palordrolap @ palordrolap @fedia.io

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

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"We could have shut them all down immediately but too many rich people might have lost money, and even though that wouldn't have caused them any appreciable hardship whatsoever, we absolutely had to give them a chance to prepare."

With open source it's either someone incredibly dedicated to doing things for other people (unicorns), someone being paid by a company to do it (workhorses. Some might have a horn, it's hard to tell. Or the company's the unicorn), or it's someone with programming knowledge who also needs and wants to use the software they're writing (hobbyists).

Outside of the horse analogues, you probably need to look at the demographics of the users of said software and put the programmer somewhere within that bell curve. As to precisely where, I'd guess not at the low end as they've had to gain at least some programming experience along with the knowledge of the topic the software is about.

For the unicorns and the paid devs, well, they could be anyone.

There are bound to be systemic skews not accounted for here. More men tend to go into programming than women, for example, or at least that used to be the case.

Mine eyes!

Don't know about mobile, but on desktop, that website is an unnecessarily bright yellow.

But I guess the tune was kind of catchy.

I guess my confusion comes from the fact I'm from a place that only within the last 100 years or so has all but lost the original "hw" in "correct" speech, except in "who", and I was thinking that the 'w' had to have been preserved, especially if the 'h' was.

There's also that the 'w' hasn't vanished in "twenty" (or "twain", etc.).

I thought it was the 'w' that had made the sound all along, perhaps modified by the 'o'. The 'o' then became a schwa or an unnecessary similar sound and was then dropped as redundant. "hwo" followed the same development, but we spell that "who" these days.

Carbon dioxide. A metric [emphasis]-ton of dust. Other waste.

Sometimes I write small Perl programs or Bash scripts, but that's rare, and it's mostly for my own benefit or amusement; even more rarely do I share them.

Sometimes despair. Sometimes happiness. Hopefully a sense of being informed and/or entertained if not also a (weak?) sense of camaraderie by means of weird little text interactions with people online.

Condescending tone was not intended, but on rereading I can see how I've come across that way. Sorry about that.

I'm not going to disagree with this on the grounds that you could replace Python with any language and still be right for a handful of programmers using it.

Relatedly, there are plenty of people who write code in Python who know exactly what they're doing (thus defeating the quote), to the point that an amateur reading that code has literally no idea what's going on. Abstractions upon abstractions. Horrors upon horrors. Likewise this can be done in any language. Try taking apart one of the standard Perl modules (that's written in Perl anyway), for example.

What does concern me is that the only source I can find for this quote is your comment. I can find Conal Elliot and even a suggestion that they have written code in Python (making the quote a self-burn, perhaps), but not the quote itself.

I would have expected that vehicles belonging to members of the royal family would have had trackers on them, and in hard-to-access, hard-to-disable places too. Anything else would be pure hubris.

Also, if I was the site security, I'd be expecting a dismissal. A stolen vehicle could almost as easily have been a, er, "lethally modified" vehicle, for example.

And the new staff get to do a full sweep of everything to make sure that this theft wasn't a distraction from exactly that.

So who should be held accountable when (mis)use of AI results in a needless death? Or worse?

Let's say a company creates an AI taxi that runs you over leaving you without legs. Who are you going to sue?

"Oh it's grey, so I'll have a dollar from each shareholder." That doesn't sound right to me.

My initial thought was that the computer pictured on the cover was a VIC-20 not a C64, then I remembered that they used old-stock VIC-20 keyboards and cases to get the first C64s out of the door quickly, so it's probably an early model. Not enough pixels to make out what's on the ID plate to the top left of the keyboard.

As for AI, I got a load of old Commodore magazines in the mid 90s, and one letter sent in to one of them has always stuck with me. The writer asked if AI was needed in order to make an enemy character follow a player character around the screen, and the response was along the lines of "no, you can do that with simple mathematics", and provided a very simple algorithm.

The concept clearly generalises to "do not attribute to intelligence what can be achieved with simple mathematics" as well as being akin to "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" and then "if you can convince a mark that your simple mathematics is intelligent, they'll throw money at you".

Killjoy: If there are no consequences there can be no memory of the event either. Our own future (from the time of returning from the past) would almost certainly diverge from the path of no knowledge otherwise, and that would be a consequence.

As such, every one of us might already have this ability, we just don't remember doing it.

Right now, I'm leaning towards "no" on account of them allegedly being awash with money.

In the vein of alternative places to donate, consider your Fediverse instance(s). If you're a Linux user, a few pennies towards your distro of choice wouldn't go amiss either. (I'd also say archive.org, but someone else suggested that already.)

You may already be donating to these places, but this comment is also for the handful of other people who might see it, and like one of those arcade coin waterfalls, might trickle down into the conscience of someone who has cash to donate.

If the "kit" says it's "one size fits all" or similar wording, check the instructions that come with it on how to adjust it for things that are likely to vary.

Otherwise, you'll probably need to take measurements or, if you're lucky, there'll be make and model numbers on the existing parts that you can use to get replacements or new internal parts.

If you're really unlucky, you have a bizarre but genius-designed toilet made by a now out-of-business manufacturer who found novel and unique ways around patents and lawsuits and you'd be better off replacing the whole thing.

"It is not enough that Allah knows everything you do. We must also know."

"That sounds like blasphemy to me."

"Uh..."

Error. Does not compute. Instant coffee implies Microsoft Windows user. fzzt fzzt Bang

I think this is filed in my head under "no two manufacturers' sizes are the same (even if they're supposed to be to a standard)", and "this is especially true of women's wear", so while I may have known about bra cup sizes specifically at some point in the past, I'm not sure I did at the time I arrived at this post, and yet am thoroughly unsurprised to (re)discover it.

They're probably referring to the fact it was founded by Jack Dorsey, who has since abandoned it because the other people in charge refused to let it be as bat-guano as he wanted.

Ironically, he left Twitter for the same reason. Bluesky was supposed to be his own version, in his image, and yet rational minds prevailed there at pretty much the same time Musk started pushing Twitter in the direction Dorsey had wanted all along.

Frick, you're right. Bit late now, but I'll edit my previous comment.

Not directly. The underlying protocols are incompatible. You have to follow a bridging service which then causes your posts to be reposted on the other side by a bot pretending to be you.

Sounds a bit convoluted, if somewhat sinister - pretending to be you?? - but that's basically how it works. And it won't pretend to be anyone who doesn't sign up, and will stop as soon as you unfollow, so the sinisterness, if any, is minimised.