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,

One wonders how a state with increasingly fascist tendencies would handle this crisis if it became impossible to ignore...

palordrolap,

Most shells will issue $PS2 as the continuation prompt if you quote a filename and try to insert a carriage return.

Ctrl-V Ctrl-J is the explicit keypress pair to insert a carriage return without triggering $PS2, but beware: If the carriage return is outside of quotes, that's equivalent to starting a new command in much the same way a semicolon or a new line in a shell script would.

echo "hello^V^Jthere" [Enter] echoes hello on one line and then there on the next, but echo hello^V^Jthere [Enter] will echo hello then try to run a command called there

We'd have to assume that whatever fixes spaces in filenames would also have an option to fix this subtlety. And I say to whoever tries: Good luck with that.

palordrolap,

Most terminals start a shell as the first program, so you're not really learning "Terminal" so much as whatever program it starts first. Bash is a pretty common shell, so you might want to search for things like "Bash examples" to get a feel for it.

If that's too simple, or you blast past that, then reading bash's manual might give you some more ideas. The man command is your friend. The manuals are not necessarily quite so friendly, but they're aimed at someone who's already somewhat competent.

Anyway, here's one link from a Bash examples search I did: https://linuxsimply.com/bash-scripting-tutorial/basics/examples/

If Bash isn't what you have where you are, substitute its name instead. Zsh and Fish are pretty popular. There are others, but I don't think any mainstream Linux uses them by default.

To check what shell you're using try an echo $0 or echo $SHELL.

Finally, a bit of advice: Don't go running commands you see on the Internet unless you're sure what they're going to do is something you have no problem with. And be careful with copy/pasting from web pages you don't know or trust - I can't vouch for the examples in the link I gave earlier, for example. It's possible to make things look like a completely innocent command but when pasted does something else entirely.

palordrolap,

This is the sort of thing I was talking about with "Don't go running commands [...] unless you're sure what they're going to do [...]"

I did a breakdown of this one on the snoosite back in the day. Searching "fork bomb" on YouTube is probably a better way to get that breakdown these days.

palordrolap,

I remember using Pico, Nano's predecessor, in the mid-to-late '90s. Nano was created because there was a desire to distribute Pico with Linux. Unfortunately, the licensing was unclear so a clone had to be made. Fortunately there was no argument about editor appearance and behaviour.

As shocking as the 2001 date might be, it seems like Pico might have ceased development as recently as the end of 2022 along with its e-mail reader parent program Alpine (formerly Pine).

If true, Nano still has a few years to go before it will overtake its parent for longevity.

(Both vi and Emacs are far older, of course.)

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.

palordrolap,

Oh boy here we go waking the sheeple again

palordrolap,

Article now contains a link to a tweet showing a reissued image that has the Shuttle blurred out. Got to wonder if someone got in trouble for putting the Shuttle in there.

palordrolap, (edited )

Not aware of any specific usages, but maybe they're used as meta-sets. e.g. "consider a set of numbers 𝕏 and a set of numbers 𝕐 ... etc, which can't be done with the defined letters.

Unicode originally only had the double-struck letters for the defined sets ℂ, ℍ, ℕ, ℙ, ℚ, ℝ and ℤ, but the full alphabets were later added at higher code-points with "reserved" gaps where the defined seven letters would otherwise appear.

(Complex, Hamiltonian quaternions, Natural, Prime, Quotient (rational), Real and Zahlen, a German word for counting numbers, for anyone wondering.

Quick edit: Zahl is cognate with English "tell" and "tale" which are both related to "tally", believe it or not. "Recounting a tale" didn't used to mean telling(!) a story, but instead literally checking a previous count, and developed the wider sense later.

Also, ℍ not getting "ℚ" because ℚ couldn't have "ℝ" is kind of funny.).

palordrolap,

Prediction: Once everything is an app, there'll be no need for generic encryption and anyone found using it will be labelled a terrorist enabler and locked up.

palordrolap,

Charging the recipient for insufficient postage has always been the policy of the British postal service. These fraudulent stamps have thus been included in with that policy because as far as they're concerned a fraudulent stamp is as good as no stamp at all.

Anything with insufficient postage is held at the sorting office closest to the recipient and a note is posted (ironic, no?) to the recipient telling them to come and pay the postage if they want it.

The reasons they've backed down this time are 1) their newfangled bar code stamps have failed to stop the very forgery they were designed to prevent, and 2) public outcry causing them (the postal service, not the stamps) to reluctantly admit that this whole thing might, maybe, uh, perhaps just a little bit, be their fault.

palordrolap,

Only if they want the letter. If they don't want it, the postal service will gladly destroy it at no charge.

Thus, this isn't necessarily a good way to exact punishment on an unsuspecting recipient. Someone who gets a lot of fan (and hate) mail will gladly forego the small handful that don't have postage.

palordrolap,

That's how it works. If mail isn't paid for it's made unavailable to the recipient.

