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 name... at the moment) until it went full Musk.

Now I'm here.

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

palordrolap,

Wow. I totally forgot that Commodore BASIC ignores spaces in variable names. I do remember that it ignores anything after the first two letters though. That said, there's a bit more going on here than meets the eye.

PRINT HELLO WORLD is actually parsed as PRINT HELLOW OR LD, that is: grab the values of the variables HELLOW (which is actually just HE) and LD, bitwise OR them together and then print.

Since it's very likely both HE and LD were undefined, they were quietly created then initialised to 0 before their bitwise-OR was calculated for the 0 that appeared.

Back in the day, people generally didn't put many spaces in their Commodore BASIC programs because those spaces each took up a byte of valuable memory. That PET2001, if unexpanded, only has 8KB in it.

</old man rant>

palordrolap,

Tenets*

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

palordrolap,

Irony: The pictured computer is not a 1980s, 1MHz Commodore 64 but instead a 2010s, 2GHz C64x PC, a keyboard-housed x86 system that looks like a breadbin C64.

palordrolap,

The Robustness Principle may seem like little more than a suggestion, but it is the foundation on which many successful things are based.

To boil it down to meme-level old-school Torvaldsry: Assume everyone else is a f--king idiot who can barely do what they're supposed to and expect to parse their files / behaviour / trash accordingly.

If you do not do this, you are, without doubt, one of those f--king idiots everyone else is having to deal with. If you do do this, it does not guarantee that you are not a f--king idiot. Awareness is key.

Examples where this works: Web browser quirks mode; Driving a car; Measure twice, cut once. This latter one is special because it reveals that often, the f--king idiot you're trying to deal with is yourself.

Assume everyone else is worse.

Fun corollary: In altering his behaviour towards f--king idiots people who should know better, Linus has learned to apply the robustness principle to interpersonal communication.

palordrolap,

This is Hell propaganda. There's no way you'd get a comfy bed.

And before you say that bed might not be comfortable, he's maintaining a smile while laying on it, so it's still too comfortable even if it isn't comfortable per se.

palordrolap,

There's a condition called progeria that is pretty much the real version of this.

Unfortunately - however you might take that - it usually takes a decade or two and is pleasant for no-one.

Wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy let alone their kid.

But if you're looking for a more entertaining take, try this shocking 2002 XBox TV ad that was quickly banned in the UK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjeYb7_kPqo

palordrolap,

...and malware out the wazoo.

palordrolap,

Put something in robots.txt that isn't supposed to be hit and is hard to hit by non-robots. Log and ban all IPs that hit it.

Imperfect, but can't think of a better solution.

palordrolap,

As a fan of log-scale axes, Randall really ought to at least suspect that the vertical axis is also logarithmic. If so, the average 800m sphere is very much not tasty.

palordrolap,

I prefer to floss between them.

palordrolap, (edited )

The jump from 7.x right to 24.x had me thinking this was an AI generated article at first, but the main LibreOffice website does indeed show that the new version number is 24.

EDIT: The article literally talks about this and I missed it. Twice. I would like to claim to be on drugs, but sadly(?) this is not the case.

The choice of 24 makes me think they've decided to switch to using the last two digits of the current year as the main version number, rather than the previous arbitrary increases, but I can't find anything obvious about this on the site.

Their current release schedule is every six months, and as long as they don't accelerate the way web browser releases do, this probably wouldn't come back to bite them.

The sub-version being .2 and it being February soon makes me wonder if that's intentional as well.

As for commentary on LibreOffice itself: I use it every once in a while, so I don't dig deep into its feature set(s) at all. In a previous update I noticed a few things had been moved around in Calc (the spreadsheet) which I'm still getting used to, but by and large all I can do is appreciate those working on it and, for whatever it's worth, thank them for their efforts.

palordrolap,

Fun fact: If you have a scientific calculator (literal or app) but no other conversion tool available, the conversion factor between miles and kilometres is almost exactly ln 5. Disturbingly close in fact.

