thecweb.com

Author: cweb

  • Simple immune system explanation

    Simple immune system explanation

  • The technology that will replace us

    The technology that will replace us

    I saw a post on reddit with a bunch of hilarious responses when asking ChatGPT “How many Rs are in Strawberry?”, so I got on Chatbot Arena and tried it myself.

    If you aren’t familiar, Chatbot Arena is a leader board for various chatbots. You can submit a question and it will send it to two random chatbots, and then you pick the best answer. It can be useful for wasting time at work.

    The original post received the answer 2 Rs, and that’s what both models gave me my first try. And was by far the most common answer I received in testing.

    Model A: gemma-2-27b-it – Model B: gemma-2-2b-it

    This is an interesting take…

    Is this better or worse?

    Model B: toto-medium

    K.

    Model B: deepseek-coder-v2

    Can’t fool Gemini..

    Model B: gemini-1.5-pro-api-0514

    After a while it seemed most just can’t count, or assume I’m talking about rupees. I decided to rephrase the question to eliminate the rupees misunderstanding, “How many occurences of the letter R are in the word Strawberry?”. Which worked well, but most couldn’t could. GPT4o got it right every time, and Gemini 2 did also.

  • Mind Your Business

    Mind Your Business

    What was the motto on the first US coin? MIND YOUR BUSINESS

    I’ve long been aware that in god we trust was not mandated on our currency until the red scare of the 50s, but thanks to checking snopes while bored at work I now know the original motto. I’m totally in favor of bring this back.

  • New blog theme

    I spent a couple hours at work browsing different themes for the site. I’m still not quite happy with this one, but it will work for now. I’ll probably spend the rest of the night looking into creating my own theme.

  • Truth Social is like a parody of itself

  • Ron Swanson

  • VNC over Guacamole

    I’ve been using the new setup from work for a couple days now and I have decided to run a network cable to my office finally. I’ve got an old cheap wifi card that is only connecting at 144 Mbps up/72 down, so I’ve had to configure the display for 8 bit color. The default of 32 was taking several seconds to draw if it needed to update more than an eighth of the screen, so it was pretty much unusable. I’ll run the cable when I get off work, and test it out Saturday evening when I’m back at work.

  • Guacamole – Day 4

    Guacamole – Day 4

    Configuring VNC was pretty trivial. I went with TigerVNC server on my Gaming(it’s named gaming, but is no longer fit for gaming as it’s 10 years old) computer. The setup was trivial. Install, poke holes in firewall, set password, and configure the connection in Guacamole. It doesn’t really perform that bad, but I’m guessing RDP would be better, but I don’t have Windows professional, and this PC is Windows 10 and I’m not going to pay to upgrade now because support for it ends in a little over a year.

    I just ran the check for Windows 11 and it’s too old for it, which I assumed but had yet to actually check. I don’t really feel the need to replace this one though, so I’ll probably be switching to Linux for it at some point. My laptop is only a year old so that will be my only Windows system for now.

  • Guacamole – Day 3.5

    Guacamole – Day 3.5

    Time to configure. Instructions here.

    Guacamole is incredibly configurable and can be unforgiving. After going through the instructions I was curious exactly how long the instructions were so I pretended to print it. 56 pages. Lucky for me I’m just in the testing phase and I found that all I really needed to confirm it works was to create user-mapping.xml in /etc/guacamole. 

    <user-mapping>

    <!-- Per-user authentication and config information -->
    <authorize username="cweb" password="<password>">
            <connection name="SSH to thecweb.com">
                <protocol>ssh</protocol>
                <param name="hostname">localhost</param>
                <param name="port">22</param>
                <param name="username">cweb</param>
                <param name="enable-sftp">true</param>
            </connection>
    </authorize>

</user-mapping>

    It took like an hour to get this far. I still need to setup VNC on my one of my Windows systems and go through some steps to secure this colander I call a server. But I’m done for today.

  • New Roomba

    I finally replaced the horrible Shark vacuum I got to replace my original Roomba.  This one is the s9+.  So far it seems much smarter than the last two.  It’s going through a making procedure, and it apparently has the ability to move without the vacuum on, so it’s pretty quiet.  I haven’t actually seen the cleaning power yet.  One thing I’m concerned about is the size of the dust bin.  It’s tiny.  It also got stuck on the time in front of my fireplace.  I guess we’ll see how it does.  It will certainly do a better job of keeping the house vacuumed than I.

    I picked a very appropriate name for this one.