I don't know how long they hold onto unpaid mail, but I assume they eventually destroy it, or open it, remove anything valuable for auction and get rid of anything else. Maybe if they're lazy, you might get something non-valuable for nothing if you know what landfill their waste goes to, but I expect they'd at least shred it.

Chances are they don't get valuables all that often because if the contents are valuable, someone's probably going to want to pay the price of postage to get it... and whoever sent it probably put the right postage on it in the first place, dodgy stamps notwithstanding, as well as a return address.

And that last part is why the policy is for the charge to go to the recipient. The postal service often has no idea who sent a letter, only where it's going.

palordrolap,

Do you want deforestation because that's how you get deforestation.

palordrolap,

It's all fun and games till your head's in a waffle iron.

palordrolap,

These IBM folks need to have a chat with whatever department recently agreed to open-source MS-DOS 4.00 (IBM had joint control with Microsoft), because they know full-well that third-party copyright-free largely MS-DOS compatible products exist and have existed for quite some time now.

This is the same deal but with their bigger iron.

Now it's true that there were a few DOS clones that somehow fell afoul of copyright that were killed off pretty quick, but the only other way to get DOS-compatibility is by... reverse engineering.

And if they sued about that, they must have lost because alternative DOS clones continue to exist.

The only caveat I can see here is that the successful clones are open-source and free of cost.

If this company are charging anything at all, that could be the angle of attack. It might be the only angle of attack.

But I'm not a lawyer and have probably missed something blindingly obvious. Or devious.

palordrolap,

The downside - and I'm in favour of wikis like Wikipedia - is that any yahoo or otherwise can also put misinformation in there, perhaps even in good faith, and that's in the wiki forever too.

And those who comb through article histories will have to contend with both the truth (we hope, whether we like it or not) as well as the nonsense.

One other difficulty is Internet-based sources disappearing or re-formatting, breaking links from Wikipedia and other places. This is the reader's reminder to donate to the Internet Archive if not Wikipedia itself, providing you can spare a little money to throw their way.

Speaking of the archive: Anyone know whether Russia blocks the archive or maintains their own equivalent?

palordrolap,

Poe's Law in action.

palordrolap,

Only four of them?

palordrolap,

Panic attacks suck. Rationality goes out of the window. "This is it. I'm going to die."

For me, stress plus a sudden-onset painful physical trigger usually brings them on. The painful trigger can be anything from a muscle sprain to a really bad stomach ache (we're talking "I now think I might have some idea what period cramps are like and I don't have a womb" kind of pain levels here.)

Even knowing about previous experiences doesn't always help. That nagging thought that you're going to die while feeling terrible in a stressful situation.

Ironically, I've wished I was dead many times, but during a panic attack, suddenly survival instinct is the one ringing the alarm bells. WTF brain.

Passed out in a hospital during one of them. Pectoral pain + Stressful day at work = Must be having a heart attack and going to die. Nope. Just a sprained pec and a panic attack.

palordrolap,

In some interpretations of "bug-driven" programming, no file, or perhaps an empty file, is an instance of the zeroth-bug: The project does not exist.

One could argue that this bug zero is the true ancestor of all other bugs. There's something satisfyingly set-theoretic about it.

palordrolap,

An older person I talk with (older than Boomer generation if you can believe that) keeps trying to moot that it's an "invasion" and then goes on about how these invaders have paid thousands to some people trafficker to be able to get over here.

I point out that invaders generally don't pay more than their life savings to invade, they get paid to do so. And they usually turn up with weapons.

Bless 'em, I keep having to reset their compassion because the newspapers must be what's putting these "invasion" ideas in their head.

There's a vague chance they might not vote blue in the upcoming elections.

In other news, and riffing on the "skulls" comment elsewhere, I'd quite like for someone to stand up in the Commons and ask what the government's jackboot budget is these days, and whether teaching armed troops to goose-step is coming back into fashion.

palordrolap,

There are already stories about companies being sued because their AI gave advice that caused the customer to act in a manner detrimental to themselves. (Something about 'plane flight refunds being available if I remember correctly).

Then when they contacted the company to complain (perhaps get the promised refund), they were told that there was no such policy at their company. The customer had screenshots. The AI had wholesale hallucinated a policy.

We all know how this is going to go. AI left, right and centre until it costs companies more in AI hallucination lawsuits than it does to employ people to do it.

And all the while they'll be bribing lobbying government representatives to make AI hallucination lawsuits not a thing. Or less of a thing.

palordrolap,

"New bacteria/plant cell symbiosis discovered"

And if "symbiosis" is too much, "combination". I also like "meld(ing)", but that might be somewhere in the middle.

I wouldn't use "hybrid" because that word has definitely made it into common vernacular and implies they've bred which isn't strictly accurate, and "chimera", while more accurate, is probably the more terrifying-sounding, if not still technical alternative.

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