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

The downside - and I'm in favour of wikis like Wikipedia - is that any yahoo or otherwise can also put misinformation in there, perhaps even in good faith, and that's in the wiki forever too.

And those who comb through article histories will have to contend with both the truth (we hope, whether we like it or not) as well as the nonsense.

One other difficulty is Internet-based sources disappearing or re-formatting, breaking links from Wikipedia and other places. This is the reader's reminder to donate to the Internet Archive if not Wikipedia itself, providing you can spare a little money to throw their way.

Speaking of the archive: Anyone know whether Russia blocks the archive or maintains their own equivalent?

Only four of them?

An older person I talk with (older than Boomer generation if you can believe that) keeps trying to moot that it's an "invasion" and then goes on about how these invaders have paid thousands to some people trafficker to be able to get over here.

I point out that invaders generally don't pay more than their life savings to invade, they get paid to do so. And they usually turn up with weapons.

Bless 'em, I keep having to reset their compassion because the newspapers must be what's putting these "invasion" ideas in their head.

There's a vague chance they might not vote blue in the upcoming elections.

In other news, and riffing on the "skulls" comment elsewhere, I'd quite like for someone to stand up in the Commons and ask what the government's jackboot budget is these days, and whether teaching armed troops to goose-step is coming back into fashion.

There are already stories about companies being sued because their AI gave advice that caused the customer to act in a manner detrimental to themselves. (Something about 'plane flight refunds being available if I remember correctly).

Then when they contacted the company to complain (perhaps get the promised refund), they were told that there was no such policy at their company. The customer had screenshots. The AI had wholesale hallucinated a policy.

We all know how this is going to go. AI left, right and centre until it costs companies more in AI hallucination lawsuits than it does to employ people to do it.

And all the while they'll be bribing lobbying government representatives to make AI hallucination lawsuits not a thing. Or less of a thing.

In some interpretations of "bug-driven" programming, no file, or perhaps an empty file, is an instance of the zeroth-bug: The project does not exist.

One could argue that this bug zero is the true ancestor of all other bugs. There's something satisfyingly set-theoretic about it.

Different Strokes might well be more of a Gen-X thing. I remember it being on TV (in England) when I was a kid and remember recognising Gary Coleman when he showed up in the '80s Buck Rogers TV series, but I was very young at the time. Pre-school age definitely.

Also, the younger cast of Scrubs are Gen-Xers and they definitely threw in a few references to it.

But let's not forget that years-later re-runs were and still are a thing, even on the handful of channels that most people had back then, so there are bound to be some people younger than Gen-X who also grew up with those shows as their parents enjoyed them the second time around.

Thanks! I wanted something hard to hit by accident but with a nice mnemonic in it.

A cat-on-keyboard situation could just about manage it, but I don't have a cat.

The iPod got me. Never had one. Never had a friend who did. This could be a Gen X experience or a cash-poor Millennial experience. If it hadn't been for the hint I would not have got past that part.

I also didn't have that particular Nokia so it took me a moment to figure out which button deleted mistakes. Mistakenly thinking that the CAPTCHA designers might not have implemented that part of the interface didn't help.

Had to guess on the boomerang. I've seen boomerangs but didn't know that's what they're called nor have I ever posted one. Again, this could be an "I don't post on that platform" or an "I only post pictures and haven't used that feature" experience. I definitely have an account on at least one platform that hosts them though.

I am technically not a Millennial. The term for my cohort is Xennial, I believe.

Weaksauce. Everyone knows you configure at least one Vulcan-nerve-pinch dead-key chord that primes the following key chord to switch the layout.

Only half joking. I'm the guy with Ctrl-Super-Alt-Shift-Pause set to put the PC into Suspend mode.

Unrelatedly, I hope the meme name isn't a dog-whistle of some sort, because that really would be weaksauce.

Eh. Not quite. Yes, the main editions use Ubuntu as a starting point, but they remove a load of Canonical's cruft, like Snaps. They have their own suite of applications, the XApps, that are forks of other tools, as well as a number of other improvements and changes.

