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palordrolap

@palordrolap@kbin.social

Some middle-aged guy on the Internet; Seen a lot of it and occasionally regurgitate it, trying to be amusing and informative.

Lurked Digg until v4.

Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.

Now I'm here.

Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish

Applying for mod in places where an occasional mod would better than none at all.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

palordrolap ,

Linux Musk sounds like the evil counterpart to Mint. A fork of Red Star OS, etc.

palordrolap ,

You know what they say about stopped clocks.

palordrolap ,

Reminds me of a TV ad, older than this comic, for a frosted cereal (probably not the first one that comes to mind) and the adult about to consume them has the inner dialogue "What about fat?!" "Wimp!"

(I always heard it as "Wamp!", so to this day I'm not completely sure if it was an early example of a spoken sad trombone, but "Wimp!" is more likely.)

They don't make ads like that any more.

palordrolap ,

Some Linux packages have WebKit as a dependency and that often has something called MiniBrowser installed as, well, precisely what it says it is. Not sure if it's available on Windows, but it's OK in a pinch.

There are a few other lesser known browsers, not in the main families, that are currently in development too.

palordrolap ,

Well there was a game on the C64 called Quake Minus One...

palordrolap ,

Important: The article mentions that they are being replaced not that the SAC is being done away with completely.

On the other hand:

Twitch declined to comment on whether the [new council members] would be paid.

The text I replaced there is "ambassadors", that is, Twitch ambassadors, people given a title that means nothing outside of Twitch, but is the only payment these people will be getting, outside, perhaps, a sense of pride and accomplishment.

palordrolap ,

It's not about whether it works, it's about proving that they're keeping pace with the trends in technology that they're not directly driving.

They're afraid that if they don't give that impression, their stockholders will pull their money and give it to someone who does, and since that's what their stockholders also fear about all the other stockholders, that's what will happen.

AI funding is so far up it's own backside I'm not sure they'll hear the cry of the small child pointing out that this Emperor has no clothes.

palordrolap ,

I never said that the way they've gone about it is the best way to have gone about it.

Frankly, I'm not even sure what that would be, only that this ain't it.

palordrolap ,

Gonna guess people who missed the memo about Mint until well after they installed Ubuntu. They haven't had the time or energy to switch distros yet, but did manage the time and/or energy to install Cinnamon.

Maybe a couple of others who have unknown reasons for avoiding Mint. No idea what those reasons are, but there's always someone with a different take.

palordrolap ,

Set one up when I used a different handle but literally never used it. Thought I had a short ID number but, for reasons I'm not sure of, the piddly scrap of paper I wrote the number down on has always been in a particular place (and has been there for well over a decade), and it was 9 digits.

Must have been thinking of that handle's Slashdot ID. That was 6 digits.

... and technically still is. Wow. The account is apparently still there. Not sure I'm going back there any time soon, but took this opportunity to reset the password just in case.

palordrolap ,

"I don't have a life or a job"

"FR me too"

"I thought you were a therapist"

head shrunk into shoulders, sweating

palordrolap ,

Had to check. It looks like the comic actually only ceased production last year after the passing of the (second) artist.

Chris Browne took on Hägar after his father Dik - who drew the linked comic - died, but today I learned that Chris died last year.

As an extra kicker, I also learned that his brother Chance died a couple of months back. He didn't draw Hägar but had taken on another of their father's strips, Hi and Lois.

My denial about getting older can only take so much of this.

palordrolap ,

Let me guess: I'll buy a toaster because my old one died but then I'll get ads for new toasters constantly. You bought one, you must want another. And another. And another. Why aren't you buying more toasters. You bought one. Buy another! Buy twenty!! People who bought toasters also bought microwaves and kettles. Do you want a toaster? Does anyone want any toast?

palordrolap ,

Ah! So you're a waffle man! Wanna buy a waffle iron?

palordrolap ,

Reminds me of that time in a pub restaurant where I ordered the Cumberland sausage (plus mash, etc.). When it arrived it looked not entirely dissimilar. Thankfully, when I cut into it, it was indeed sausage, not a snail. Or anything else.

(Must have tasted OK because I don't remember hating it.)

palordrolap ,

This hen laid a cannon?! That might be worth more than a goose that lays golden eggs to a warring king.

palordrolap ,

Probably closed the terminal emulator it was running in and opened a new one before trying to find documentation at my leisure. One of the luxuries of learning Unix commands in a graphical environment.

For a more drastic noob story, I once rebooted a computer because I couldn't get out of GWBASIC. I was familiar with QBASIC at the time and that was a lot easier to get out of if you didn't know what you were doing.

palordrolap ,

Surprised they haven't tried to train a neural network to find a compression algorithm specifically for their sort of data.

There's a ridiculous irony in the fact they haven't, and it's still ironic even if they have and have thrown the idea out as a failure. Or a dystopian nightmare.

