Month: November 2023

no more Firefox (at work)

I got a little surprise this morning, when I logged into my work PC and launched Firefox. The program still worked, but I got a popup from Windows telling me that access to the Mozilla update site was blocked.

Firefox has always been on our approved software list, so that surprised me. There hadn’t been an email about banning it, or anything like that. I checked the list, and it was still on there, so that got me wondering if the block was a mistake or something. I also considered that maybe they’d switched to a managed install, with updates pushed out from Software Center. But that didn’t seem to be the case either.

So I gave up and opened a support ticket to ask about it. (I’m always hesitant to do that for stuff like this, because I get paranoid that maybe I was never supposed to be using Firefox, and asking about it is going get me sent before the Spanish Inquisition or something.) I got a response back that, yep, InfoSec had decided to block Firefox. So, oh well, I had to switch to Edge today.

Edge actually isn’t that bad. And it has one advantage over Firefox (at least in our org). We’ve always blocked syncing Firefox user profiles, so I can’t easily keep my bookmarks or preferences in sync between my laptop and desktop with Firefox. But we do allow sync in Edge. So that’ll be nice.

The thing I’ll miss most about Firefox (and the main reason why I’ve stuck with it at work) is the Multi-Account Containers add-on. I have to juggle a bunch of different Microsoft accounts, and it’s nice to be able to have a container for the oddball ones, so they don’t confuse things for my everyday work under my normal AAD account. In Edge, I guess I’ll have to just use private windows for that, which kind of sucks, since I’ll then have to log in every single time. But I can deal with that.

I managed to import my Firefox bookmarks into Edge, then spent a bunch of time cleaning them up and organizing them. All said, I probably spent about two hours today figuring out why I couldn’t use Firefox, switching to Edge, cleaning up bookmarks, logging in to sites, poking around in preferences, and so on.

As part of this switch, I’m also going to try to switch from DuckDuckGo to Bing. Microsoft really wants you to use Bing, and there are some advantages to it, so I’m going to give it a try.

We’re also planning a mass Windows 11 upgrade at work. I’m not sure how they’re going to do that, but I’m a little worried about it. If I have to upgrade both my desktop and laptop, that could take a bit of time and involve a bit of risk. I guess that maybe I’m better off there than a lot of people, since i have two machines, and I can keep using one while the other is getting upgraded. (Most people now only have a laptop.)

Oh well, I guess it’s time to embrace the all-Microsoft future, and get used to Windows 11, Edge, Bing, and whatever else they throw at us.

Sandman and ChatGPT

I was watching a video on YouTube yesterday, with Neil Gaiman and a few other folks talking about Sandman, and reminiscing about the early days of the comic. It was fun, and it got me thinking about doing a Sandman reread. There’s a podcast about Sandman called Endless, and they’re going through a reread of the book right now, so I could follow along with that while I’m reading.

And that got me looking for a list of the original Sandman issues, with story titles and artist names. The Wikipedia entry has a lot of info, but no complete list of issues. The DC Universe Infinite page shows all the covers, and has all the art teams, so that’s probably good enough. But I thought it would be fun to ask ChatGPT, and some related chatbots, to give me an issue list and see what I got.

Here’s the prompt I used: “Can you give me a list of all 75 original issues of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comic, with creator credits and story titles? Format as a table or list.”

And here’s the results:

  • Bing – gave me a table. On my first try, it gave up at issue 8, and told me “and so on up to issue 75.” (So it knew it was giving up!) On my second try, it got up to issue 31, and then just gave up. (And it took a long time to get that far.) Interesting feature: you can open a table from Bing in Excel.
  • Poe, “web search” bot – gave me a numbered list, but lost track of what it was doing after issue 25 and started repeating itself. Then gave up at list item 50. Definitely the worst result I got.
  • Poe, “assistant” bot – gave me a numbered list. Stopped at issue 72.
  • Poe, Claude-instant-100k – gave me a table. Gave up after issue 66.
  • ChatGPT 3.5 – Returned a table. Got all the way to issue 75, but, double-checking it, I see that a lot of it is wrong.

So I guess my conclusion is that this isn’t a great task for ChatGPT or similar chatbots. ChatGPT was the only one that returned all 75 issues, but it got a bunch of stuff wrong. I didn’t check the other results too closely; they looked right, as far as they went. But I just went back and looked again, and they’re all not quite right.

I like the Bing feature that lets you open a table in Excel. None of the other chat interfaces make it easy to do anything useful with the table. I managed to copy & paste the table out of ChatGPT, but it was a bit of a hassle. I’m really surprised that, with all the fancy tech behind ChatGPT, they don’t just have a simple “export to text / Markdown / PDF” button for chats. (Maybe there’s a way to do that, and I just haven’t stumbled across it yet.)

So, anyway, that was all probably a waste of time. I should spend less time screwing around with chatbots and more time reading comics.

Learning

I renewed my ACM membership over the weekend, and I noticed that they now have an add-on called the Skills Bundle. I’ve blogged before about ACM learning options. I was a little annoyed when they dropped O’Reilly some time ago. Now, you can pay $75 extra and get limited access to O’Reilly, Skillsoft Percipio, and Pluralsight. It’s not all of O’Reilly, but it seems to be a good subset. So I paid the $75 and got that.

I still get Pluralsight through work, but I, stupidly, decided to try logging in through ACM, just to see what I’d get from ACM. Well, that was a bad idea, since it linked my account to ACM and un-linked it from work, so now I only have access to the ACM subset of the Pluralsight library. I may try to straighten that out tomorrow.

I’m still doing a little bit of learning around ChatGPT and other AI stuff. OpenAI had their “DevDay” conference today. You can watch the keynote here and read about it on their blog here. And here’s a news wrap-up from The Verge. There’s some interesting stuff going on, though I don’t know if I’ll have the time or inclination to dig into it too deeply.

I’d meant to do some ChatGPT learning over the weekend, but I started feeling a little sick again, so I spent a bunch of time in front of the TV binge-watching The Dragon Prince season 4 on Netflix.

Meanwhile, I’m thinking about trying to get back into learning Angular, which I started reading about a year ago, but put aside at some point for various reasons. I see that there was some kind of Angular event today too. I guess I should watch that video, and/or read this blog post.

And I may try learning MongoDB soon too, though maybe I’m biting off more than I can chew again.

Sometimes, I wish I’d picked a career that didn’t require me to learn a bunch of new stuff every year. But I probably wouldn’t be happy with that. I just get tired sometimes.

The Beatles

I was poking around on my iPhone after lunch today, looking for something to listen to, and noticed that Apple Music Radio was running a Beatles “top 100” show from 2 PM to 7:15 PM today. And it was just a little past 2, so I got in at #97 or thereabouts. I listened to an hour or two of it at my desk, and really enjoyed it. It was cool to just discover this randomly, but it would have been cool if there’d been a way to know about it beforehand. Maybe there’s an Apple Music newsletter or something, and I’m just not subscribed to it. I get weekly emails about Apple Arcade, Apple TV+, and other random Apple stuff, but I never seem to get any emails about Apple Music. Oh well.

I guess this Beatles thing is related to the release of the new Now and Then single that’s coming out tomorrow. I’m looking forward to hearing it, though I don’t want to get my hopes up too much. (Tying in with my recent obsession with ChatGPT, AI was apparently used to help clean up and finish the song.)

By the way, I’m still listening to the top 100, and they just got to #1, which is… “Here Comes the Sun”.  Not what I’d expect, but I’m not going to argue with Apple’s metrics.