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,

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,

So, it's trying to replace Emacs?

palordrolap,

A wild username reference appears!

There's an editor called Kate. It's probably not named after you, but if you're young enough and the person who named you was into tech, you might be named after it.

palordrolap,

named myself

Programmer error: I totally missed a bunch of edge cases there. Cases 32 to 35 for sure

Buuut I'm guessing you didn't name yourself after the editor.

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.

suddenly I cannot fully access The Economist behind tor without a subscription anymore

I used to read The Economist without a subscription behind tor to avoid captchas, ads and also to avoid their IP profiling (they limit the free articles a non subscription IP can read) but 2 days ago articles stopped showing also behind tor and the TBB....

palordrolap,

Of all the publications, there's something deeply ironic about not wanting to pay for an article on The Economist.

Don't take that as a declaration of fondness for paywalls, only that I understand why they exist.

... And since I don't know whether giving any sort of direct answer to this query might result in some sort of Fediverse ban, I'm going to leave it at that.

palordrolap,

In addition to other advice here: If you want to save on keystrokes, set yourself up a shell alias that's short but unlikely to be a valid command anywhere else.

I have one that's kind of the inverse of yours, called mntStorage (no prizes for guessing its purpose). It wasn't intentional, but mixing case like that is pretty rare in important commands too.

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,

This is pretty big if it has a completely separate browser rendering engine to the two remaining families, even if the feature set is small.

The more current alternatives we have, the better.

palordrolap,

I was counting WebKit and Blink (Chromium) as cousins, both descendents of KHTML, but maybe they've diverged enough as to not easily be able to borrow from each other any more and it really is three.

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,

Dead, no. Dying, maybe. We hope it'll get better.

Perhaps you'd be happier on a Lemmy instance, but then they have upvote/downvotes over there too, and you don't like that for some reason.

What you need is your own website or blog that doesn't have any of those things.

With that I wish you the best of luck. I'm sure you'll get lots of visitors.

palordrolap,

Maybe read some of the other threads here. kbin has a few issues at the moment - some would say a lot - and the lead dev has a few issues of his own that are keeping him from working on them. To be fair they're probably keeping him from a lot more than kbin.

I'm going to guess the downvote is because of the trollface picture but it could be because you're asking something that has been asked before.

palordrolap,

Downvoted for being irrelevant to this magazine.

palordrolap,

"Magazine" is the general name for communities or subgroups on kbin. Whether you meant to or not, your post is in /m/kbinMeta which is for posts about kbin itself.

Character assassinations aren't relevant here. You'll probably find more like-minds in a politics sub... and a few who'll tear posts like this apart even when it is in the right place.

As they used to say on another site, lurk moar.

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,

512KB? At the risk of going all Four Yorkshiremen, that sounds luxurious.

Floppy disks held 170KB if you were lucky to have a drive. The PET line, like many 8-bit computers, used a cassette tape drive (yes, those things that preceded CDs for holding and playing music). Capacity depended on the length of the tape. And it took ages to load.

The PET was fancy because it had a built-in cassette drive. That's what you can see to the left of the keyboard in the picture.

palordrolap,

Comparing audio cassettes to modern high-density tape storage is pretty much the same comparison as an 8-bit computer with a modern 64-bit server, or, say, a hamster with a human.

Basically the same thing, but the differences are somewhat notable.

palordrolap,

The gsettings command can change things on the fly in the dconf, assuming that's where the setting actually resides. It's a pain to do, but that means it's possible to write a script that makes the necessary change(s) and that can then be assigned to a keyboard combo.

For example, I have one that toggles a Cinnamon panel between the top and the bottom of its screen (I won't get into why) and currently have it bound to Ctrl-Alt-Space.

It's currently a hack that uses a couple of hardcoded values that I pulled from the dconf by observing what it was set to with the panel in each location. If it finds the first value it changes it to the second, and vice versa.

(In the unlikely event I come to change the layout to something it doesn't recognise, it bails out, doing nothing.)

Anyway, you could probably do something similar to toggle the dark/light mode.

palordrolap,

dude

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