palordrolap

Common misquote. The original is closer to “What is the answer to the ultimate question of Life, the Universe and Everything?”

That italic bit is a very important plot point.

Some people genuinely do not understand the concept of GUI windows and how they work. They do not generate a full mental model of the desktop and the windows on it and only see the whole screen as one bewildering interface. They focus on what they do know in order to get by.

This may be especially true of people who learned their IT with small screens or low resolutions where running an application full screen (or as the only active application!) is required to get anything done.

Your colleague saw you click on part of the interface they were ignoring because they didn’t understand it and magic happened.

Newton himself might disagree, given that he said that he was only able to produce his work because he was “[stood] on the shoulders of giants”.

That could put Euclid’s Elements above Pricipia Mathematica.

While unlikely to be #1, I bet there’s at least one computer programming book in the top 100.

I reckon there’s a few of us about on here.

This. Winnie the Pooh is canonically a teddy bear, presumably only alive by some sort of magic. Likewise, Kanga, Roo, Eeyore, Tigger and Piglet.

Rabbit and Owl, however, were real, living creatures - the true inhabitants of the wood - with related magic allowing them to interact.

So basically, yes, Pooh isn’t edible.

Around £100.

The small print: That includes delivery charges and all other household and hygiene supplies that can be bought at a UK supermarket.

How do you spell “Blind Pig”?

B-L-N-D P-G. Because if it had two eyes it could see.

Yes. The institution in question is human society. We generally grant the permission to make rational decisions over our lives to other humans who know better that we do or are more skilled than we are.

Sometimes, yes, those humans turn out to have been deceitful or dishonest, but there are mechanisms in place for when that happens.

And yes, sometimes those mechanisms are wilfully avoided by the deceitful. Politicians and rich people are especially good at this.

Guess who’s pushing “AI”? The thing that has no contract with human society and cannot be held accountable. And neither will the people pushing it.

This is why we should have as little to do with it - at least as it is in its current form - as possible.

This is true. But then I’m not using the latest version while I still have an active session, and that can lead to weird behaviour or errors after the fact.

Case in point, I once received an Xorg update that I allowed to install, but didn’t restart the computer properly until much, much later.

By then I’d forgotten about the update, so when I restarted and started having graphics problems, I was mystified.

I’ve also forgotten how that all panned out, but in the same situation I’d roll back to a previous Timeshift snapshot and work the system forward again until I find the culprit or things are stable, so I assume that’s what I did back then.

Tangential advice: Many people use YouTube (and formerly Twitch until they nixed it) as a place to store videos. As in the only copy of a video is hosted there.

If your videos are precious to you (or you think they’re going to be), make arrangements for them to be at least stored elsewhere, if not hosted. That’s not going to be cheap what with hardware prices going through the roof, personally or third-party, but it is necessary because no host is both trustworthy and permanent.

Actually not even self-storage is as trustworthy and permanent as we’d like, but it’s still better than any alternative for data retention.

Also, donate to your chosen Fediverse host(s) if you can.

In such places, beware of the person returning their own trolley / cart and offering to take your coin in return for theirs. Because eventually you’ll get one who has used a coin-sized token and they’ve just conned you out of actual money.

But even so, were it not the case there was some kind of coin / token deposit system, would you return your cart? I know I would.

For me, it’s about reducing the amount of time the “update available” icon shows up in the system tray, because its very presence bothers me. Maybe there’s something cool and new. Maybe it fixes a severe security problem. If it’s for programs I’m not using right now, then the update can be applied right now. Otherwise it’s going to have to wait until I’m done. And bother me.

Yes, I could turn updates off and never see it, but that seems like a bad plan in the long run.

Fake AGI is like fake banknotes. Some of them are really good approximations. Nigh indistinguishable. A lot of people will be fooled by it but eventually it will be discovered to be a fake and people will get hurt in some way or another.

And it won’t be the people who are pushing for “AGI”.

The people who are seeking AGI will be happy when an LLM appears clever enough to fool them, not anyone else.

They may even realise this, because they think everyone else is less clever than they are.

This is why the whole thing has been called AI in the first place.

It’s not necessarily about “the government”, well it is, because governments often contain, or may come to contain, bad people, but they shouldn’t be the only concern.

It’s about not making it easy for bad people to interfere in your business, even if what you’re doing is all legitimate and above board; and not making it easy for bad people to harm you or those close to you either.

Mobile telephone numbers aren’t strictly a secret, especially those on monthly contracts. Names and numbers are linked in a provider’s database somewhere. But for an untrusted third party to know that information? It’s bad enough when someone who needs to know it sells it on to a telemarketing database. Imagine what would happen if any old crank got a hold of that.

Likewise we all have real names, home addresses (for the lucky majority anyway), etc. There are people who know these things. Perhaps even people we’d rather didn’t, but it would be incredibly stupid to leave that information in plaintext for anyone else to find, especially if it can be linked to our online activity.

You might be the most fair and balanced Internet user in the world, but if your name and address is public, any crank who takes exception to you anyway will be at your door shouting and raving before you know it.

If we have to give it over, presumably to a trusted individual or organisation, we need a method where it can’t be intercepted. So it’s either a slip of paper at a clandestine meeting place or you need encryption to send it over the Internet.

There’s plenty of other personal information that I haven’t mentioned here where similar rules will apply.

That blank box is a proof if and only if it is a proof. That makes it a self-reference and has no truth value.

Is it any more maintainable with four levels of abstraction?

As I’ve said before, once Linus is gone, we might well end up with splits at the kernel level rather than at the distro level. And we would be wise to avoid any one organisation’s stock kernel, even if there are some very large organisations providing a lot of code for the kernel at present.

I can see a future where, say, GNOME, start producing their own kernels to support their vision of the Linux desktop from the ground up.

And it’s all but certain that Canonical and Red Hat would be very interested in things going their (respective) way(s) when the time comes.

An old computer trick / prank / “fun” thing to do was piping random things to /dev/audio, or finding whatever program was available that could take any old file and not complain while translating it to audio by some means or another.

On my distro there are at least three of these programs installed by default: aplay, paplay and pw-play.

Some or all of these will complain if the file or stream they’re given isn’t a recognisable audio file, in which case, there’s a --raw or similar flag where it’ll just shrug and blast whatever through the sound system. If you’re creative, you can set different sample rates and hear it at different speeds.

VLC is just a really fancy way of doing the same thing.

For even more “fun”, try opening a file in Audacity / Tenacity, which will default to raw mode if it can’t tell what a file is, and you get to see the waveform and so on. Just take care not to modify and save over an important file with that.