Once upon a time I wrote an IRC chat bot for my friends and I that could do calculations and convert units (metric -> imperial) with a command.
My friends were impressed that I included units like furloughs, leagues and bushels.
My chatbot was just googling their request and returning the result (which, handily, was done by the google engine itself and was very easy to extract with Beautiful Soup in python). This was 15+ years ago.
This doesn’t really have anything to do with your reply, just a fun memory I guess
I’m mainly concerned with people using it for calculating things personal to them, finances/taxes comes to mind first. While the search engine may not know with certainty what the numbers represent, they have so much data on you that they could very well start inferring what those numbers are to add to your profile. For example if you suddenly do a ton of calculations in the days leading up to when taxes are due and all the numbers have two decimal places, it would be a pretty big hint to them. Or if you always do budget calculations on the days you get paid, they might be able to recognize that pattern and work out when your payday is and what your income, expenses, and savings are. And they definitely have AI to make these inferences for them so they can do it for every single user. IDK I might just be paranoid though.
doesn’t support floats. For float you need bc and I always have to look up how to use it. You have to tell it how many numbers it should show scale=2;5/8, by default it also only does integer.
I feel like most people nowadays are just typing math calculations into their search engine. Which obviously also has massive privacy implications.
Yeah. If a search engine knows you didn’t know 5x(30/47)^2 they might be able to derive your SSN from that information.
Once upon a time I wrote an IRC chat bot for my friends and I that could do calculations and convert units (metric -> imperial) with a command.
My friends were impressed that I included units like furloughs, leagues and bushels.
My chatbot was just googling their request and returning the result (which, handily, was done by the google engine itself and was very easy to extract with Beautiful Soup in python). This was 15+ years ago.
This doesn’t really have anything to do with your reply, just a fun memory I guess
How so? I don’t know much about this stuff lol
I’m mainly concerned with people using it for calculating things personal to them, finances/taxes comes to mind first. While the search engine may not know with certainty what the numbers represent, they have so much data on you that they could very well start inferring what those numbers are to add to your profile. For example if you suddenly do a ton of calculations in the days leading up to when taxes are due and all the numbers have two decimal places, it would be a pretty big hint to them. Or if you always do budget calculations on the days you get paid, they might be able to recognize that pattern and work out when your payday is and what your income, expenses, and savings are. And they definitely have AI to make these inferences for them so they can do it for every single user. IDK I might just be paranoid though.
Love your username person
Thank you!
There are many fun ways of calculating stuff.
echo $((5+8))or abusing REPL mode of python3 or node.My colleagues once made fun of me using galculator with a tiling wm:
Call me a plebian but I still open up Python when I want to do calculations in the command line because I don’t know how to in Bash.
It’s complicated.
doesn’t support floats. For float you need
bcand I always have to look up how to use it. You have to tell it how many numbers it should showscale=2;5/8, by default it also only does integer.