keid

I and, coincidentally and separately a long-time friend, were homeless for a year while undergraduates. It was a financial necessity to stay in school full time (while working part-time) and not take out student loans. That was over 40 years ago. We both went on get Ph.D.s and become part of the middle class. As homeless students we were a rarity, but it wasn't unheard of--a former roommate student camped out of his car for half a year--just couldn't give up that car.

Last line, absolutely correct. Spew super-superficially-plausible nonsense to technical questions. Tell it it's wrong and it will either (or both) spew only superficially plausible nonsense and apologize that it was wrong.

Right now it's a great party trick and no more, IMO. And if one gets into more "sociological" questions it spews 1/3 factoids scraped from the web, 1/3 what could only be called moralizing, and 1/3 vomit-inducing PC/woke boilerplate. My only lack of understanding of its training is how the latter 2/3 were programmed in. I want only the first 1/3 supposedly-factual without the latter 2/3 insipid preaching. If a human responded like that they'd have no friends, groupies, adherents, or respect from anyone, including children.

I walk through drive-throughs regularly. I don't even get particularly odd looks like I'd initially expected. These include both fast food and bank/ATMs (or a teller at the other end).

As a founder/part-owner, like the other two he kicked in some money to get it started. Despite being a computer science professor he wasn't an effective real-world programmer so he in effect became a silent partner. He eventually got cold feet and his initial investment was bought out by the other two. (The other two ultimately went all-in and effectively gave up their professorships; J. Mack stayed in academia.)

When I went to Oxford University in 1985 I learned that, at the time, theses in the mathematics department were required to be written with T^3. I did not advertise my background--I did not want to be tech support. I actually went back to TCI for a while after finishing my degrees there.

Way back when, just after the IBM PC came out in the early 1980s, a company named Triad Computing was formed by J. Mack Adams, Roger Hunter, and Barry MacKichan, with the goal of creating a WYSIWYG technical text editing system. I was their first employee. Roger, Barry, and I did all the programming. Venture capital for this sort of thing wasn't common then; we raised operating capital by contract work (e.g. I wrote a floating-point arithmetic library for the PDP-11). After about a year our product debuted, named T^3. Shortly after there was a company name dispute and we changed ours to TCI Software Research. I could go on at some length, but that's where MacKichan Software started.

1980, operating systems class, write a shell for UNIX. I thought I'd be clever and do more than simple pipes, so I created some syntax to enable the specification of a directed graph. It's pretty neat to see that someone has now done this industrial strength.