palordrolap @ palordrolap @kbin.social

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

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It's not like Israel needs any more weapons against a rag-tag bunch of terrorists whose existence they - arguably indirectly - continue to foment.

Yes, I know Israel's take on the matter is that the existence of Hamas is precisely why cruelty to Palestine is "necessary" rather than the other way around, but at this point does it matter whether the chicken or the egg came first? Those who say yes on both sides - even if they differ about which came first - are using it as a crutch at this point.

The whole thing now is a big kid stomping the ever-loving fk out of a smaller kid because "he kicked my shin! he kicked my shin!" so that obviously makes whatever they do OK, and in fact, let's have some other big kids (one wearing a stars and stripes shirt of all things?!) help out with the stomping.

And tomorrow, had this not suddenly escalated, the original big kid would have gone through the smaller kid's pockets for lunch money, and maybe a house or two like usual.

(Please note that - goofy metaphors aside - I'm not happy about the civilian deaths that have occurred recently, regardless of what the dead might have believed while they were alive. In war, it's almost always the wrong people who die.)

herbivorous dinosaurs: visible confusion

I'm on the "no heating until I can't bear it any more and even then maybe I'll wait a day or two to think about it" rule.

Hot drinks and hot water bottles are key. Heat the human, not the house.

I realise this doesn't work for everyone. Children and pets turning blue should be a priority. Turn it up to a balmy 16°C and have them run laps occasionally.

The Jewish god (and thus that of the Christians and the Muslims because it's the same guy) was once part of his own pantheon. He even had a wife at one point.

It's not thought he's the same god as Zeus/Jupiter, but his name is suspiciously similar if you squint a bit (a bit more than you do to compare Zeus-Piter, Zeus's "full name" anyway, because that's more of a "holy shit" realisation if you don't know). Almost like the name might have mutated slightly under the influence of neighbouring religions.

Consider: When you're frightened of saying your god's name even though you think you might know it, it can help to make it sound a bit more like other peoples' main god, after all. Your god can't get mad because you're not saying his name, and the heathens might start to like the comparison and convert.

Another thing to note, regarding pantheons, is that Jewish god is quoted as saying "you shall have no other gods before me". That, depending on interpretation, could imply that the other gods are still around twiddling their thumbs and playing solo paddle-ball or something, but we mortals aren't allowed to talk to them any more.

YHWH will pitch a hissy fit if we do.

Edits: Formatting. Typos. The usual.

If you want the historical reason, you need to look at ASCII and its teletype forerunners. America, for better or worse, were the ones who laid down the bases for a lot of the standards we still use today. UTF-8 covers the gamut of Unicode, but its first 95 printable characters from 32 (space) onwards? Identical to 1967 ASCII.

And since ASCII ended up as the default, most programming languages only allowed symbols from those original 95.

In some really bad cases, in order to support keyboards with even fewer symbols, things like digraphs and trigraphs were kludged into some languages. (C, for example, is only just planning on getting rid of support for them this year.)

Those systems tended to be completely alien to ASCII or descended from the 6-bit teletype code where there are only 60-some usable characters. (Two character cases at the same time? Luxury! And what the heck is a curly brace?)

Now that UTF-8 is gaining a foothold, some languages are daring to use Unicode, so we might soon see more and more interesting characters being allowed in the base syntax of languages. (See Raku, for example. Or don't. You may go blind.)

On the other hand, there's APL, which has been doing its own thing with weird symbols since 1966 and giving not a bit of interest to ASCII or anything else.

Hot take

Aw man. If the photo is anything to go by, they might have cured it of racism, which you'd think was a good thing and that I'm a racist asshole, but the fix could actually increase its use for racism.

That is, ironically, a system that's only really good at identifying one race (usually white people like a large percentage of the people who made the systems) is a bit harder to (mis)use that way.

The only way to (mis)use an accidentally racist facial recognition system is to persecute everyone it can't identify, and you wouldn't need an expensive system to do that. And it's a lot easier to get called out for what you're doing, either way.

When the system works on all people of all skin colours, this can allow a racist user of it to pick and choose and plead innocence.

Slightly more mainstream hot take

Facial recognition is dystopian and should be yaten into the sun.

