palordrolap @ palordrolap @kbin.social

Some middle-aged guy on the Internet; Seen a lot of it and occasionally reg

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2 yr. ago

Not sure how to prove I'm not an instance of ChatGPT. Or even if I could, that I've never used one to masquerade as me / generate text on my behalf.

"Are you, like, a crazy person?"

Clearly hasn't thought of folding the paper.

The real complaints would be paper so fibrous you get splinters or paper so smooth it doesn't so much clean as smear. I've seen the former and actually had to use the latter many, many moons ago. Do not recommend.

Skippable bit:

Probably the same sort of person who doesn't check the seat status before sitting down.

Before an "always put the seat down" radicalist chimes in, I too have forgotten to check.

It is a lesson. If you don't learn said lesson upon falling further than expected into cold, dirty porcelain, you deserve the lesson again and again until you learn it.

Alternatively maybe you get an earlier than expected bounce on a lid that's cold on parts that were not expected to touch anything cold because you live with an "always close the lid" radicalist.

OR, you live with forgetful people, or you yourself are forgetful. I imagine even a "seat-downer" might forget to do that at least once after cleaning the throne (They do clean it, right? Right?!)

We call them "hyphenated", or more poetically, "double-barrelled" surnames in Britain. It was usually done by the aristocracy to preserve both family names after an auspicious, possibly engineered, union.

(The "double-barrelled" terminology derives from, well, double surnames, but also the fact that the aristocracy are the ones who go game hunting with double-barrelled shotguns. There's a "shotgun wedding" pun in there as well, though usually, as I implied, these things are usually by choice (thought not necessarily that of those being married) rather than a hasty wedding.)

More interesting things happen when one or both people getting married already have double-barrelled surnames.

It's how the British royal family ended up with the family name Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, ...at least until they changed it to Windsor because being conspicuously German was not a good look in Britain during the early 20th century.

Anyway, as that example suggests, the usual rule is to pick the order that sounds best and put insert hyphens between the surnames. The Weinersmiths haven't quite followed the same rules, or else they'd spell it "Weiner-Smith", but it still sounds better than any variant of Smith-Weiner (in my opinion).

Bold of you to assume that humanity will even exist at that point. In fact, it'd be pretty bold to assume we'll exist in 2757; forget those last two digits.

I saw that comic the other day. The answer to this is "It was a Hamas base of operations."

To over-egg this comment: "What gave you the impression Hamas were there?" "There were Palestinians there." "..." "..."

C'mon Joe, you're the guy who said "I'm Irish" when talking about the relationship between Britain and Ireland. The parallels here ought to be keeping you on your toes.

ash (and its successor dash found on other distros) is a POSIX-y shell rather than a sh clone, so it has all(? most?) of the POSIX feature set, whose syntax may indeed have been 'borrowed' from shells that came later than sh.

Not sure if there's a "parent" from which both ash and bash inherit the syntax or whether bash is the true source, but that doesn't really matter here.

All that said, it's worth checking to see if your system has a command on the PATH called [[. That has been one way that [[ support can be added to a system when the shell itself might not support it. Note that command names don't have to be alphanumeric like functions tend to be in a programming language (or other languages if you consider that the shell can be used for programming too), so [[ is perfectly valid!

D'oh. I had briefly forgotten that small shops still exist. Probably because the ones nearest me went out of business. Not because of shoplifting but because they were priced out by corporate stores.

Questions for retailers (who probably won't see this, but whatever):

1. Do you have a security guard? Yes/No

a) If yes, and you're still getting shoplifters, hire better security. Problem solved.
b) No? Get a security guard. Problem solved.

1. Still here? Are you complaining about having to pay for a security guard? Yes/No

a) If No, why are you still here? Go hire that competent guard.
b) If Yes:

1. What's the cost of the shoplifting compared to having a security guard, taking wages, insurance and premiums into account? Less/More

a) If Less, stop complaining, you're getting a bargain.
b) More? Looks like hiring a security guard might be worth it after all.

Do I shoplift? Ha. I'm currently agoraphobic and don't leave the house. My arms aren't that long.

The last time I was in a physical store, I was of the opinion that as long as I can afford something I need, I'll pay for it. For things I merely want and can't justify the expense, I'll do without. (Sounds a bit like 3a.)

And the last time I nicked something (calm down, put your monocle back on) it was probably a sweet from the pick & mix at Morrisons when I was 10 or something.

