palordrolap @ palordrolap @fedia.io

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

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Well, you see, Perl's length is only for strings and if you want the length of an array, you use @arrayname itself in scalar context.

Now, length happens to provide scalar context to its right hand side, so @arrayname already returns the required length. Unfortunately, at that point it hasn't been processed by length yet, and length requires a string. And so, the length of the array is coerced to be a string and then the length of that string is returned.

A case of "don't order fries if your meal already comes with them or you'll end up with too many fries".

I like to think of it as the Conservatives chose to sit on the right because they can't accept that they're not.

And I believe this pun works to some extent in French too, which is where that arbitrary labelling started.

"He sees it the way we've told him to see it. Absolutely masterful following of instructions."

As a Perl fossil I recognise this syntax as equivalent to if(not @myarray) which does the same thing. And here I was thinking Guido had deliberately aimed to avoid Perlisms in Python.

That said, the Perlism in question is the right* way to do it in Perl. The length operator does not do the expected thing on an array variable. (You get the length of the stringified length of the array. And a warning if those are enabled.)

You can start a fight with modern Perl hackers with whether unless(@myarray) is better or just plain wrong, even if it works and is equivalent.

Hold your breath. I mean really hold it. Keep holding. If you're the sort of person who can do this until you pass out, do try not to do that. Try for a minute. Minute and a half. Stop before you keel over anyway.

When you finally release your breath, is it steady or do you gasp? Either way, do you feel the relief as you begin to breathe normally again?

Some of what you might feel before that relief, that discomfort, that urge to breathe, that's a deep set reflex that is about as close as people like yourself can get to feeling panic or fear.

If you do pass out, remember that loss of control. Empathic response is not easily controllable.

Have you ever been really hungry? I mean over 24 hours without food kind of hungry. There's a bit more of it in there. That yearning. That need.

Ever had an electric shock? The anguished scream of another person in physical or emotional pain has a little something of that to it as well. As blinding or searing as any physical pain.

An empathic response is like being hit in the gut suddenly with pain, panic, hunger and shock all at the same time. Right to the very centre of the being. Like the strong urge to breathe, the urge to be able to do something to ease the other person's pain and thus ease your own pain is incredibly strong.

And in that last sentence you can see, from a detached perspective, why the empathic response evolved, even if you can't feel it yourself. Humans are a pack animal and those in your pack carry your genes. The empathic response preserves the self, just indirectly. And for most people it has the "unintended" side-effect of extending to everyone, not just relatives.

Finally, there's a joke about wishing that someone unpleasant would put a toothpick under their big toenail and then kick a door.

Put yourself in the, uh, shoes of that person - I'm not saying you're necessarily unpleasant, only to imagine yourself doing that. What would stop you from doing so in real life? Any discomfort from thinking about doing that? Explore that feeling.

That'd be self-preservation. Imagine that, outside of your control, extending to other people.

I have no idea if any of this helps as my own empathic response is often crippling, but I hope it does.

Nerd here. That's soft-light Rimmer. He didn't get the hard-light drive until they met Legion in season 6.

The only things he could physically interact until then were other holographic things provided by Holly or whatever his light bee was programmed to supply.

E-e-except where the script writers made a mistake. At one point he was able to smell something burning which definitely shouldn't have been possible. Unless Holly simulated it for him anyway. That sort of shenanigan would be right up Holly's alley now that I think about it.

(For the uninitiated, Holly is the sarcastic and dry witted AI in charge of supervising all ship computer operations. And he's allegedly senile after 3 million years in deep space. Allegedly.)

You can't tell me there isn't a coprophilia / coprophagia forum out there somewhere.

I seem to recall liking the Doctor and the Medics cover of that, even if my age could be counted on one hand when it was released.

The oft-stated did-you-know question being "Did you know the guy who originally wrote and sung it was Jewish?". Quite the surprise when I learned that one.

But to simultaneously bring this back around and buck the trend a little, Shine, Jesus, Shine used to slap as a hymn back when I dabbled in God-bothering.

And to buck things even more, Hava Negila kind of slaps too.

Per screenshots of the "skeet" = As can be understood from screenshots of the post, also known as a "skeet"

as folks on the butterfly app = (a name that) users of Bluesky

are wont to call their posts... = like to call their posts...

"Skeet" being a combination of "sky" and "tweet", which I hope you can figure out the origins of, and also a somewhat dirty word that the owners of Bluesky would really prefer people didn't use as the non-generic name for posts on their platform, but is also disturbingly accurate if you compare the conceptually similar word "disseminate" for the spreading of information.

I should probably have separated the above into two sentences somewhere.

Interesting. Any sufficiently powerful magic erases all conventional weapons, so the magic of the fantasy world can't be all that powerful in the first place.