I couldn't say whether it's as far from Ubuntu as Ubuntu is from the original Debian, but it's some distance removed for sure.

And LMDE is based on Debian, skipping Ubuntu entirely.

Probably because some n-eyes (is n still 5?) nation state "we're the good guys, honest" protocol insisted that there be one. And if it wasn't that it was probably some misguided attempt to permit remote maintenance.

The former hiding as the latter is not impossible either.

You could probably rig something up to periodically check RAM usage and if it's dangerously high, send a system notification - or make an xmessage popup - to tell you to restart Brave ASAP. That is, before the death loop begins in the first place.

You might also want to install an extension that unloads tabs that haven't been accessed in a while, especially if you're a tab hoarder.

I don't use Brave, so I'm making assumptions that such an extension exists and that Brave can be restarted without losing all tabs, etc.

If you're using GNOME or a derivative, you should probably be using gio mount to do the same mounting as the file manager would. Then again, you say that the file manager isn't working, so gio mount probably won't work either.

I admit I had no idea about the guts of this - and maybe still don't - but the user who suggested looking at udisks is probably right. It's always been there in the background as long as I remember (Mint/Cinnamon, many years), and has hooks into something I mounted with gio after the last reboot.

Another search term that might help is "gvfs", or GNOME virtual file system, which I've definitely poked around with before.

Importantly, Nautilus and gio don't need sudo because they call into what's already running. They (or the subsystem) automatically create the mount point directory (and remove it on unmount). If the directory already exists, they use the "append a 1" technique you experienced, presumably so they don't clobber or hide something that might be important.

Tenets

But don't sack your tenants. They need a place to live.

Debian has a .deb that does the job.

Unless you have a really old graphics card anyway and then you have to use the .run installer from Nvidia. Pain in the a-- sure, but still not Joker level hurt-the-world madness.

Nah. Notepad in Windows. Definitely.

The only place this will be active is on the computers of home users who don't know how or don't care to deactivate it. The computers of the common clay of IT usage. You know. Morons.

And to tie that meme in with an older one: A fool and his money are soon parted.

Yep. The phrase "Personal Computer" is fairly old at this point. Everyone and their dog called their computer product a "Personal Computer" back in the 80s. The id-plate on the Commodore 128 and 64C computers had that exact phrase under the computer name.

"IBM-compatible personal computer" is a wordy phrase, and even before the "IBM-compatible" part became somewhat anachronistic, it was being abbreviated to just "PC", heralding the death-knell for most other systems that otherwise had every right to use the name.

There are plenty of other factors at play. A common one is a desire for a partner of the same or similar age.

A family unit that stays together - thus the parents ageing together - has an on-average better outcome for offspring. Thus this is also an evolved response.

There are obviously other, non-evolved reasons, such as having a common upbringing and generational vibe.

The desire to protect and not harm children is also an evolved response, which, I'm glad to say, manifests in most of us at a fundamental enough level that it kills off any desire that might arise.

But shave the hair off an adult and well, it's still an adult, but it might be enough to fool our animal hind brain.

Someone else already said WSL, but before WSL there was Cygwin, and before Cygwin it was probably the DOS era tbh, but you could definitely get pdksh as a DOS executable back then. (I was never quite brave enough to make pdksh the SHELL in CONFIG.SYS, but I could have.)

As for Windows' WM being Explorer, yeah, that's basically been the case since Windows 95. The desktop itself is a special instance of a folder and the taskbar, at least up to Windows 7 (I've been out of touch since then) was a heavily modified partially-floating menu bar.

Prior to that, Windows 3.x had something called Program Manager which Windows 8 kind of, sort of, went back to (but not really) and everyone hated it. The original Program Manager would have been better, honestly.

Makes me wonder if the setting is still there in modern Windows to change the WM to something else. It used to be in WIN.INI, so it's probably a registry key now. No doubt deep instability will result if it's set to anything other than explorer.exe because of the deep integration that explorer.exe has with literally everything, so probably not worth trying. Also, if you start Explorer when it isn't the WM, it'll probably try to do WM things anyway and break whatever else is running.