palordrolap

I can think of at least one Commodore 64 game from back in the day that was hard to play, but I only remember the name of one of them: Quake Minus One. It was not a prequel to the 3D shooter Quake.

Fully aware that I may end up eating my words here, what’s your Chess ELO and your Go rank?

You can also try signalling the parent with a SIGCHLD. Most of the time it does nothing, and hey, you’d be using a stronger version of the kill command anyway if it doesn’t work.

Do things other than these images you’re downloading also look any different? Text on websites sharper or more blurry?

Do old downloads still look the same to you, or have these somehow degraded in quality when you weren’t looking? Look closely.

Thus the lateral thinking answer: Check your screens and your eyesight. One or more of these may have a defect. Or an improvement for that matter. New glasses?

The guy who played Chakotay (Robert Beltran) literally did not want to be there. He kept asking to quit and they kept giving him more money to stay.

Whether the living wooden totem was a result of the character or the actor, or a little bit of both is kind of hard to say. But you’ll notice he stops doing all the “isn’t it cool he’s a Native American” business fairly early in the run, so someone clearly got bored with it all, writers or actor.

My unending soul-sucking void is also named Bort.

A weird and distressing noise woke me this morning. Pretty sure it was a fox. It’s not even near the woods here, but I’ve seen urban ones around if I’ve looked out early in the morning.

The alternative is that it was a dog being suddenly and unexpectedly hurt, and I’d prefer to think it wasn’t that.

They weren’t thinking big enough. They’ve only doubled the address space. I say this at least half seriously, well aware that mine is far more ridiculous the other way.

… but I probably should have tried searching for “IPv4+” before using it as a generic term. At least one other proposal shows up when I search for that, and one of them is a proposal that adds a couple more octets.

Uh. You should keep your hands to yourself - regardless of intent - unless the job explicitly requires it or there’s some kind of danger to life or limb.

Someone that “needs cheering up” does not qualify.

If you think there needs to be an exception, ask for consent. “But then it wouldn’t be a pleasant surprise!” Wrong. You have no idea how the person will react, and they might even pretend to like it for the sake of decorum. Just don’t.

And remember, even if you do get consent one time, it does not imply consent going forward.

There’s a hybrid BBC / Commodore 8-bit computer I’d like to have seen, for sure.

IPv5 existed. It was called the Internet Stream Protocol. The fact IPv4 used 4 octets was a happy coincidence more than anything, so v5 wouldn’t necessarily imply a ninth chevron fifth octet.

But IPv4+, whatever that might have been, could have been an extensible system like, say, Unicode, and taken advantage of the unallocated/reserved 240.0.0.0/4 block to flag that the address is longer and the rest is encoded elsewhere in the packet.

I mean, if you want to go completely crazy, you could specify ~2^28 further octets with such a system… although requiring a 256+ megabyte MTU might be slightly too extreme.

history | grep -E '(sed|grep|awk|perl)' | wc -l 107

Dang. That’s out of 1000. I need to up my game. Also three of those seds are part of something with a -basedir and don’t count.

So yeah, about 10% of my commands are iterating shell pipe things for poops and giggles, I guess.

… and this got me going down the rabbit hole of writing a filter for my history to pull out the first command on the line. This is non-trivial because of potential preceding variable assignments. Most used commands are currently apt and man and ls. I think apt is a Spiders Georg situation because the system is fairly fresh and I keep finding things that I haven’t installed yet. Also I went through a patch of trying to parse its output.

… oh, er… unga bunga.

If 1) you’re smart or practised enough to be able to generate what you’re asking the AI to do for yourself, 2) you’re able to take what the AI generates and debug, check and correct it using non-AI tools like your own brain, 3) you’re sure this whole AI-inclusive process will save time and money, and 4) you’re sure using AI as a crutch won’t cause you brain-rot in the long term, go nuts.

Caveat: Those last two are tricky traps. You can be sure and wrong.

Otherwise, grab the documentation or a bunch of examples and start hacking and crafting. Leave the AI alone. Maybe ask it a question about something that isn’t clear, but on no account trust it. It might have developed the same confusion that you have for precisely the same reasons.

So anyway, Linus clearly fits 1 and 2, and believes 3 and 4 or else he wouldn’t be using an AI. Let’s just hope he hasn’t fallen into the traps.

