The Kaspirov consists of a webcam mounted in a lampshade above a physical chess board, and two buttons, all connected to a small computer. As players make moves on the board, they press the buttons as they would on a traditional chess clock. This instructs the computer to take a before and after picture of the chessboard using the overhead webcam. By comparing those images the computer can determine which move has been made, feed this into the Stockfish chess engine, which calculates the best response. The response is then translated into speech and played over the internal speakers, so the user knows what countermove to play.
Don’t you miss the days when you manually picked a CD or a vinyl album to play, or a mixtape you carefully put together, rather than having The Algorithm play a ‘mood’ for you? The physical act of putting a cartridge into a playback device, it had something magical. The simple push of a button. No fumbling for a password, no interruption from a Windows update, no keyboard, no loading times. But, unfortunately, all your music is in the cloud nowadays. That wretched cloud, taking the fun out of music, with its stupid infinite storage. Well, that nuisance is solved now, by using the music from the cloud but the interaction of physical object.
My copilots invented their own sorting methods that didn't sort. Inputted non-existent function names. Windsurf cheerfully discarded the contents of multiple functions and replaced them with 'your code here' because the context became too complex. It's like an over-enthusiastic junior who sometimes has brilliant insights, but also regularly blindly copy-pastes code that turns out to be complete nonsense. Windsurf even managed to write Python code in a JavaScript file. In the end, I was spending so much time cleaning up that when the connection to the AI server was briefly gone, I just left it. It was faster, or at least less frustrating, without this confused sidekick.
The entertainment of dining at Rosings was repeated about twice a week; and, allowing for the loss of Sir William, and there being only one card-table in the evening, every such entertainment was the counterpart of the first. Their other engagements were few, as the style of living of the neighbourhood in general was beyond the Collinses’ reach. This, however, was no evil to Elizabeth, and upon the whole she spent her time comfortably enough: there were half hours of pleasant conversation with Charlotte, and the weather was so fine for the time of year, that she had often great enjoyment out of doors.
So powerfully did the whole grim aspect of Ahab affect me, and the livid brand which streaked it, that for the first few moments I hardly noted that n
[HONDENKOTS]