That's fewer keypresses than generating the Golden ratio or working out Fibonacci numbers. But if all you have is your head then, yeah, the Fibonacci trick is good enough in a pinch.

palordrolap,

TIL I have a crush on everyone.

palordrolap,

Do employers actually care about being understaffed or do they only wish that that staff would stop complaining that the company is understaffed?

After all, an understaffed company is a lean, efficient company that doesn't give out money all willy-nilly to the sort of people who have to do undesirable work and thus ensures good value for the C-level end-of-year bonus and stockholder portfolios, which ought to sound like a win from their point of view.

palordrolap,

Those guinea pigs are enormous.

Either that or it's a tiny trap and it was meant for a guinea-pig-sized bear such as, if true, the one in this comic.

palordrolap,

THEREareWORSEwaysTOtypeTHINGSandSTILLhaveTHEMbeKINDofREADABLE.whoNEEDSspacesWHENweHAVEtwoLETTERcases?

OrMaYbEwEcOuLdEsChEwEvEnThAtAnDjUsTaLtErNaTe.IfThErEaReWrItInGsYsTeMsWiThOuTvOwElsThAtCaNsTiLlBeReAdWhYnOtWrItElIkEtHiSiNsTeAd?

palordrolap,

With Microsoft, any love shown could well be the Embrace part of the strategy that will lead to Extend and then Extinguish just as soon as they can figure those parts out. They might already have a plan.

The fact they've been able to turn things to their advantage so far does not mean they don't have such a plan. Or won't ever have one.

palordrolap,

Hunt literally co-wrote a book on how to turn the NHS into a US-style system, and members of his family are prominent in private healthcare.

Understand now?

palordrolap,

8388409 = 2^23 - 199

I may have noticed this on a certain other aggregator site once upon a time, but I'm still none the wiser as to why.

199 rows kind of makes sense for whatever a legitimate query might have been, but if you're going to make up a number, why 2^23? Why subtract? Am I metaphorically barking up the wrong tree?

Is this merely a mistyping of 8388608 and it was supposed to be ±1 row? Still the wrong (B-)tree?

WHY DO I CARE

palordrolap,

No more than identical twins are the same person.

palordrolap,

Just going to leave this xkcd comic here.

Yes, you already know what it is.

palordrolap,

Caution: Finding something that one hates more than one's self does not take away the initial self loathing. Attempting to mollify or subdue the lesser by observation or interaction with the latter may result in something greater than the sum of its parts and oh boy, Jeffery Christmas, now we're in for a bad time.

palordrolap,

U nd to rembr tht mny snr devs grw up prgrmng on old hrdwr tht ddn't hv mch mmry & oftn th lang ony allwd shrt var nms anywy. Also thy wr th gen of txtspk fr smlr rsns.

Yngr snr devs pckd up bd hbts frm tht gen.

And here's a sentence that's not squashed to cleanse your palettes / give a sigh of relief because I figure if I need a break from typing like that, you need a break from reading it.

Nmng thngs s hrd.

palordrolap,

Channelling my father here, but the lessons learned (but not fixed) after Beeching gutted the railways will be learned again here only too late.

That is, once you get rid of the minor bus routes, you'll realise that quite a few people were using those to get to the major bus routes, and now some of the major bus routes are as little used as the minor ones were.

And so you repeat. Close the minor ones. More minor ones. Confused face. Close the minor ones. Customers are complaining they can't get anywhere. Profits aren't rising. Angry face.

Soon you're left with only the buses that run the straightest routes to the closest nearby major places and all you can say is "nothing we can do, it's too expensive to run anything else."

Linux for Microsoft Surface devices. It is reality! (cloudblogs.microsoft.com)

I would like to share with you a very cool project that develops drivers for correct operation of Microsoft Surface devices on Linux. I myself use Surface Pro 6 with these drivers and everything works like a charm (battery life is good, cameras work, stylus, keyboard, touchscreen, screen). The developers are gods. From myself, I...

palordrolap,

Microsoft wants to give Linux a nice warm hug and then squeeze and squeeze and all the warmth disappears this is actually quite a high pressure oh that hurts Microsoft no ow are those needles coming out of your arms I think I hear bones splintering and screaming oh no it's me I'm screaming I'm hearing myself screaming I'm turning into

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