Sure. OK. How about we put the Greek alphabet at the lower code points and the Latin alphabet higher up, and now you might argue that Latin takes up more space than necessary.

Potential counterpoint: "This is stupid. Latin goes in the lower code points, it always has, it always will. Who's putting Greek down there??"

Well, if Greece had invented computing as well as, let's say, democracy that's very likely how things would be.

In that timeline, someone is using exactly the same line on you "[The representation of Latin text in memory i]s as long as it needs to be unique." and you're annoyed because your short letter to Grandma is using far too much space on your hard drive.

"Modern Perls are supposedly faster" I thought, until I checked and apparently they used a very recent Perl.

So now my denial is along the lines of "Well they're asking Perl to do things it doesn't need to, like implementing merge sort and binary trees, and, and!, TIMTOWTDI! They're probably choosing a slow way to do things too!"

The other denial idea was: "Interpreted languages offer rapid prototyping and easier debugging, which saves energy during the development process, and that isn't being taken into account here."

...but then I see the ridiculously low scores for JavaScript. I wonder if Perl (or other interpreted languages) had received the amount of scrutiny and attention that JS has had in order that browsers remain relatively fast, whether it would be any faster now.

The whole "Debian 12 doesn't support the legacy 390.x nvidia card driver" really threw me for a loop when I upgraded to LMDE6 (which is based on it).

I occasionally play older games and Nouveau wasn't suitable at all (for me anyway). Go to find and install the legacy driver. Oh. Not in the repository. Sinking feeling.

Had lots of fun trying to get nvidia's own installer to work. Can't install it if Nouveau is active. Can't uninstall Nouveau without another driver available. Catch-22 much??

However, I am stubborn and can work without a GUI for a short while if I absolutely have to. So I did. And now the legacy driver is installed.

Of course, the legacy driver .deb is (still) available in Debian Sid (Unstable); Had I not convinced myself it wouldn't have worked (unfulfilling/unsuccessful experience trying to install other "future" software previously), I might have tried that.

The last I saw, AI models were very good at explaining what code did at a very superficial level, but not why it's doing that or why it's written that way.

I assume it's gotten better at that since then. (?)

e.g. They'd be able to write comments for x = 0 along the lines of "set variable x to 0" but not why it's being done or even why it might be a good idea.

Deeper question: What can AIs do with obfuscated code? Can they pick that apart and explain it? What if it's regular code with misleading function names?

Perl is still as good an interpreted language as any of the others tbh.

Most of its "problems" are cosmetic, which is probably why Python ended up being its successor in many fields.

Given the choice between brutalist and Fisher-Price architecture, most people are going to opt for the latter even if everything's effectively the same inside.

Can't fully agree with the sentiment there. There are innocents in Russia who very much don't deserve any of this.

But Putin though? Yeah. Him specifically and anyone who supports him.

Perl had $[ (yes, just those two characters) to allow setting of the first array index, but it's a fatal error to put anything but 0 into it now.

Of course, since Perl arrays can be negative subscripted from the last element, you can stand on your head and index the array negatively from the wrong end. -1, -2, -3 etc. Use unshift to put things on the beginning (logical "end") of what you're doing rather than the usual push. Presto, a 1-based array (up to sign, anyway).

You may wish to file this under "stupid, but it works".

People with more time / more need for something that looks professional, would probably be better off writing something that uses tie instead. (Or, yes, yes, a different language entirely, hush now.)

New Labour. They dropped the New almost immediately and for a while recently it looked like they might drop it in spirit as well, but apparently not. Their current figurehead is a literal knight of the realm. Not necessarily a conflict of interest, but, well, have you seen him?

Anyway, the purpose of projects like HS2 is to get as much money out of the public purse and into the pockets of politician's pals as quickly as possible, Labour, Tory or otherwise. If something comes out of it that's actually useful at the end of it all, well, maybe it'll garner a few more votes in future? Who cares when you've got huge piles of money?

Yeah, I've seen their name before. I notice they haven't responded yet, so either they're not online right now or they're conjuring a really epic take-down of my point.

I was actually slightly afraid of coming back here to check because I didn't know what I'd find.

The other possibility is that I've made a point that can't be refuted within their ideology. After all "The West" as they see it is precisely the sort of big guy stomping the little guy that I clearly don't like. And I'm not sure I completely disagree with that point.