palordrolap @ palordrolap @fedia.io

Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurg

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12 mo. ago

What's specific about '83? ARPANET began in 1969 and grew from there, mostly in academia, until HTTP finally transformed it into the WWW in the '90s.

The "September that never ended" began in 1993. Maybe you meant that?

The irony of this statement is that you may take any (human) disagreement with it as proof of it.

Yet lots of (human) people have the natural demeanour and default mindset to not be one. They're like unicorns, sure, but they exist.

Only play hardball with him if you're already prepared for unhinged retaliation.

My least favourite technical support calls were with people who didn't know their own interface and I was having to direct them, blind, to get the information and do the diagnostics I needed.

There were at least a couple of times where I had to ask the customer to describe literally everything they saw on the screen starting at the top left and working their way down.

I sometimes pretend to be one of those people when I get tech support scammers on the phone because I know how tortuous it is.

There have been national park visitors who have asked at what time the animals are let out of their cages and put back in them. Then again, that might be an education issue rather than a stupidity problem. Would it be ethical to experiment on these people by suggesting "we'll tell you if you can get that dumpster open"?

Caveat: Having never seen those dumpsters, I have the nagging feeling that I could well be outsmarted by the bears.

A few days ago, I saw a post about negative income tax which is something that had occurred to me independently. Wasn't surprised to learn that someone with more brains had actually given it some serious thought and that it had an actual name.

That would be the sort of thing I'd be interested in being implemented, so that those who are on little to no income - especially those who can't simply "get a (better) job" for whatever reason - don't fall below the poverty line.

This is not to say that the UK benefits system (where I am) doesn't work at all, but it's often coupled with the expectation of getting the recipient back into work or to getting a better job where you don't need them any more.

It would be nice if that part went away.

What makes you think they care about that?

You're not going insane... probably. I edited the post to use asterisks which I assumed must be the more commonly used italic markdown. It might also be that the ™ is right after the markdown character which I know can cause some parsers to choke. YouTube's comment system is a notable nuisance for this.

Hm. I'm guessing that the formatting which works on fedia.io doesn't work elsewhere. I used _very bad idea_™

Probably a prolonged awkward moment that I couldn't escape. In chatting to an old friend I bumped into, I let slip that I'd heard something bad had happened to them and asked how they were doing. Rather than answering clearly, they were super interested in finding out who told me in the sort of way that I knew it would be a very bad idea™ for all concerned to reveal that information.

I can't remember how I got out of that. I sometimes think I'm still in that moment and all this is a fever dream as my brain tries desperately to escape.

Honourable mentions: i) Zeroing the wrong partition on my own computer, all data unrecoverable. ii) Deleting all of a customer's data rather than the one part they wanted removing. Luckily, in that case there were backups.

Edit: Blind formatting fixes(?)

You're right. I should have used the word hypothesis.

Here's some reaching: There's the theory hypothesis that our universe is the inside of some construct in a higher universe that is similar to if not actually a black hole.

In our universe, time and space inside a black hole are causally disconnected from the outside so there can be a defined beginning without there needing to be time continuity across the event horizon. It's often said that time and space switch places inside a black hole, which could mean that our time is relative to space outside of the universe. This hurts my head to think about. Almost like our time dimension runs sideways relative to whatever was "before".

As to whether this is turtles all the way down / universes all the way up, we'll probably never know.

You should try being nicer.

No specific examples, but I bet there are C-levels who have resigned because they didn't achieve the profits they were supposed to. That's definitely shameful in the eyes of the stockholders. Horror of horrors, etc.

Though this doesn't mean they wouldn't have got a more-than-generous severance package and a similar job elsewhere.

Now that I think about it, there are an analogous situations with police officers in some countries too.

Edit: I can grammar

And Ukrainians probably don't want to be equated with Russians either.

I guess 80% doesn't qualify for the adjective "largely".

And a people largely indistinguishable from their own.

Edit: Note to self: Subtly pointing out that Trump wouldn't want to invade Mexico because he's a racist is not the way to go in the Fediverse because people will think you're the racist.

Negotiation? That's a funny way to spell capitulation.

Yeah, D is used for deuterium.

AuDHDH would be gold dideuteride dihydride. Probably not possible as it is because gold doesn't have a +4 state, but a 1:1 mixture Au(V)DHDHD and AU(III)HDH together could be written informally as AuDHDH.

The main problem with that is that no isotope of hydrogen is electronegative enough put gold into the +5 state.

Sometimes you want a change and so you have no bibimbap instead of no solyanka.