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• Post #2501050

  I hit "Listen to this page" in Chrome on my phone by mistake recently. I had assumed that it would just read the text aloud to me. But no -- it generates a little natural-sounding chatty conversation between a man and a woman about what they claim the page says. They marvel at something they think is unusual and then make a few vague and inane comments about some things they may or may not have understood. It's astonishing how much effort they put into sounding natural...

• Post #2501049

  I told a website's support chatbot about an error I was getting. It informed me that the feature (which costs extra) simply wasn't available in the app and I needed to use the browser. (I had been using it in the app for months.) I told it the inconvenience would make me consider cancelling. It agreed sometimes we have to make tough decisions and offered me instructions on cancelling. The next day the functionality was working again.

• Post #2501048

  The other day I asked CoPilot to identify duplicates in a list in Excel. It toiled fruitlessly for a few minutes while I did something else. When I came back it explained that it had been trying to use Python and had made no progress. It offered me three options, in this order: A) It could wait until Python was working. B) I could make the list shorter for it so that Python wouldn't have such a hard time. C) It could explain an Excel formula using countif to me. C was all I had ever wa...

• Post #2501047

  I am fascinated by the fact that a common ad hominem attack on reddit is to accuse the other person of being a redditor, of all things.

• Post #2501045

  Mystified as to why the background colour on the webpages I had uploaded today was missing, I tried to manually compare the html to a page that was working and detected no difference. In despair I asked Copilot which pointed out that bgcolor had been misspelled bgcolour. I had just added a bunch of -or to -our corrections to my post-dictate macro. I have now added a step to flip bgcolour back to bgcolor.

• Post #2501044

  I used to be baffled by the "if Adam delved and Eve span" riddle because I assumed that the answer had to be one of the two and that it was about gender rather than class. Now that I know the answer is "there was no class division in those days" it makes much more sense.

• Post #2501040

  Today I heard someone suggest that something should be accomplished "as ASAP as possible" and I just couldn't contain myself.