xplorer2 build 6.203 released

[nikos]

basically a fix for the reported checkboxes bug, use HELP > CHECK FOR UPDATES menu command

also the free LITE version is updated to v6.2

[Kilmatead]

Once upon a time, men could claim to understand nature in the ways of time itself: they could see the graces of the Gods in the leavening of breads, the fermentation of spirits, they awaited the long efforts of education to flower and endure to appreciate the depth in their wayward sons.

But now everyone's in such a hurry to get back to their hammocks that they accept the least of confirmations in their correctitude, wait not for judgements of empiricism to rest in assuredly subtle, yet reliable, protections.

You seem awfully quick to engender your own consolations, oh Mighty Vibeless One™. Take care, else your humility will seem as superficial as the testing done, and the bugs may smite thee yet!.

* * *

Along those same lines, I'm beginning to think that what passes for modern civilisation apparently peaked in the late 60's with the invention of canned spaghetti and has been in free-fall ever since. Why do I suspect this? Because canned spaghetti tastes exactly the same now as it did when I was 3 years old!

It was a cloyingly disgusting product born into such apparent perfection that its recipe never needed tweaking! Never needed changing year after year! And the public was so hoodwinked into overlooking the negatives of processing "food" into tins with a half-life of only God-knows-what, that they saturated the market with this stuff and never looked back.

That kind of perfection is daunting. Intimidating, even. Human dog-food. This is the detritus left in the decline of Empire. Everybody imagines this so-called civilisation will fall in slow-decay or with rapid-alacrity and will produce endless reams of evidence to support their theses.

I submit instead that it has already occurred, unnoticed amid the doomed march of technological progress, and offer the humble can of spaghetti as proof of this superficial civilisation's final demise. Trapped in stasis, darkness, chemically comforted, and beloved in distaste and emotional recoil by children for decades. The end is truly nigh.

* * *

Tune in next week when I review canned meat-balls in gravy and the curious relationship between the Brutish East India Company (sic), and the technocratic robber-barons of yore still raping and pillaging today to the delight of a zombified populace.

Oh, be still my heart.

[nikos]

I copy/pasted your rant to chatgpt and requested a summary, looks it's unrelated to v6.203

Modern civilisation didn’t collapse with a bang but with the quiet, chemical sigh of canned spaghetti—unchanged, unloved, yet weirdly adored, a perfect emblem of our stagnant, processed decline.

[Kilmatead]

The first part was about (you rushing out) 6.203 obviously, the rest was just another lost soul shouting into the void, double-obviously. You know me, always unrelated yet somehow obliquely prescient at the same time.

As an aside, while not a fan of AI at all, as a gamer I can't help but be suspicious/impressed with the predictive frame-generation and associated DLSS/FSR technologies. I have no idea how it manages to do what it does in "real-time" but a doubling of FPS on 5-year-old+ graphical hardware without a real loss of quality (including the DX12 ray-tracing nonsense, which normally kills everything) is undeniable.

(To be clear, I understand what it claims to be doing, screen resolution-wise, but I just don't see how the extra real-time floating-point maths rendering is done so efficiently "out of thin air" - especially when it works better on the higher-resolutions it's geared for.)

Personally, I suspect that in reality there were a team of Oompa-Loompas living in my graphics card the whole time anyway, with half of them doing all the work, and the other half just sleeping it off. This DLSS stuff (while "called" AI), is really just some bigger-bossy Oompa-Loompa with a pitchfork wandering around in there poking them in the arse getting them to earn the pay they've been getting for years anyway.

At least that's how my primitive Neanderthal brain rationalises the mathematical magic it can't otherwise explain.

Everything else about pseudo-AI (like the GPT gruel they force-feed to the masses to fatten them up for slaughter), is just a sideshow, a very impressive If/Else Eliza-wannabe on steroids. My old TRS-80 would be proud with its new lease on life bamboozling teenagers.

In future, I predict there will no longer be any age-appropriate Check-Out-Chicks® in the supermarket to flirt with to take the sting out of queueing.