There's deeper subtlety here. There are declared variables, uninitialised variables and variables that will at some point be declared, uninitialised or not, that don't exist in the logic of the program flow yet. Compilers / interpreters may or may not make distinctions between these, especially if memory is (perhaps only considered to be) in short supply.

What specific languages do in these cases is wide and varied. Some automatically give all variables a safe, but identifiably undefined value the moment they're declared, which may or may not be equivalent to the language's interpretation of null. Or is equivalent in some senses but not others. Looking at you, Javascript.

In the toilet paper example, the holder might actually still exist but the middle bar might be missing for "identifiably undefined", and the blank wall is that variable you have literally no idea about.

Maybe in trying to access it you amaze yourself by finding that you've punched through the wall and managed to grab some toilet paper from a neighbouring bathroom cubicle.

Maybe you instead discover your hand goes through a mincing machine and the pain, oh god why the pain nothing will ever be the same, is that my hard drive churning? No way to tell. Now that's undefined behaviour.

Technically, this is also possible by creating extra groups, but this kind of access control presumably exists because the old-school method can be a pain to administer. Choosing group names can also be an "interesting" secondary challenge.

i.e. Dude's not going to be best pleased if they ls -l and see the group on the file is xyzgroup-but-not-dude even if it is with good reason. (Shouldn't have deleted the database, dude.)

What freaks me out is that sometimes getting the error message more than once can reset parts of the programmer's brain enough to be able to see the error that "wasn't there" before. And what's equally freaky is how often the programmer then forgets what the error even was once it's fixed.

This is personal experience of course. For me, being introspective about this is kind of like remembering Dr Who's The Silence exist when they're not right there, but somehow it can be done.

And don't let Moon Knight lend money to Dracula.

A lot of other religions and nationalities have "customs" going the other way, that is pertaining to the abuse of Jews. I'm sure he's somewhat less in favour of those.

As am I, disturbingly enough. That is, I wouldn't spit on, or otherwise persecute him for being Jewish.

For being an abject asshole on the other hand...

I only mentioned the lag to make the point that if we're getting an update at the same time as Arch that maybe it was an important one.

Anyone on Mint who finds themselves trying to leap ahead of the default release schedule might want to at least sniff around a different distro or two.

That said, Flatpaks with later versions are also often available in the provided Software Manager (basically an app store), so that's a place to look before jumping ship. Hard to tell now, but I think 115 was the Flatpak option while the, uh, default default was 102.

Makes me wonder. LMDE got a glibc update too and Mint is very much not leading edge when it comes to non-critical updates.

Case in point, at roughly the same time as the glibc update, we (LMDE users) were upgraded to the latest Thunderbird, 115.3.1, four or five days after that sub-version came out. That's the sort of lag we generally see. (115.x was a bit of a surprise too as we've been on 102.x, but that's not strictly relevant here.)

Just going to leave this xkcd comic here.

Yes, you already know what it is.

Let me guess: Moony doesn't punch women, won't make exceptions even when she's way more powerful than he is, and the whole thing goes sideways for a bit.

Or 20 comic books over the course of a year or so.

To roughly paraphrase one famous, self-described softy southerner espousing a tale where they soon learned a very valuable lesson: "Manchester's in the north and so's Scotland. Shouldn't take that long to get from one to the other."

Nice chap. Robert Llewellyn. Does electric car stuff and the like now. Occasionally plays Kryten in Red Dwarf, but this isn't strictly relevant.

The point is that, by default, no-one from south of Watford understands that there's quite a lot of land and people here between London and Edinburgh (and quite a lot north of that as well for that matter).

And even if you manage to get over the geography (conceptually or literally), there's a lot more lefty voters in this ignored bit, so it tends to suit the largely centrist and right-leaning south to maintain their ignorance. And distance.

Although the leftyness often doesn't extend to "foreign" folk, which is a disappointment.

Perl's unreasonable effectiveness for creating write-only code was part of the joke.

For my own amusement I'm going to pretend you were using something like Perl where determining what's a comment and what's code can be context sensitive.

i.e. stripping from # to the end of the line can be a very wrong thing to do in a language where the comment marker can actually be used in other niche ways.

Strip the wrong "comment" and your code won't compile. Or worse, do something unexpected.

170.170.170.170 is best subnet mask. Change my mind.