocoding libraries, but they fail because they often pick a random-ish city which likely will not match.
I would say sometimes data needs to be rejected as invalid. I don't know the exact scenario here, but you'll never be able to know if a street number/name alone is unique as almost any street will have dozens or more matches across the country.
If people are jamming their entire address into address line 1, that is also solved by CASS.
Cliche, but I've found this to be an amazing interview question for nontechnical positions. You learn quickly how much someone can hand wave and bullshit. If they are too cocky and can't say "I don't know", that's great to suss out up front. If it's for a sales role, maybe that's a good thing.
Bank of America has had 2-part login screens forever. IIRC they are going in the opposite direction and will be putting them together in a single page very shortly.
Right, because if one day your sitekey is missing, you'll shrug and think "I guess my cache cleared, whatever", and not distinguish a data reset from a MITM attack.
