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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)PA
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725
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11 mo. ago

  • Where I live, most stops have been in place for decades if not a century at this point. No-one remembers why the all ones that exist now exist where they do, only that they exist there. Some actually migrate over time due to new construction and other factors.

    But to guess how they got where they are, at least generally speaking, someone would have designed routes for public transport around main roads and important industrial areas mainly so that workers could get to work in a morning. Businesses may have even lobbied local government or bus companies for a stop near where they were if one wasn't already planned to be there.

    Anecdotally, I know a stop near where my parents live was deliberately placed at the far side of a road junction so that factory workers who wanted to get off there were getting off past a fare boundary. That meant that if they caught the bus closer to work rather than a quarter mile up the road, they'd have to pay extra money. Actually, it's so old a thoroughfare it might have been a horse-drawn tram stop originally. Same fare shenanigans though.

    That stop migrated to the "cheaper" side of the road junction nearly 30 years ago, but as far as I know, it's still treated as though the fare boundary occurs before it.

    Anecdote 2: There have been embarrassing stories of workmen upgrading bus stop shelters only for locals to tell them, and the local news, that the bus service that would have stopped at it has long since been cancelled due to budget cuts. Bureaucracy is a wonderful thing.

  • I tend to use right shift for pretty much everything. The arrow glyph has worn off the key I use it so much.

    Important factors:

    1. British English keyboards, like the one I have, tend to be ISO, with a larger shift key on the right. Bigger target. Easier to hit.
    2. I have at least a couple of passwords that each have at least one shifted character from the left side of the keyboard and it's much easier to use both hands when I need to type those.
    3. It might even go back to the fact that most of my early typing was on a Commodore 64C and the positions of surrounding keys. Hitting shift-lock or run/stop by mistake would have been a nuisance. Caps lock isn't quite as annoying because it's not a literal mechanical toggle, but even so, the right shift avoids that particular error.
  • From what I understood on the recent "live"stream, it can be turned off.

    But as others have said, there are many performance mods that don't change the core game experience. Getting those set up can be a bit of a chore, even if you choose a different launcher that manages them for you, but it can be worth it.

    Until very recently I had Minecraft Java running smoothly on a PC that was 13 years old. 1st gen i7 with a similarly aged Nvidia card.

    ...and I still run the same mods on the new PC. Saves energy, and reduces fan noise a bit, so might as well.

  • Google could close the Chromium source at any time. There might be promises and provisions that they'll never do that, but if they do, who has the money to sue them? And who, of those, can't be bought?

    "So what, people can run with the last good codebase!"

    Sure, until there's a critical bug that Google don't publish which then cripples Chromium until the maintainers figure it out, or else Google (deliberately or otherwise) take web standards down an unexpected path requiring massive changes, also making life hard for the fork maintainers.

    And don't say "that'll never happen". Need I gesture broadly at the state of the world?

  • In this instance, I think there was some suggestion to write code in mostly lower case, including all user variables, or at least inCamelCaseLikeThis with a leading lower case letter, and so to make True and False stand out, they've got to be capitalised.

    I mean. They could have been TRUE and FALSE. Would that have been preferable? Or how about a slightly more Pythonic style: true and false

  • IMO, this needs a different name. It's too similar to "Saidit", one of sites that sprang up as a refuge for the edgier (or sicker) content that Reddit wanted rid of about 10 years ago, and unlike Voat, it's still live.

    If you're one of the right-wing trolls and/or edgelords who used to hop between Reddit and 4chan back in the day, it might be the place for you. Otherwise, probably best to steer clear.

    Either way, steering clear of similar names might be a good idea.

  • This whole situation reminds me of this joke: Two guys out hunting in the wilds somewhere. One of them falls ill and collapses. The other can't rouse him.

    He grabs his phone or radio and calls for help. "My friend collapsed. I think he's dead!"

    The responder says "Well, first we need to make sure if he's actually dead."

    "Just a minute...." BANG!

    "OK, now what?"

  • Many white supremacists believe in the One-drop rule. Basically, to them, if you have even a single black ancestor within the last three or four generations, you're black even if you don't think you are, and should be treated as such.

    Obama didn't even have the good grace to look white so his ancestry doesn't even matter. To them he was black.

    I am, of course, being sarcastic here.

  • Bringing "no garden" back out of the analogy equates to no computer at all. The fountain is all the crapware and spyware shovelled into Windows these days. The billboard is the ads they want inject into everything.

    The alternative is Apple. They don't want to install a billboard just yet, and there's no obvious fountain, but there's a nightmare HOA who tell you how you have to live and if you don't live their way you have to move.

  • Somewhere around here I have an old (1970's Dartmouth dialect old) BASIC programming book that includes a type-in program that will write poetry. As I recall, the main problem with it did be that it lacked the singular past tense and the fixed rules kind of regenerated it. You may have tripped over the main one in the last sentence; "did be" do be pretty weird, after all.

    The poems were otherwise fairly interesting, at least for five minutes after the hour of typing in the program.

    I'd like to give one of the examples from the book, but I don't seem to be able to find it right now.

  • Here's an analogy: You can do your own gardening, or you can hire one of the two landscaping services in town.

    This sounds great, but these days, no matter who you hire, the people who show up 1) want to install a fountain and an advertisement billboard that will run off your water and electricity supply and 2) want the right to take what they like from your house by default, they'll mysteriously "forget" and do it anyway even if you pay them not to.

    Furthermore, with their latest package, one of the landscaping companies are basically saying that if you don't have a yard large enough for their fountain, you have to move house, which is only marginally better than the other one who will only work on gardens for houses they sold in the first place.

    (A previous version of this comment involved the word "lube". I'm sure you can imagine the rest.)

  • 99% of people want a drop-in replacement for Windows that will install and run every possible Windows-compatible application, game and device without them having to make any extra effort or learn anything new. Basically Windows but free (in all senses).

    Any even slightly subtle difference or incompatibility and they'll balk. Linux can never be that, and Microsoft will keep the goalposts moving anyway to be sure of it.

    Sure, a lot more works and is more user friendly than 15 years ago, but most people won't make the time to sit down and deal with something new unless it's forced on them... which is what Microsoft are doing with Win11.