palordrolap

The Grinch is green. Trump’s the Orinch.

The real question might be whether the compiler was smart enough to change var++ and var-- into ++var and --var when the initial values aren’t needed.

As compiler optimisations go, it’s a fairly obvious one, but it was 1974 and putting checks like that in the compiler would increase its size and slow it down when both space and time were at a premium.

Sometimes a person’s brain is only capable of operating in a conversation mode. Full, natural language sentences. Or sentence fragments (like these), I guess.

Then there’s the fact that some people can’t discern the line between the artificial and the real, or else are able to ignore it where they can see it because the LLM makes that easy.

I occasionally bounce ideas off free LLMs and I’ve been mostly conversational when I’ve done so, but I’m aware of things like 1) it’s a crutch 2) they’re mostly wrong about a lot of things and 3) any praise they give is invalid, so I’m not yet into the trap of thinking they’re people.

… but I still feel kind of bad if I drop a conversation when I’m done with it without saying goodbye.

For me it’s not about trusting the hotpatching; I know it can work. What I don’t trust is my own ability to not only do it properly but also to do it in less time than it takes to carefully close all my programs, reboot and then get them all started again. And so, reboot.

And to save making another comment elsewhere: About a week. It would have been longer, but I was having a configuration issue and a reboot seemed like a good idea at the time.

“Sugar free” on things that are mostly sugar because the serving size given isn’t great enough to overcome a rounding down to zero.

This is pretty smart for the left guy. He’s usually down at the level of “HTML is a programming language” or “What’s a programming language?”.

That said, the first one of those isn’t mutually exclusive with what he says in the meme.

Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgqEIp2YmtE

VLC.

But then I’m one of those strange people who doesn’t listen to music much, so maybe I’m missing a trick.

Pros: Little screens on every key!

Cons: Looks awful and costs a fortune!

Get one today!

Let me save you a few characters: %Y-%m-%d can be shortened to %F

For visualisation’s sake I also like to put a space before the %F so that the year and the file size are separated a little more, but that’s more of a taste thing than anything else.

(Caveat: %F’s year is explicitly four digits in some libraries, whereas %Y is always the full year. If you’re planning for your code to last 8000 years you might want to consider that.)

Yeah. Right Control should be where Fn is for sure.

And as an ISO keyboard user, I need my right Shift key, so that Control has to be a Shift instead. On ISO, left Shift is small and right is large. For that and other reasons I use the right one way more than the left. And if that’s not possible for deep technical reasons, hard-wire it to the left one bypassing all of the trouble. It wouldn’t be the first time a keyboard did something like that.

… and what do you know, there’s a even little space there with no key where they could put the Fn key omitted by those changes.

Everything else I could deal with. Even the otherwise US layout. It’s been a while since I used one, but occasionally there’s a hiccup and I’ll reach for double quote or at-sign in the opposite places, so that muscle memory is still there, maybe waiting for mangling into typing on something like this.

I haven’t used Windows in earnest since Win 7. No wonder they want to force people to upgrade to new hardware.

Oof. That must be a single core laptop from 2010 or something, which if true, that sucks.

I have a 13 year old computer around here that had no problems with LMDE6 when last I fired it up. It was relatively high spec when new which takes some of the edge off, but I never had an input lag problem anywhere except maybe badly-written websites.

Just how limited is your computer?

As it stands, it doesn’t look like there is one. It appears to be a recreational mathematical toy for the creator to learn things more than it is for others to play with. It’s kind of neat nonetheless.

I think I might have made different choices for the reversal calculations, but I haven’t really thought about how I’d implement those choices, nor about nigh-insurmountable edge cases, and I’m only vaguely thinking about the “c = a OP b” case, not anything more extreme. The creator may have wanted to make the same choices but found themselves forced down a different path.

Verbatim from the creator: “it is imperfect”.

I seem to remember a story about how something - a neural net, or an early reinforced learning experiment - ended up accidentally exploiting a physics bug in a chip to achieve a result that should have gone through the chip’s expected circuitry instead.

It was specific to that one particular chip, and swapping it out for another supposedly identical chip caused the calculation, or simulation, or whatever that was running on the larger system, to fail.

That is, it wasn’t supposed to be exploiting physics glitches but that’s what happened.

… I think I found it. It happened all the way back in the 1990s if this story is to be believed: https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/

alias name-here yields the line alias name-here='contents-of-alias-here' as output, and if you want just the part between the single quotes from that, sed, cut or, come to think of it, related shell tricks that do the same thing, would be needed to capture and convert it.

${BASH_ALIASES["name-here"]} is a name for what’s only between those single quotes.

For example, I have a lot of preferences built into my alias for ‘ls’. Occasionally I want to run watch ls -l somefilespec to watch a directory listing for changes to a file. But commands fed to watch don’t go through the alias mechanism, leaving the output somewhat different to my preferences.

It’s wordy, but watch ${BASH_ALIASES["ls"]} -l somefilespec mostly* achieves what I want.

* Unfortunately, watch also causes the stripping of colour codes and I have --color=auto, not --color=force in my ls alias, so it’s by no means perfect - I have add the latter if I want colour - but I don’t have to type the rest of the preferences I have in there.

FWIW, my ls alias is currently:

alias ls='LC_ALL=C ls --color=auto --group-directories-first --time-style="+ %F %T"'

I have an alias called save_aliases that does alias > ~/.bash_aliases. alias on its own just dumps all the existing aliases to the terminal in a format that can be parsed by Bash.

I felt especially clever when I came up with that and used it to save itself.

Bonus fact: ${BASH_ALIASES["name-here"]} is a way to get at the contents of an alias without resorting sed or cut shenanigans on the output of the alias command.

I’m a hoarder who refuses to buy more stuff because I can’t bear to part with the stuff I’ve got. So all of it, I guess?*

But if you want a simpler answer, there are a couple of old stuffed animals that I’d mourn as much as I would a living pet, so probably those. They’re a lot lower maintenance than an actual pet though, which is a big plus.

* Actually I can think of a few things that I don’t want, but they need to be disposed of properly (broken electrical; dead batteries) and I don’t really have the means to do that.

Add more colours a button that turns it into a slot machine. Three sevens and you win a prize.

(a redirect to a picture of a duck)