Vaporisation. When synapses are too far apart, or blown to atoms, confusion is not the result. Oblivion is.

I used to go to a local supermarket once a week. I didn’t (and don’t) have my own transport, so I’d walk there (or get the bus there rather than home after work) and then take a taxi back home. Buying a week at a time worked out cheaper than constantly getting bits and pieces from even closer stores, but carrying the bags then became a pain, hence needing a taxi back, which undid the savings somewhat. (The bus is not really viable when you have four or more bags.)

Then I switched to every two weeks to save on taxi fare, shoe soles and dealing with weather.

And now I just order online and have it delivered every couple of weeks. I’d order more, but my fridge only holds so much, and fresh vegetables only keep so long anyway. And the delivery charge is a third of the price of a taxi home.

The only downside is that I don’t get the exercise of the walk to the supermarket.

I burned out and can now barely look after myself let alone my property. Thus work for me is existing. Actual paid employment would literally destroy me. The medication doesn’t help much.

But if you want interesting shift patterns, I was once on a rotating days and nights schedule that was a lot tighter at one end than four-on, four off. Day shifts were eight hours but staff were staggered so all hours from 8am to 6pm were covered. Nights were always 8pm to 8am. (On-call and a different team covered 6pm to 8pm.)

The worst part of it was that you could finish a day shift at 6pm and need to be in work for a night shift at 8pm the following day. 26 hours to adjust. That was all.

The best part was if your night shifts ended and the recovery time led into a weekend where there was no day shift. That made for nearly a week off, which happened about three times a year.

But absolutely none of that made up for the way it messed with my sleep schedule. I thought being a night owl would make it easy. I was wrong and it severely weakened me.

And it took several years of a different but increasingly stressful (days-only) job before I broke completely.

My previous landline phone had a digital answerphone on it, and yes, there was a while where I took inspiration from the funny answerphone message lists that made it onto the early WWW from prior junk faxes and chain e-mails.

My current one - because I still get the occasional call on the landline number - might have a similar “record your own” feature, but I’ve never bothered. I use the prerecorded message that came with the base station phone.

As for my mobile… I don’t actually remember what the message is that I have on there, but it won’t be anything interesting. Also it costs money to check / make changes to it on my plan, so it won’t be getting my attention any time soon.

This.

Now, that’s not to say I haven’t slacked off in other ways, but to be so obvious as to sleep? No.

And I say this as someone who has worked nights and been on call and had severe sleep deprivation as a result, but I still never slept at work.

I didn’t mention necessary evils in my main comment. With necessary evils, the pleasure is more of a secondary effect to relief of some kind. The fact we even have the phrase in our language for the concept and that it contains the word “evil” would seem to serve my point.

Also, consider that the harm is minimised by the fact that those bacteria cannot suffer in any meaningful way.

For where the harm is greater, tens of thousands of pages of law have been written about where the line between pleasure and relief falls. How evil an act is deemed to be is ultimately indicated by the severity of the enforced consequences (prison sentence, etc.). Or at least that’s the idea.

Maybe it was a man-on-man killing by someone in danger with no other apparent reasonable options. Maybe they just felt like it and are only saying that. Maybe they were clumsy or incompetent. Was that with malice? etc. etc.

And then there’s those enforced consequences. They’re also a necessary evil.

But these are all evils.

Eating flesh to survive is a necessary evil for those that are smart enough to understand they’re killing another animal, and it’s not evil for those that aren’t. It’s probably not an either-or, either. There might well be another sliding scale there.

It’s what they evolved to eat and they have no means of creating an alternative. Carnivory almost certainly evolved in parallel with brains increasing in size, which is a curious consequence. You eat flesh, so your brain gets big enough to try to tell you to stop eating flesh.

There have been instances of predator animals temporarily adopting the offspring of the adult prey animal they ate. I think it would be wrong to call that a guilty conscience in a non-sapient creature, but whatever the ‘merely’ sentient equivalent is, I bet in some cases, it’s that. In others it might well just be a snack for later, but it’s curious how they treat that child with care and respect before they do.

FWIW, I’m no saint here. I eat meat even though I could probably get away with not doing that.