Our best sensors can detect terrestrial radio chatter from something like 0.5 light years, tops. The nearest star is 4 light years away. The galaxy is tens of thousands of light years across.
Alpha Centauri could be the seat of a post-warp interstellar empire, and we'd never know unless they pointed a directional transmitter straight at us and said hi.
I wonder if anyone has ever written an embedded #RDBMS in which there is no run-time #SQL interpreter, and all SQL queries are translated into machine code at compile time.
Kinda like #Rust sqlx, except queries are fully compiled at compile time, not just checked for correct syntax and types.
I'm guessing this would be extremely specific to one #programming language, and outright impossible in most programming languages.
In the beginning, the computer was invented. It had many uses, and people saw that it was good, and much money was made.
Then, the Internet was invented. It, too, had many uses, and people saw that it was good, and much money was made.
Seeing this, the techbros concluded that people will see any new technology as good, and that much money will be made, and so they invented #cryptocurrency, and said that it had many uses and was good.
Nice thing about #KDE#KDEPlasma: if you rename a file, and try to use the name of a file that already exists, the file manager asks if you want to replace that file.
Which, yes, is exactly what I want. Most file managers won't let me do that, but this one will.
xz maintainer: fell victim to social engineering, reportedly due to ill health
xz co-maintainers responsible for code review: don't exist; nobody's getting paid to do that
Corporate security impresarios in the near future, probably: “Three-factor authentication is now mandatory. This will solve everything for sure this time.”
EU government: “Open source is now illegal. Use proprietary software instead; it never contains malware.”
We didn't have none of these new-fangled light-emitting doohickeys when I was young. If you wanted to see a picture on a screen back in my day, you'd point a 27-kilovolt death ray at your face, which came with a screen attached in front of it, and the death ray would light up the screen. This contraption somehow didn't kill us. Usually.
I think the most horrifying thing about the #AGI craze is the eagerness with which business owners race toward what they believe will bring about the end of human civilization.
They don't know that “#AI” isn't actually intelligent and can't actually replace people, but they think it can, they must know that replacing everyone with machines will result in basically everyone starving to death, and they WANT that. They're speedrunning it.
The progression of #time is generally considered to go from negative (past) to positive (future).
For example, “year -1000” is commonly understood to mean one thousand years before the beginning of the common era. Similarly, “T-minus 30 seconds” means 30 seconds before some event happens.
What if this was inverted, such that the past is considered positive, and the future negative? My first thought is that, although mathematically equivalent, this would seem rather depressing…
I wonder, why does #VGA use synchronization pulses, and not a pair of sawtooth signals for controlling #CRT deflection directly? Then the display could change modes faster (nothing to resynchronize), and a non-sawtooth signal could be used to implement a vector display if desired.
There must be a reason why #IBM didn't do this. Anyone know why?
As a child, the Internet gave me such hope. With the ability to learn anything and talk to anyone at will, I thought that the ignorance of the old world would soon fade away, and hatred of the “other” would be revealed for the absurdity it is.
I had no idea, then, of how callous most people are; that bigotry is born of willful malice, not some tragic misunderstanding. Nor that it infests at least a third of my fellow humans.
