Reminded me of Lenny and he didn't even need any AI to waste a lot of scammers' time.

I remember setting up Lenny and forwarding calls I used to get to him while commuting on the bus early in my career. It was a lot of fun to listen to scammers start to freak out when they realized what was happening.

Our record at the office was 47 minutes. FORTY SEVEN MINUTES keeping a scammer on the phone till they hung up. We never laughed so much at work in all of twenty years. :D

Maybe Daisy has become sentient and has taken over all operations at 02. No one noticed.

Google Translate often translates words through English.

DeepL also, for the record (since it's being compared in the submission)

It's pretty clear if you use the words out of context and they're true friends but it gets you the German translation of the English translation of whatever Dutch thing you put in. I also heard somewhere, perhaps when interviewing with DeepL, that they were working towards / close to not needing to do that anymore, but so far no dice that I've noticed and it has been a few years

The dearth of Lojban and Ithkuil texts holds back machine translation, for they would be perfect intermediate languages.

</ha-ha-only-serious>

For though-hole components which I use with my breadboard and for small bolts, nuts and washers I have glued together a few dozen matchboxes and inscribed them with component description. For SMD resistors/capacitors I use an organizer box. Components within a certain range go into the same compartment together. For example, I have three compartments for resistors: ≤1k, 1k..≤10k, >10k. SMD ICs are all in one box, each type in its own plastic bag, inscribed.

I also have a registry of everything I have. When I buy or use something, I update the registry.

The king has just taken my largest piece after no moves were left. I guess when you reach 2048, you can take the king and win.

Apparently he is worth 1024 so you can take him when you have a 1024 piece, and win. I didn't realise this (or that he takes pieces when cornered - I avoided that, assuming a stalemate would mean losing) so played it right through to a regular 2048 which took a verrry long while.

This look like a simple test to see if remote command execution works.

If you have a public HTTP server somewhere, you can check its access logs. You'll find a lot requests which try to exploit remote code execution vulnerabilities of some CMS or router firmware.

You can replace the controller board all together, the electrical interface should not be that hard. You have to spin the spindle, jiggle the heads and send/receive the data. The main problem I see here is that modern hard drives have enormous, unimaginable information density. There must be so many tricks how they achieve that (and do that reliably!). You have to re-trace the steps the hard drive industry has made in the last 50 years.

If a normal PC had an ISA bus (like they did 30 years ago), my network card could have been connected to it with just some minor modifications.

Funnily enough modern machines have ISA in form of LPC bus used for few of the common peripherals (TPM) that can be used in ISA-compatible mode, and you can get LPC to ISA adapters.

They do apparently have an spi bus inside the pcie standard. Don't know if it would be possible with that or not though.

not being pedantic, just rounding out the record, ISA's follow-on, EISA, had already been around a while and was already sunsetting 30 years ago because PCI had already been invented. VESA also was ending its brief flash of glory.

I started with a CPU and then built everything else around it. Using something like a Z80 just doesn't seem fun for me.

I'm sending my long frames out to the network and no OS I have has any problem with that. I've read somewhere that long frames are actually used by some routers to store metadata after the packet.

wireshark doesn’t complain either?

Of course not. Long frames are totally valid.