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2 yr. ago

  • There are already slats so the only hole you can get a fork into is the earth, unless you've already got something convincingly shaped like an earth pin in the earth hole to open the slats over the live and neutral. If you're going to that much effort to zap yourself, the switch isn't going to be much of a hurdle.

    I'd suspect that it's largely because it's more convenient to have a switch than to unplug things and plug them back in again, especially as our plugs are a nightmare to step on to the point that Americans complaining about stepping on lego seems comical to anyone who's stepped on lego and a plug.

  • I don't think it's guaranteed that Linux will be a viable kernel in a future where NT's forced to be abandoned unless it's simply because Microsoft refuses to maintain it. Linux is older than NT, so if age alone killed kernels, it'd die first. I think it's a pretty safe bet that Linux can be kept viable for a long time, so if Microsoft wanted, they could keep NT viable for a long time.

  • The joke is partly that lots of trans women in particular enjoyed this game in particular, so plenty of people who noticed the switcheroo in the tweet will still see it as an opportunity to talk about the game rather than seeing the game as something irrelevant that could be swapped out for another.

  • You can jam the Windows UI by spawning loads of processes with equivalent or higher priority to explorer.exe, which runs the desktop as they'll compete for CPU time. The same will happen if you do the equivalent under Linux. However if you have one process that does lots of small allocations, under Windows, once the memory and page file are exhausted, eventually an allocation will fail, and if the application's not set up to handle that, it'll die and you'll have free memory again. Doing the same under every desktop Linux distro I've tried (which have mostly been Ubuntu-based, so others may handle it better) will just freeze the whole machine. I don't know the details, but I'd guess it's that the process gets suspended until its request can be fulfilled, so as long as there's memory, it gets it eventually, but it never gets told to stop or murdered, so there's no memory for things like the desktop environment to use.

  • Even by crypto standards, Bitcoin Cash is dodgy. Its origins were a temporary hiccup in the Bitcoin network which forked the blockchain into two branches. As blockchains are designed to tolerate this, the network quickly decided that one branch was worse than the other, so everything switched to the good branch and Bitcoin continued chugging away and consuming enough power for a small country. However, a few people were cross about this because they had more Bitcoin on the dead branch, so manually configured their wallets and mining hardware to use that branch, and tried encouraging other people to do the same. That didn't work. They then decided to provide a preconfigured wallet and mining software that would prefer the dead branch but claimed it was its own new cryptocurrency and everyone who had Bitcoin already would get some of the new one for free, and that was enough to get some people to sign up.

  • The documentation was totally clear that calling squeeb would do that, and the official sample code only called squeebWithACondom for that exact reason except for one sample specifically illustrating the remote impregnation feature. It's not Squeeb4J's fault that third parties made tutorials with security holes, and it was irresponsible of the tech press to blame them. It wasn't Dennis Ritchie's fault when people demoed exploits in software that passed user-provided format strings to printf in C, everyone accepted it was the application's fault for using printf irresponsibly.

  • Someone's clearly confused GNU Scrimble, and Scrimble for Windows, a fork of GNU Scrimble which makes no changes to the program itself, but has an overcomplicated installer that provides a stripped-down MSYS2 environment which only includes GNU Scrimble's direct dependencies (which turn out to be about 90% of a full MSYS2 install, excluding only the package manager, update system, and a few key Unix tools you'll only realise aren't present if you start using Scrimble Bash as your daily Bash shell and run a script that uses a POSIX-mandated but rarely used utility, and also awk for some reason, which causes problems squeebing certain file formats until you download an awk binary from the upstream MSYS2 project).

    As a true Unix Philosophy application, GNU Scrimble itself wouldn't integrate extra features that should clearly be standalone applications like a Lisp interpreter, Pong implementation, or wide file support. Instead, it calls the existing Lisp interpreter, Pong implementation, and various tools to convert file formats into intermediate text representations that can be parsed through an unholy mix of grep, sed and awk that all GNU-based operating systems must always provide. After all, it's better somehow to call a bash script that runs some awk snippets so your dependencies are only expressed at runtime than it is to link with libjson-glib.so.

  • Nintendo used to have a page on emulation on their website incorrectly claiming that it was always illegal and all emulators had solely been created to enable piracy. This new claim is not compatible with their previous action of having that page.

  • You'd expect musk of all people to know you need to spend 45 billion to buy the server first.

  • It's really easy to disguise a campaign to wear out moderators as respectful debate, e.g. by sealioning, especially if you're not working alone. The new rules don't have any provision to distinguish between respectful debate and bad-faith posts, so it's not unreasonable to worry that this change will do a lot more to promote bad-faith 'debate' than respectful debate.

  • Many of the inactive accounts will be people who signed up and started, but made no or too little money, so abandoned the idea. They're still worth counting when working out how likely a new person will be to make money. Other inactive accounts will be bots or catfish where there was never any intention to make money the way people expect the site to be used, so you can still discount a lot of them, but it's not all of them.

  • Putting "false" in a YAML file gives you a string, and just false on its own gives you a boolean, unless you tell the YAML library that it's a string. Part of the point of YAML is that you don't have to specify lots of stuff that's redundant except when it would otherwise be ambiguous, and people misinterpret that as never having to specify anything ever.

  • Most of the problems can be totally avoided by telling the YAML loader what type you're expecting instead of forcing it to guess (e.g. provide a schema or use typed getter functions). If it has to guess, it's no surprise that some things don't survive the string to inferred type to desired type journey, and this is something that isn't seen as a dealbreaker in other contexts, e.g. the multitude of languages where the string "false" evaluates to true when converted to a boolean because it's non-empty.

  • Sometimes when a product is whitelabeled and can be bought directly from its real manufacturer for much less, there's still a good reason to buy the expensive one. The main one is that sometimes the ones that pass QA are sold via the whitelabeler and the ones that fail QA are sold directly, so the cheaper ones are known to have something wrong with them and you're gambling that it's something without symptoms.

  • Wet water is the water with added wetting agent used for firefighting. That stuff shouldn't be coming out of your household plumbing.

  • The new law allows you to have more than one charging connector provided that either the USB-C one is the best one, or the USB-C one is as good as the spec allows. If the new connector's genuinely better, then it'll beat a maxed-out USB-C connector, so devices will provide it in addition to a maxed-out USB-C connector.

  • Male to female A-to-A cables are pretty common (they're just basic extensions) and totally legal under the spec provided they're limited to a certain length or contain a powered repeater. It's just the rare male-to-male (which my keyboard stupidly uses) and even rarer female-to-female that aren't legal. There's also the exception of USB-on-the-go cables with a micro-B end and a female A end for devices like smartphones that are capable of being host or connecting to a host, back before they switched to USB-C.

  • It doesn't have to have been effective. They might just have overestimated how many people would think killing health insurance CEOs was unacceptable.

  • It adds the executable permission (without which, things can't be executed) to all the files in the game's directory. You only need to be able to execute a few of those files, and there's a dedicated permission to control what can and can't be executed for a reason. Windows doesn't have a direct equivalent, so setting it for everything gives the impression that they're trying to make it behave like Windows rather than working with the OS.

  • Selling old games and new games isn't mutually exclusive, and more money tends to be spent on new games than old ones. It's not unreasonable to expect that selling new games too could subsidise the work to make old games run on modern platforms.