palordrolap

Pretty sure my own education had a Tanenbaum book in amongst it, from which I learned a number of things. In another world, one where my brain isn’t its own worst enemy, I could well be one of those IT managers. There the FUD would have been the main factor in my decision. Probably. Because I’m not sure I’d be completely happy if it was a Linux buried in the chipset either. Especially one largely outside my control.

m’user

Lemmy and the Fediverse as a whole is a microcosm that doesn’t make much of a difference one way or the other. We can stab at the tankies all we like, but it wasn’t their influence in the Fediverse that caused the result, even if they did manage to hoodwink a few into voting for fake tan man.

The whole ring -3 / MINIX business a while back put a serious amount of FUD into the market and Intel has been on the wane ever since.

This is not necessarily unfounded FUD either. MINIX is literally there, lurking inside all modern Intel processors, waiting to be hacked by the enterprising ne’er-do-well. (NB: This is not to say that there aren’t ways to do similar things to AMD chips, only that MINIX is not present in them, and it’s theoretically a lot more difficult.)

Then bear in mind that MINIX was invented by Andrew Tanenbaum, someone Linus Torvalds has had disagreements with in the past (heck, Linux might not exist if not for MINIX and Linus’ dislike of the way Tanenbaum went about it), and so there’s an implicit bias against MINIX in the data-centre world, where Linux is far more present than it is on the desktop.

Thus, if you’re a hypothetical IT manager and you’re going to buy a processor for your data-centre server, you’re ever so slightly more likely to go for AMD.

Clee-ent? Unsure if AI, a non-native English speaker leaking their native pronunciation, or, as allegedly happens later, someone having a minor mental malfunction.

I’ve been around just long enough to suspect that this will be part of a cycle going back and forth between tactile controls and touchscreens.

That is, give it a decade and touchscreens will be the in-thing again. And another decade and someone will have the “fantastic new idea” of bringing tactile controls back.

And there’ll be a combo breaker of some sort where a new technology comes along (probably no screens, or controls, only voice control) which a small few will absolutely love - due to sunk cost fallacy mostly - and no-one else will buy (compare: 3D TVs), and the cycle will begin again.

Bonus points for: 1) Manufacturers managing to have cycles out of step with others because the market forces aren’t quite enough (people not having the money to buy new cars) to bring them all into line. 2) External factors like, say, the world ending, breaking the cycle.

Christianity of all denominations is losing followers at a church-worrying rate. Yes, you’ll always get those who are zealous or make it part of their identity and will never quit, and of course, the quiet - if you’ll pardon the pun - masses who are ever faithful, but the churches don’t fill up quite how they used to.

By getting the kids hooked on an ideology through a relatable, maybe even exciting, child-like character, they’re hoping to (eventually) get people back into churches and get business booming again.

Fears grow? Really? That’s what it’s been about for decades at this point.

William would become king, but then things get weird. I strongly suspect there’d be a rushed act of parliament on behalf of the dead Charles, to whom the parliament was loyal, in order to - ahem - reign in this inexplicably power-mad William and perhaps even try to seek to apply some kind of punishment.

I could see a cross-party vote to not recognise William as king because of the grievous act and instead choose to recognise the next in line who was not in favour of that grievous act. This might mean that parliament chooses to recognise George as king and seek to appoint a regent in his stead until he was of age, for example.

Whatever was to happen I don’t think there’d be a civil war over it, but there’d probably be a referendum on becoming a republic fairly soon afterwards so the whole thing could be sidestepped.

If it turned out William wasn’t acting alone then I still think there’d be an investigation as to who was in favour and maybe expunge William’s line from succession altogether… but then I don’t think the powers that be would want Harry as king either. Or Andrew.

Edward would be unwilling, but I think he’d make a good, if quiet, king.

Anne would be f**king hilarious.

But all of this is moot. The chance of Wills becoming a homicidal maniac is about as likely as his gran coming back from the grave and doing the job herself.

Is it just me or is this response the wrong response? I would have expected:

not everyone speaks bri’ish english

(that missing “r” in “ameican” inspires the use of the “improper” option here). It’s American English that uses “tire”, after all, and the rest of the Anglosphere that has “tyre”.

Find yourself a language that allows negative indices to count back from the end of an array.

In those languages, index 0 is usually the first element, but if you’re particularly perverse and negate your indexing, you can start at 1, or rather -1, at the other end and work backwards.

0-indexing originally comes from needing to add to the array’s base memory address to locate elements. If you have an array at memory address 1234, you might expect to find the first element at that address, which would be 1234+0, and the next at 1234+1, etc.

1-indexing started as either a deliberate abstraction from that idea, and/or else there’s something else stored at 1234 that the array data type needs and the real elements start at 1234+1.

All that said, there’s at least one language that insists the indices of an array be of a subtype of some Integer type that must have a limited range. Then you can start and end wherever you like, and the whole 1 vs 0 business is meaningless (except to whoever writes the compilers for that language anyway).

Retired racing driver Damon Hill approves this post.

I have just watched the Legal Eagle video about the various law-related things that happened around the 2020 election.

It served as a reminder that the plan had apparently been to claim to have won before all the votes were counted - something about doing so in the interim between two sets of votes being counted (I want to say mail-in versus in-person, but I might have misunderstood) and then act as if Trump had actually won at that point, thus giving legitimacy to any later cry of foul that was almost sure to be needed.

Which is precisely what Trump did.

… my point being that it would be foolish to assume it wasn’t in the play book for this time around as well.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/elon-musk-transgender-daughter-vivian-wilson-interview-rcna163665

This might not be to anyone’s satisfaction though because it suggests he doesn’t refer to Vivian at all, considering her “dead”, not actually deadnaming her, per se.

Among other problems, this fails to account for non-typing activities performed by the monkey, such as damaging the typewriter or attacking the researcher.

285 years increases to a few thousand if you alarmingly frequently have to clean the contents of a monkey’s colon out of a typewriter.

And at some point you’d want to further “refine” your selection process by “repairing” the typewriter to have fewer keys and/or causing the typewriter to jam after the required key press. Monkeys like to press the same key over and over again. Good luck getting them to stop once they’ve pressed a key once.

TL;DR monkeys are chaos, and this will not be easy.

They’re doubling it every week, so a googol is only ~4 years off.

Who knows what data type they’re using. Based on the values given, it’s already getting close to 128 bits, and most languages don’t have a data type that large in their standards.

I figure it will be more like “Vasily! Print another page of zeros!”

In before you’re going to need a telemetry spoofer in order not to attract attention. On the other hand, it takes an extraordinary amount of government paranoia before they start going after random citizens.

North Korea did this already. I expect that Russia’s effort will be as good if not better. Bonus comedy points if they use NK’s effort as a starting point.

But I wouldn’t try to use it if my Internet location was outside Russia. Or maybe even if it wasn’t.

Also: something something falling out something something Windows.

One possibility is that you have a fairly common username part and a similarly common domain like, say, gmail.

There’s nothing stopping a spammer from taking existing addresses and word lists, then taking them apart and putting them together in different ways to make up completely new addresses to send spam to. It doesn’t matter if 99% of the addresses they make up don’t exist because they’re only interested in the 1% of the 1% of successes who will fall for their scam. They don’t even get the rejections because the From address is usually bogus too.

e.g. I bet whoever owns john dot smith at gmail gets a huge amount of spam whether he’s in any databases or not.