but which delimiter.

if you choose pipe ok, now you have to make sure nobody typed a pipe into the input field or spreadsheet, and you cannot store unix commands

if you choose tab, ok, now people will get confused when they try to edit the text file to replace tabs with spaces, and now you have trouble putting code snippets into data fields because they have tabs.

this is the problem and it's why xml/json exist.

in my particular domain, tab separated works pretty well but in a general context of the world at large, i feel like JSON has reasons it exists.

Well the obvious solution would be ASCII 0x1D (Group Separator)! Accept, no one actually uses those ASCII characters. Kind of bums me out that UNIX basically skipped out on them.

I agree. Lots of discussion related to proposing that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31220841

It's not a separator character, but at least vim and emacs acknowledge the page feed character. A pittance, I suppose.

> It's not a separator character,

Isn't it? I thought all the separator characters (0x1e, 0x1f, 0x1c) were specifically for delimiting records, fields and units.

What are they for?

They’re saying that “page feed character” (I’m guessing form feed) is acknowledged by Emacs, in contrast to those separator characters.

I think it’s used to mark sections in Emacs Lisp code.

Both pipe and tab are infinitely better for so-called human-readable data compared to comma. Comma doesn’t even work well for numbers since some locales use comma as the decimal separator. And a data format can’t be “human-readable” if you’re not allowed to write numbers in the way that you’re used to write them.

Pipes are quite common, but for tricky data, I'd recommend ¬. It's on most keyboards and I can't think of any other use of it.

This symbol is not present on US keyboards.

I did not know that. It's on most UK keyboards

What is it called? What's it for?

I had to look it up as I don't know what it's called and it's a negation symbol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_logic_symbols

As to what it's for, I'd say it's great as a delimiter. I've never used it for its intended purpose.

> but which delimiter

Control characters. Like ctrl-A and stuff. Almost nobody has them in their data.

why do i feel most of whats good about "agile" was actually already being done in the open source world before Agile was even a thing?

Because it was. "Waterfall", as described by agile evangelists, was a very rare practice. Good shops had a process that already incorporated most of the best features of agile.

i just asked Chat GPT to write a python program that does rot13 decoding and it was flawless.

then i asked it to do the same thing without the codecs library

and it was also flawless.

what that reminds me of is if you asked a human to decode rot13 theyd probably get bored and make a mistake. but they could write a program to do it well.

then.

i asked if it can run python programs.

"Yes, I am a large language model trained by OpenAI, and I have the ability to understand and generate natural language, including the ability to understand and execute simple programming commands. However, I do not have the ability to execute programs or access external resources like a typical computer or device, so I am unable to run complete Python programs or interact with the external world. I can only provide explanations and examples of how a program might work, based on my training and knowledge"

so.

what we need is to give ChatGPT access to a shell on a linux box and the ability to run python.

then just ask it "please write a python program to rot13 decode this text and then run the program and show me the results. "

But this has already been done https://twitter.com/sergeykarayev/status/1569377881440276481...

another food analogy would be how farmers started grinding up dead animal carcasses and feeding the results back to live animals (i.e. making cannibals out of vegetarian ruminants), which resulted in an outbreak of prion diseases like Mad Cow / CJ.

in private companies this is solved naturally when they go bankrupt or the owner shuts it down.

in the government this is solved when elections change power. (sort of)

in universities... i think they might just be better off having the administrators elected by the... alumni.

i went a little Meta

"It is difficult to say for certain whether an artificial intelligence with emotions would get tired of people asking it about the trolley problem, as this would depend on the specific design of the AI and how it was programmed to experience and express emotions. However, it is possible that an AI with emotions could become frustrated or annoyed if it was asked the same question repeatedly without any variation or new input to consider. It is also possible that an AI with emotions could become more engaged in discussions about the trolley problem if it was able to have thoughtful, nuanced discussions about the topic. Ultimately, the way an AI with emotions would respond to being asked about the trolley problem would depend on its individual characteristics and how it was designed to function."

Sadly this sounds like a more interesting conversation partner than myself or any of my friends.

i hear that it has sockets built right in. no more Trumpet.

We could send many more Strongly Worded Letters to criminals and they would be on much nicer paper.