palordrolap

… so you don’t think Mastodon is a worthy competitor?

How about Bluesky?

Out of left field, and something I’ve posted online before: Arthur Tudor

Arthur was the older brother of the man who became Henry VIII. Like the curious echo in modern times, red-haired Harry was the spare.

Arthur’s death, therefore, is the historical pivot that turns Britain Protestant, cutting ties with Rome, dissolving alliances with Europe and sending us off into doing everything in the way we did it, for better or worse, since Tudor times

Shakespeare? Might never have happened. Spanish armada? What armada? We might well have remained friends and there’d be no need for angry Spaniards in ships. Arthur was married to Catherine of Aragon. We might have been part of any armada.

Mary I was Henry and Catherine’s child. With Arthur still alive, there’s no Mary I.

In the timeline where Arthur lives, Henry’s trajectory is completely different. Does he still marry Anne Boleyn and beget Elizabeth? Even if they do, she’s very unlikely to become queen.

All of modern history, especially that of the USA, would be completely different were it not for that one unidentified and lethal malady.

Nah. That change began when the towers fell, so we should probably point to the deaths of the 3000 as being the turning point.

Age is relative. Age is a state of mind. Both of these statements are true to some extent at any given time. Both are informed by age-related factors within and without what- or whoever is being assessed as being old.

That is, if I were a 36-year-old with a chronic pain condition, I’d feel a lot older than an otherwise healthy 36-year-old, and that doesn’t even touch on mental health and general disposition.

And either way, if I were a 72-year-old - because why not, let’s double it again - both of those hypothetical people would be youngsters, and an 18-year-old would be practically a baby.

It’s impossible to be sure. There are usually some red flags when mods end up out of touch or alignment with a community, but a sufficiently crafty mod team have the power to hide many of their transgressions where regular posters don’t. Quick edit: In the Fediverse, this is slightly harder to hide because the mod logs are public. But someone would still have to comb through them.

Whether the problem ultimately turns out to be the mod or the community (or a subset thereof) is a difficult question.

Sometimes it’s clearly one or the other. Sometimes it’s possible for both mod team and community to be out of order in completely different ways, and there are no winners in the court of morality. But the mods will win through sheer power.

Ever watched shows about nightmare landlords and nightmare tenants? Same kind of deal.

As with anything, contemptible people eventually get themselves into positions of power, and once they’re there, it’s nigh impossible to get rid of them without starting over completely.

Innie, Spinny, Sh-thole, Bob; Spotty, Hula, Turquoise, Outie. (Phteven)

Bonus bonus: Cark. Ceres gets to keep its initial like Pluto.

Spinny is ironic.

If you want serious… uh, well you could attempt to apply exoplanet order-of-discovery and label things Sol x where x is the order letter, but I think that gives (Sol) c, d, a, e, f, g, h, i. “b” would be the Moon, stricken from the list, or renamed to a-something once it was identified as a non-planet.

Good grief. I was six months into a new job that would peak in greatness about six months later before the stress really started to pile on, so I was riding high. QoL has been mostly downhill, sometimes rapidly, since then.

I made sl on my computer a bit more literal. It takes the output of ls -l and reverses every line, including any wrapping within the column width, and pads it to the right of the terminal. One day I might get around to fixing it so that it forces, parses and correctly reverses the ANSI colour codes too.

In /usr/bin, I get lots of lines that “start” with spaces and “end” with things like toor toor 1 x-rx-rxwr-

I can think of at least one Commodore 64 game from back in the day that was hard to play, but I only remember the name of one of them: Quake Minus One. It was not a prequel to the 3D shooter Quake.

US English dialects mainly, though there may be pockets in other Anglophone places.

Long was it known fact: Windows versions and OG Star Trek films. Every other one was terrible.

… but I note there are a few important releases missing there. 3.0, Win2K and 8.1 especially, and we might argue for 3.1 and 98SE and maybe even the unreleased Longhorn too.

Fully aware that I may end up eating my words here, what’s your Chess ELO and your Go rank?

According to Wiktionary, Russian uses different words (as do a lot of languages for that matter) for the two concepts, so it’s hard to imagine how this could have happened.

Yes, I know it’s a joke. I think it would have been a cleverer joke if Russian was a language that used the same word for both, like English.

But then, if you do find a language that does this, the word order is generally different, and the word is generally conjugated into an adjective so it still can’t be mistaken for a noun. (This is based on what happens with “European Space Agency” which would otherwise be a better candidate for the joke.)

Using AI to find errors that can then be independently verified sounds reasonable.

The danger would be in assuming that it will find all errors, or that an AI once-over would be “good enough”. This is what most rich AI proponents are most interested in, after all; a full AI process with as few costly humans as possible.

The lesser dangers would be 1) the potential for the human using the tool to lose or weaken their own ability to find bugs without external help and 2) the AI finding something that isn’t a bug, and the human “fixing” it without a full understanding that it wasn’t wrong in the first place.

The basic functionality of sponge can be emulated with an AWK or Perl script, so most people who needed it in the past almost certainly rolled their own.

I get what they’re going for with the arrow coming from the process to STDIN, but I still feel like it should point the other way.

And shout-out to the sponge and tee command-line tools for those situations where the memory buffer won’t cut it.

You can also try signalling the parent with a SIGCHLD. Most of the time it does nothing, and hey, you’d be using a stronger version of the kill command anyway if it doesn’t work.

Do things other than these images you’re downloading also look any different? Text on websites sharper or more blurry?

Do old downloads still look the same to you, or have these somehow degraded in quality when you weren’t looking? Look closely.

Thus the lateral thinking answer: Check your screens and your eyesight. One or more of these may have a defect. Or an improvement for that matter. New glasses?

The guy who played Chakotay (Robert Beltran) literally did not want to be there. He kept asking to quit and they kept giving him more money to stay.

Whether the living wooden totem was a result of the character or the actor, or a little bit of both is kind of hard to say. But you’ll notice he stops doing all the “isn’t it cool he’s a Native American” business fairly early in the run, so someone clearly got bored with it all, writers or actor.