I have the book (and CD) on my shelf above my machines in my home office. I vaguely recall buying this at Costco, around the same time I bought the 4 volume Microsoft Press C++ series (for dirt cheap, at the time) from Costco.
MS Press used to publish some amazing references. I have a LOT of 'em.
Definitely! I couldn't live without the "Quick Accent" PowerToys to quickly add accents that don't exist on my keyboard, I use it hundreds of times a day.
Me too, but it is so unreliable laggy, I sometimes have to wait 2 secs or more for the menu to appear, ruining the flow.
And typing ALT 0151 to get an em dash, I mean seriously?
For someone typing accents and em + en dashes on purpose — well before it becomes an AI’s trait — it’s so infuriating, I can’t believe people type books on Windows. All this while macOS solved this, built in the OS, since ages now…
It has been available for 20 years. To use combining characters (and client-side font layout and rendering), type the letter, then one of available dead keys two times (e. g. `a, AltGr+Shift+6, AltGr+Shift+6` gives â). To get the single code point (if it's available), type modifier once, then the letter (e. g. `AltGr+Shift+6, a` gives â). I've been touch typing em dashes for years, and can't imagine it any other way.
It seems that corresponding Russian installers are more up to date. You can gently nag the author to update the English version, or just take the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator, and do it your way. Be aware that certain silly applications use hard-coded keyboard shortcut handlers that bypass the system, and therefore misbehave if system layout is anything else but default US English. Windows also sometimes likes to resurrect the deleted default layout until the last process that used it exits, or something like that.
It has been said multiple times that the absence of proper typography on personal computer keyboards is just laziness, ignorance, and lack of leadership. There are no technical reasons for that — just look at keyboards for European languages.
Last year I wrote a simple system using Semantic Kernel, backed by functions inside Microsoft Orleans, which for the most part was a business logic DSL processor by LLM. Your business logic was just text, and you gave it the operation as text.
Nothing could be relied upon to be deterministic, it was so funny to see it try to do operations.
Recently I re-ran it with newer models and was drastically better, especially with temperature tweaks.
What's the technology behind this. I'm working on something myself, using a distributed actor model (setup like a graph) to create a living reactive model.
The model is a multi-threaded Go script running on a 512-thread AMD EPYC server. It's a trend based model so it's just trying to figure out how best to measure and predict trend changes. Not day trading or HFT.
It conducts millions of simulations daily for each asset, then provides a snapshot of the top-performing results to GPT-4o for final selection.
I'm really pushing the limits of GPT-4o currently. I started testing with o1 just last week and it performs better. It's just so much more expensive.
