Anyone remember chatbots back in the day?

the early DIY attempts at creating programs which could communicate with people, in some cases an effort to beat the turring test.

ALICE, and it's variants.

and of course the more... questionable one's designed for the more... adult of us.

anyone still using them or see them used more recently?

I've been feeling really confident with my programming skills over the last few weeks since I've been able to actually pump out a decent amount of projects that actually work and have some degree of optimization. As such, I've considered making my own little video tutorial series on programming (specifically C++, for a number of reasons.) If anything, the series will be put up on Youtube since I'm pretty new with content creation and don't want to monetize immediately with Udemy or something. Knowledge should be free.

So I'm asking you guys, have you ever tried to learn from a video series? What was your biggest pet peeve with it? Why did you stop (if you stopped) or what kept you coming back to learn from that one series of tutorials?

Right now, I want to start doing a focus on adding some sort of 'homework,' like small projects that I'll explain at the end of a video then go over a solution in the next video or something like that. Since I'm a bit mic/camera shy, I've also noticed my videos take pretty long since 1. I'm giving some pretty detailed explanations and 2. I'm speaking a bit slowly from shyness.

What else would you personally like to see? (Not that I'm gonna spam advertise my shit here, but just so I know what the audience is looking for rather than simply going for it without a regard for the viewers.)

Back to Linux. I'll be dual booting between Manjaro and Windows 10 for the time being. I need to keep Windows around for all of my games.



I built a second computer as well to keep my Plex server running and my torrents seeding while I dual boot. Ryzen 2200G CPU, 4 GB RAM, mostly built from parts I had lying around.

So over the past few years I've seen a pattern, one that has become extremely annoying...

90% of tech has become throwaway nonsense!

Phone screen cracked? back up your files, toss it, buy a new one.

Car trouble?, Pay someone $150+ an hour to "fix" it on their time.

Computer Not turning on?... you going to check the power cable? nope call geeksquad to make sure you didn't unplug from the outlet again.

the list goes on, and while the first one has been a gold mine of free parts as I've learned to recycle other people's junk one thing keeps coming to mind.
WHY?! why do people pay overpriced "specialists" to do simple jobs, why be lazy and not fix it yourself... not like it's actually difficult... in fact it's gotten easier.

Granted if your TV screen is cracked that's one thing, or you need a new windshield... or you need a valve job on your car or alignment done which require special tools but for the easy stuff, why throw it away? why shell out buku bucks for some college student in a back room to fix it in 30 min and charge you for a few hours?
It just doesn't make sense. 

it's not like I'm expecting my grandfather to build a PC from scratch but even he does simple maintenance on his computer with defrag and keeping his anti-virus up to date...
I'm not sure if it's society, laziness, or something else but working in tech support the most irritating thing I hear daily is the following.

"Alright sir is the power off?, good! now i just need you to take the yellow cable labeled printer on the port labeled 1 of that box on top, take it out, and plug it back in."

"I can't do that, I'm not technical, I shouldn't be expected to do this"

Insert facepalm with phone on mute while I figure out how to convince them to do a simple trivial task.

BTW, that yellow cable? is keyed, it can only go in ONE WAY!!!!!

these are people in government jobs that literally make the world work 

anyway, rant over...

what do you prefer to do? do you try to fix things yourself or do you take it to an overpriced repair shop so they can fix problems that in hindsight are probably pretty easy?

Hi,
I am new to the forums, however not to the internet

Well.. I hope to stay here for longer so.. I just wanted to say Hi

wasn't quite sure where to put this so I stuck it in general.

so the quotes cycling through the banner could use some refreshing so I thought hey, why not get some suggestions for some!

so post here any quotes you think would be cool or awesome to have come up on occasion.

I'm opening this thread today because lately I have been playing Simcity 4 a lot in this region, and I wanted to start sharing it with you all, as well as give myself more reason to participate in this here forum!  

Today for you I just have this picture of a Cruise Ship Port I unlocked in the city of Zhurstl, apparently it had many more jobs in commercial than I thought. I may post the area again later when it is fully developed.

Im new here

Hey all. I'm new here. Forum looks really neat!  I found the link on ForumPromotion and thought I'd check it out. : For those who don't know me, I'm Smokey, 28 from the USA, i'm a gamer, webmaster and streamer on Mixer. When I'm not spending time with my girlfriend, i'm usually gaming or posting around forums. Hope to see you all around the forums and have some interesting discussions. 

Final season starts tonight! Exciting stuff!