The quotes were because "home" both is and isn't the right word. There are a lot of people in this world who might still think of the house they grew up in as "home" on some level, but in many cases, that property is in the hands of strangers now.

For example, I have a relative who not only lived in but was born in a house that remained in the family until a couple of decades ago, and I think they'd dearly love to be able to go back there. Even so, I don't think the current occupants would be best pleased if my relative decided to go "home" without some kind of arrangement, especially if they decided they were going to move in.

Feel free to generalise or pick apart this metaphor.

Israel does not have to be Zionist Israel.

Now, I'm sure the Palestinians would rather have it that, after WWII, people hadn't come "home" to settle in the area in the first place, but if it had been handled better, and without, you know, all the genocide, they might have been more accepting of the idea.

Maybe not much, but definitely way more accepting than they are now.

This may be a proximity thing. A word can have a different meaning in context, and when the context spans a continent-length border, it can be easy to see it as a global default.

Take the example of the word "Asian": An Australian using the term (advisedly, because it's often (mis)used or interpreted as a pejorative) is probably talking about someone from South East Asia. A Brit using the same word usually means someone from the Indian subcontinent.

I realise there's no border proximity with that example, but if you consider immigration and the percentage of population each Asian group makes up in each place, that physical proximity is why the word means what it does where it does.

AFAIK, "gyatt" is from the way people say "g-d damn". As in, it's what certain people said when they saw the thing the word has now been associated with.

It may be worth noting that this is in The Telegraph, occasionally referred to as "The Torygraph", a nickname earned for being the slightly less rabid, but still very much right-leaning newspaper. "Tory" being used in the pejorative sense.

In that newspaper, the thought of the UK being untrustworthy or that Brexit was a bad idea must be carefully skirted at all costs. Then again, that seems to be government policy no matter who the government is these days.

This is a bit niche but is the first thing that sprung to mind: I strongly dislike the Ubuntu font family. It's one of the first things I remove from Mint when I reinstall.

I don't use the default Cinnamon look either, and picked one that looks even more like Windows 7, which is what I was using before I switched. Now it 's just a case of old habits dying hard, I guess. The icon set I use is blue though. Way better than Windows' yellow or Mint's default of green, IMO.

Dark mode? Check? Custom shell prompt? Check. Old school Minecraft grass block icon because the creeper one is awful? Check. Shell aliases, ~/bin dir and custom keybinds? Check.

More generally, there are a few websites that store what ought to be user-attached session-spanning settings in short-lived cookies. That means that certain things go back to defaults when I restart the browser, even though my login persists. Grumble, grumble, etc.

Old school gamer here. Headline should definitely say Quake II.

There might not seem to be much difference to a casual observer, but from that standpoint there's not much difference between either and any other FPS. Even Minecraft to some extent.

Speaking of which, the Minecraft equivalent to this had all the same problems outlined in other comments here. Interesting as a proof of concept, but there are almost certainly better ways of using AI.

Package version 0.01: Built with libraries abc version 2, def version 0.1 and ghi version 7.2.2

Your system has requirements: abc version 2, def version 0.2 and ghi version 8.0.0

Package version 0.02: Requires abc version 3, def version 0.2 and ghi version 8.0.1

You realise that those differences in version would mean that you would have to basically recompile (then debug and recompile) your entire operating system with the three upgraded packages, and deal with a full cascade of dependencies, not just the package you really want to compile, OR basically sit down and rewrite Package 0.02 from the ground up using older libraries than it was originally written for.

You decide to make do with the old version of the package.

If endl is a function call and/or macro that magically knows the right line ending for whatever ultimately stores or reads the output stream, then, ugly though it is, endl is the right thing to use.

If a language or compiler automatically "do(es) the right thing" with \n as well, then check your local style guide. Is this your code? Do what you will. Is this for your company? Better to check what's acceptable.

If you want to guarantee a Unix line ending use \012 instead. Or \cJ if your language is sufficiently warped.

Do you remember the push to get everyone to sign up to YouTube with their real names and abandon pseudonyms when Google Plus was a thing?

They pulled the same trick there too. They'd pop up a box that said something like "Do you want to migrate your account to your real name now?" and if you said no, they said "OK, we'll ask again later.", which was inevitably in a couple of days.

No option to say "never ask me again" because that would be against what they wanted. I changed my then-main account to a name-like pseudonym just to get them to stop asking. Thankfully their algorithms that checked whether a name might be legit or not didn't catch on that it wasn't real.

As for why they do this, innovation for innovation's sake is to prove they're doing something and so the stakeholders think that value is being created and don't pull their investments. Also, the more you watch, the better the profile about you is that they can then sell to advertisers, especially if your account's under a real name.

If it was legal to install tracking devices in people's behinds, Google would be a top manufacturer of them.