But if it is the latter, they might help save time and effort by telling "the public" what avenues have already failed, or that they don't want purely AI-generated solutions. Someone's bound to try it otherwise.

palordrolap ,

Ay, there's the rub. Almost no-one's going to pay for the top-notch system, and will instead go for the lowest bidder.

palordrolap ,

Obligatory note that /etc/profile and ~/.profile are only run by login shells, and many terminal emulators do not execute a login shell by default.

Unfortunately, there is no standard secondary place* that all shells execute, so check your chosen shell's manual for what it does run on startup and put your functions into one of those. Preferably one that goes in your homedir.

Alternatively have that file source ~/.profile assuming that won't cause an infinite loop.

  • And not even a primary if you count *csh, but if you use those you have other problems.
palordrolap ,

Dinosaur here.

Windows Paint, as it was back in 9x? Totally my jam. Between that and Irfanview for access to resizing and filter features Paint didn't have, I could get a surprising amount done.

But then they updated Paint to have more advanced abilities and I had no idea how to do things any more.

I've tried Krita recently, but I felt lost. I think I need to attend a course or watch some videos on layers and the brushes and everything like that. It isn't intuitive at all. None of the advanced graphics programs are.

Old Paint? You didn't need a how-to or a course. It was one layer. No overwhelming number of tools and options. You wanted another layer? You opened another Paint window.

You wanted anti-aliasing? You drew things two or four times the size then used something like Irfanview to shrink it down when you were done.

Damn kids get off my etc.

palordrolap ,

The main reason for the name is that it sorts before both Amazon and Apple in the Big Tech directory. It's literally as petty as that. They obviously chose a word that was related to searching within that criterion, but still.

palordrolap ,

They probably want to avoid anything that sounds like it might be Jewish, so Aaron is out. This is not because of direct anti-Semitism, but because of the fear of it. Avoiding such words avoids the subject entirely. (Ironically, the Semitic origins of the word "Alphabet" aren't as obvious.)

Aardvark is too alien and weird. Also, C-levels are deathly afraid of varking too aard.

Abacus might have been a better choice, but it doesn't come with the infuriatingly tantalising closeness of one or two letters' distance.

palordrolap ,

One of Perl's design principles was the Robustness principle, though it probably wasn't known by that name at the time. (The name came about around the same time Perl was becoming a thing, something something zeitgeist something.)

Perl can be locked down and made to complain (with at least a couple of levels of pedantry) when things are wrong, but unlike most other languages, it doesn't do so by default.

palordrolap ,

find's expressions are order-sensitive and look like options, which is probably why the real options go zeroth, then the starting path goes first. Also, there is a -path-match expression that means something different than that starting path.

That said, there's nothing stopping the writing of a wrapper script that allows any placement or intermingling of any of those groupings.

The simplest would just grab the last argument and use it in the first position, which I'm guessing is what the meme creator really wants. Watch out for the edge case of whitespace in the path name. (And the edge case of the edge case where the end part of that path is valid but not the intended target.)

palordrolap ,

I think I might be the third option: f'ss-tab.

Couldn't tell you where that's from. When I first ran Linux, the year didn't start with a 2.

palordrolap ,

If they have any sense they'll not try to find out what's on it and send it straight to whatever electronics recycling is available.

Sticking a USB device of unknown provenance into your computer is just asking for trouble. (When you think about it, we even take a risk every time we buy one.)

Sure, you know it's harmless, but they don't know that, even if you tell them. Who are you? You're just someone who used to live in their house. As far as they know, you might be a freak who gets a kick out of leaving dodgy devices around for people to find.

palordrolap , (edited )

Peertube is the Fediverse equivalent of YouTube, the Fediverse being what Lemmy (where you are), Kbin (where I am) etc. are also a part of.

As far as I'm aware, it's a matter of finding an instance you resonate with, create an account and share away.

Do bear in mind that since it's the Fediverse, Peertube instances aren't usually backed by a large organisation with bags of cash, so if you can afford to donate to your instance, at least consider doing so.

I'd also recommend not using Peertube as a be-all-end-all storage for your videos. Always keep a copy for yourself. People do this with YouTube and they shouldn't unless they're OK with suddenly and forever losing that content at some unspecified future date. The same can happen with PeerTube, but the reasons are likely to be different (instance closing rather than unexpected account deletion).

Corporation-backed video hosts include: Twitch, Dailymotion and Vimeo. You could probably also host on Facebook. While these are options, they might make you feel as unclean as I did typing that out.

palordrolap ,

Compilers were much less complex back then and didn't do a great deal of optimisation. Also hardware was slow, so your compiled code, which wasn't necessarily optimal either before or after the compilation phase, was at least half as fast as you wanted it to be.

If you wanted speed, you hand-rolled assembly.

palordrolap ,

"Socky"

"Socky Junior"

"Socky Sock Sock"

"The guy who wrote this implementation was suffering from burn-out, wasn't he."

