Mauve 👁💜 @mauve@mastodon.mauve.moe

Debugging: the mystery game where you are the detective, the murderer, and the victim.

That's where I am right now. At the stage where I understand so little about the bug that it's tempting to blame the tools.

I mean, why do some of my interrupts seem to get disabled when a specific instruction, which has nothing to do with interrupts, is more than 4kiB from the beginning of the program?

(To be continued once I get a clue. I slept over it but that hasn't been enough.)

New release! This time we have some small quality of life improvements like enabling #gemini sites to prompt for user input which enables stuff like search engines!

https://github.com/AgregoreWeb/agregore-browser/releases/tag/v2.11.0

Did you know:
You can find us on Bluesky via [@agregore.mauve.moe](https://bsky.app/profile/agregore.mauve.moe)

or on the fediverse via [@agregore](https://mastodon.mauve.moe/@agregore)

mom said it's my turn on the mutex

Anyone here has a cross-platform GUI toolkit they love?

I'm kinda sad that there is nothing really easy out there. I remember how easy it was to just launch LiveCode (aka Runtime Revolution) create a stack and just create standalones for macOS, Windows, and Linux.

I just want to cook up some tiny GUI tools here and it seems like Tk still the easiest option.

@mzedp @necedema @Wyatt_H_Knott @futurebird @grammargirl Representative example, which I did *today*, so the “you’re using old tech!” excuse doesn’t hold up.

I asked ChatGPT.com to calculate the mass of one curie (i.e., the amount producing a specific number of radioactive decays per second) of the commonly used radioactive isotope cobalt-60.

It produced some nicely formatted calculations that, in the end, appear to be correct. ChatGPT came up with 0.884 mg, the same as Wikipedia’s 884 micrograms on its page for the curie unit.

It offered to do the same thing for another isotope.

I chose cobalt-14.

This doesn’t exist. And not because it’s really unstable and decays fast. It literally can’t exist. The atomic number of cobalt is 27, so all its isotopes, stable or otherwise, must have a higher mass number. Anything with a mass number of 14 *is not cobalt*.

I was mimicking a possible Gen Chem mixup: a student who confused carbon-14 (a well known and scientifically important isotope) with cobalt-whatever. The sort of mistake people see (and make!) at that level all the time. Symbol C vs. Co. Very typical Gen Chem sort of confusion.

A chemistry teacher at any level would catch this, and explain what happened. Wikipedia doesn’t show cobalt-14 in its list of cobalt isotopes (it only lists ones that actually exist), so going there would also reveal the mistake.

ChatGPT? It just makes shit up. Invents a half-life (for an isotope, just to remind you, *cannot exist*), and carries on like nothing strange has happened.

This is, quite literally, one of the worst possible responses to a request like this, and yet I see responses like this *all the freaking time*.