palordrolap

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.

Is this the first human trial, or just the first officially sanctioned one?

IIRC there was that one guy who experimented on himself and cured his lactose intolerance.

… found it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3FcbFqSoQY

Nearly 8 years ago.

My unending soul-sucking void is also named Bort.

A weird and distressing noise woke me this morning. Pretty sure it was a fox. It’s not even near the woods here, but I’ve seen urban ones around if I’ve looked out early in the morning.

The alternative is that it was a dog being suddenly and unexpectedly hurt, and I’d prefer to think it wasn’t that.

“I like to rebuild my kit sports car every time I want to take it out for a drive. Anyone who does otherwise is a pleb.”

They weren’t thinking big enough. They’ve only doubled the address space. I say this at least half seriously, well aware that mine is far more ridiculous the other way.

… but I probably should have tried searching for “IPv4+” before using it as a generic term. At least one other proposal shows up when I search for that, and one of them is a proposal that adds a couple more octets.

Uh. You should keep your hands to yourself - regardless of intent - unless the job explicitly requires it or there’s some kind of danger to life or limb.

Someone that “needs cheering up” does not qualify.

If you think there needs to be an exception, ask for consent. “But then it wouldn’t be a pleasant surprise!” Wrong. You have no idea how the person will react, and they might even pretend to like it for the sake of decorum. Just don’t.

And remember, even if you do get consent one time, it does not imply consent going forward.

That first tale is clearly a case of when tech aura goes bad.

I mean, we like to let the non-techs believe that our mere presence can cause technology to behave, and we might even like to believe that ourselves, but that comes back to bite us if the hardware breaks instead.

… I’m not saying the tech should have grabbed something heavy and made a show of threatening the device, but I don’t think it would have hurt!

There’s a hybrid BBC / Commodore 8-bit computer I’d like to have seen, for sure.