Hello GPT-4o (openai.com)

GPT-4o (“o” for “omni”) is a step towards much more natural human-computer interaction—it accepts as input any combination of text, audio, and image and generates any combination of text, audio, and image outputs. It can respond to audio inputs in as little as 232 milliseconds, with an average of 320 milliseconds,...

palordrolap ,

It's not yawn, but not because it's great. It's because it'll be around for just long enough that it will create reliance on it, ruin many things, and then those people who have become reliant will find themselves in the position of having to unruin the many ruined things without the crutch to help them.

Or maybe I'm being the next iteration of the schoolteacher or parent who said that you won't have a calculator in your pocket all the time.

But then, a calculator doesn't need a terabyte of RAM. We're a ways off that being consumer-affordable as yet. If past consumer RAM size trends are anything (and the only thing) to go by, a portable LLM would be a 2040s or 2050s expectation.

Assuming that you'd be allowed to have the terabyte of data for nothing, anyway. Exorbitant subscription models are likely to be the norm by then.

palordrolap ,

I must have heard "saata" somewhere because that's my head-pronunciation, and it doesn't match how I say data (dayta). Not sure I've ever said it out loud.

Could be an "avoiding saying anything like 'Satan'" kind of thing, not because of religion, but more to avoid lame jokes.

palordrolap ,

Ha. No, I don't think it was Linus, but it might have been someone else European. Really hard to be sure at this point. SATA has been around for a while.

And I've unearthed a memory of the other, other pronunciation that I know I've heard: "serial ay-tee-ay". Why make it an acronym when you can say one of the words and then the initials of the others!

palordrolap ,

Ridiculous.

I think I like it.

... which is probably what my mother thought when she first set eyes on me, tbh.

palordrolap ,

had he
at any point in the episode
consumed mushrooms

palordrolap ,

Well I found a good quality version of the original on Imgur: https://imgur.com/WK1g3xd

... but I can't find a good quality version of this particular "Billionaires" modification. (That's assuming it's as badly pixelated for everyone else as it is for me anyway.)

palordrolap ,

It worked... or it will work? for Jeffrey Sinclair and Delenn. Just don't think too hard about which one of them did it / has done it / will do it first.

And the closest thing to a moth wasn't either of those.

palordrolap ,

Implemented as "Maleness" with options: TRUE, FALSE, FILE_NOT_FOUND

One of the few cases where this implementation of a boolean is almost a good idea.

palordrolap ,

@Toes @snownyte @otter

There are two mods currently, Ernest, admin of kbin as well as owner of /m/tech, and @artillect, who hasn't been seen (except for votes maybe?) for 8 months.

The word is that Ernest has real-life problems and can't maintain kbin at the moment.

I've applied here and a bunch of other places but hopefully better-qualified, more active people have also applied; Even if I get it, I can't be here all the time.

... but it needs the owner of the magazine, Ernest, who isn't around, to accept the applications.

palordrolap ,

One of the main problems is that Ernest is the owner and only mod on those magazines getting all the spam. I guess I missed the memo (figuratively speaking) about deletions not being federated though. That seems like a problem even if there were alternative moderators.

There's at least one person on the mod-request queue for most of the spam-ridden magazines. That "at least one" is me, which is how I know. I'm not here all the time and wouldn't be great at it, but at this stage even a part-time mod would be better than none at all. Hopefully, as and when Ernest comes back he can assign some roles. Twice as hopefully, someone else who would be better at it gets it instead.

palordrolap ,

I used to be an adventurer like you but then I

aged several decades without realising.

palordrolap ,

Where does Yandex's money go these days?

palordrolap ,

Somewhere around here I have a 1960s or '70s Star Trek annual with a story where machines like this end up converting an entire planet into one enormous city, and the people that live there can't stop it.

The story is basically a warning about turning everything over to AI, not that they call it that specifically.

palordrolap ,

Oddly enough, Spock solves the problem (because of course he does, and it's a comic that has to be done in 30 panels or so) by discovering that the city construction materials can be chemically dissolved into goo. Thankfully not the sort that overtakes a planet.

... at least assuming there wasn't a sequel.

palordrolap ,

Unforchunetly, Ingglish speling duzn't laiyn up with saowndz wun-tuh-wun.

Spelling things how you say them can lead to people misunderstanding or causing unintended(?) pain.

palordrolap ,

dude

palordrolap ,

Presumably this means that Musk/Tesla is looking to embrace this newfangled source of energy known as "aul" and can be extracted from the Earth itself with a magical device called a "puhmpjaak". Older Teslas can be upgraded by installing a "gehneraydor" in their "truhnk" whatever that means.

Company may or may not be renamed to Texla and start referring to themselves as the largest state automobile company in the USA when they aren't.

palordrolap ,

If my hasty checking is valid, there's nothing in the Bible about holy water. There's holding a baptism, but nothing about holy men blessing water to imbue it with the Holy Spirit.

As such, I assume that any liquid blessed by a priest might be considered holy.

Something something Godly Gatorade, Blessed Baja Blast etc.

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