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,

This feels like satire on the job market.

palordrolap,

Whenever this comes up I think of that one guy who was told to lose more weight in order to qualify for the operation to have the excess skin removed. Except he had already reached the ideal weight underneath all of that excess.

Unfortunately, he could not make the hospital understand that if he lost that amount of extra weight, he would actually be severely underweight to the point of being in danger of his life.

Something they would apparently only be able to comprehend once he'd lost the dangerous amount of weight and had the surgery.

He couldn't even sue for malpractice because they hadn't actually done anything.

Caveat: This was in the UK, and he wanted the operation on the NHS which would have been cost free. It's possible the hospital were being incompetent on purpose because they didn't want to do the operation and were hoping he'd go private - read "give money" - either there or elsewhere.

But it's more likely that the incompetence stemmed from inflexible (mis)application of guidelines about patients' weight before operations.

palordrolap,

Unfortunately I don't remember his name. And looking into it again, it seems like the NHS have decided that they don't want to do those operations at all now, so maybe I was right the first time. That is, the deliberate inflexibility was a stall until they could make "No" an official policy.

Seems like every person in this situation - and there's a decent number of them - loses all the weight under medical advice but the NHS won't go that extra step at the end, making the patients wonder if the whole thing was worth it.

Most of those that make it to the press are crowdfunding and/or end up going abroad where the price of the operation is cheaper.

Can't really blame the NHS either. They're chronically underfunded and there's an obligation not to show it.

palordrolap,

Any self-respecting malware writer will download and decompile the Powertools to find out what API calls are being used. Especially if they're calls to an undocumented API.

Having Powertools on your computer is thus not the security hole it might appear to be.

The fact they exist at all - well that's not really a security hole either. Their existence just more quickly dissolves any security-by-obscurity that might have existed. Someone would have found those calls another way.

One might suppose that they contain something special that's not in the stock OS, but then we're back to the malware writer's reverse engineering which would lead them to learn and implement their own versions of whatever it is that Powertools does.

palordrolap,

"Sir why did you drop trou-" "Oh no. Oh God no."

palordrolap,

The Z80 was a secondary processor in the C128. The main processor was the rival MOS8502, a descendent of the Z80's main rival, the MOS6502.

The Z80 was included so that the C128 would be able to run CP/M software which was considered to be an important inclusion at the time.

CP/M was supplanted by the ubiquity of IBM-compatible PCs and MS-DOS, which is a shame considering that MS-DOS started life as something deliberately quick and dirty based heavily on the syntax of CP/M. The dir command? That's from CP/M. The peculiar *.* wildcard syntax? Also from CP/M.

Now, it's true that CP/M took a lot of inspiration from Unix and similar, but it wasn't trying to replace Unix. MS-DOS though? Arguably, it came to fill the same niche that CP/M already occupied. Except everyone was then on x86, not Z80.

palordrolap,

No numbers in the article, so I'm going to assume that a modern smartphone would chew through several hundred of these per day and an EV would need a battery the size of a house.

Reddit Is Taking Over Google (tech.slashdot.org)

Reddit, Quora, and other internet forums that have climbed up through the traditional set of Google links. Data analysis from Semrush, which predicts traffic based on search ranking, shows that traffic to Reddit has climbed at an impressive clip since August 2023. Semrush estimated that Reddit had over 132 million visitors in...

palordrolap,

Quora was supposed to be the high-brow answer to Yahoo Answers, but then Yahoo Answers was killed off.

Eventually the muppets found their way to Quora. Probably by accident at first, but the Quora moderation didn't stop enough of the muppetry and now it's just Yahoo Answers pretending not to be.

palordrolap,

Meat and crumpet? Haven't we learned not to use these terms for each other? "Desirable partners" is the preferred termino...

whisper whisper whisper

I am told that I have misunderstood the headline. Please carry on about your business.

palordrolap,

Self-promotion like this is generally frowned on in most forums. The fact you haven't used sock puppets to do it is somewhat endearing, but it's still not the best look.

palordrolap,

English is an open-source project with no overarching plan and several major variants that has had literally millions of contributors over thousands of release cycles per branch. There's bound to be some cruft in the code.

Anyone who suggests reform is enacting that one xkcd about standards. And no-one will use their variant except for a few enthusiasts who think it's the best thing since sliced silicon.

palordrolap,

Statistics. It's a menu option.

If you look, be thankful it only shows per-world information. And there's no count of server time once you lose access to a server's world.

No-one can know.

palordrolap,

at least rehost on imgur or something. grumble grumble

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,

Someone in the article's own comments section makes the same assertion as me, so my guess is that they've corrected the image on the article and the Fediverse's various caches still have the original.

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,

Maybe I want to say it without saying it. There's no rule against doing that, but people somehow think there is - or that there ought to be.

Most of the time I don't swear, so it makes me uncomfortable to use the word. There have been and undoubtedly will be exceptions. When the mood takes me. When the word, unfettered, feels right. Today was not that day.

Funny how the partial omission offends some people more than the original word does. Adapt your parsers.

palordrolap,

It's not about whether other people are willing to accept it. It's about whether I'm willing to generate it. This is the other half of the principle.

palordrolap,

I turned the volume down to a more comfortable level.

palordrolap,

I have worked for companies that dealt with content filters. This was in the UK where a number of counties in the south of England have "sex" as the last three letters. The problem is non-trivial.

And if you think it is, my second sentence here contains 'have "sex"' in a context that is very hard to distinguish from a context a school might not want their students investigating. If you are reading this through your school's blocker... well you might not be. It might have been blocked already.

palordrolap,

Oh. That sounds like fun. Going round collapsing all the unoccupied chairs, that is.

palordrolap,

Prediction: Royal Mint will cease to exist within the decade. King William coinage will be minted in the European Union.

palordrolap,

LMDE should probably just be "Mint". "Linux Mint" for verbosity. Both flavours use .deb packages, and as /u/Ooops points out, all of the GUI package managers are basically pretty ways to run the apt* and dpkg* CLI commands.

Do I run those commands? Mostly no. I can sit on the floor, but I prefer my chair, if you catch my drift.

That said, I do like to use apt to find out which package contains processes I see in top/System Monitor that don't seem to have a man page. "Who are you and what are you doing on my machine?" "Oh. OK."

The last time I used a dpkg command directly though... uh... probably a couple of years ago when I recompiled a .deb with different install directories to see if I could. Most people aren't going to do that.

palordrolap,

Those ads have to come from somewhere, so a pi-hole ought to take care of them.

Actually, does Windows still have a functional /etc/hosts somewhere in its filesystem? If the ads are pulled from a small number of hostnames, entries in the hosts file routing them to 127.0.0.1 might be enough.

...and it's just technical enough that Microsoft probably wouldn't put effort into to circumventing it for the handful of users who did that.

palordrolap,

I registered the next-in-sequence for one of them. Haven't seen that username since. I like to think I broke a script somewhere, but it could just as easily have broken a spammer's tiny little brain. The disappointing but more likely explanation is that they shrugged and moved on to a different set of usernames.

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