palordrolap

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.

Any C-levels, current or former, who were in charge during the unethical behaviour should be made to pay this. Either they knew or they should have known. Seize their assets, take them back to basic income and lifestyle and only then take the remainder of the fine from the company.

Yeah, I know this is a pipe dream. These people have their arms lodged so deep in politicians it makes their mouths flap, so it’ll never happen, but it would stop this sort of behaviour right quick.

-1 would be antihydrogen. Blackholium is whatever number is large enough to cause gravitational collapse, so probably one or two more than the largest neutron star.

There are exotic atoms in that chemical formula that aren’t in the periodic table. Not even if you count the equivalent table of potential antimatter atoms.

Muonium is sure to exist in non-zero quantities at any one time, for example.

Be aware that a lot of distros will be switching from X11 to Wayland at some point in the not-too-distant future and these ancient tools will not work there.

People have tried to write equivalents (ydotool is one I’m aware of), but Wayland has intentionally been written to make doing such things difficult, for “security” reasons.

I will be grumpy until I can make my scripts work again, but that’s for future me to deal with.

They allow the user to script changes to, and pull information from, windows in the window manager. Like read, if not also set, a window’s title, change a window’s dimensions, move it around, send it to a different desktop, send keypresses, bring a window to the foreground, etc. etc.

Basically, anything the user can do with the mouse, keyboard or window manager via the GUI, and a little more besides, can be automated.

The two commands work slightly differently to each other and one can often do something the other can’t.

As an example, I have a script that resizes the active window to a 4:3 ratio at full vertical height on my 16:9 monitor. I’ve then bound that script to a keypress in the window manager. It’s a lot like having something halfway between window mode and maximised mode.

Couldn’t I do that with the mouse? Sure. But with the script I don’t have to gauge by eye and spend multiple mouse clicks and movements trying to get it just right.

Yeah, my university had those, but they also had an interface to it accessible from the more modern systems.

I also did a work experience placement with a company that had amber-screen terminals when I was still at school (and the year still started with a 1), so I’m no spring chicken either. They were very early in the process of supplanting them with PCs, which is not something they explicitly told me, but looking back, the evidence was all there.

The “fun” part with those specific terminals was that the admin password for the terminal hardware itself - because they had a rudimentary sort of BIOS on them - was a “fail at the first wrong character” system. With enough tries you could figure it out.

There wasn’t much you could do from there, at least not that I remember, but one of the terminals I used did end up beeping at a slightly different frequency to all the others.

A terminal in the computer sense was originally a screen and keyboard attached to a terminating node on a network. The network didn’t pass through, so it terminated there. This meant the literal, physical hardware. Think old school green- or amber-screen systems attached to a mainframe in the basement somewhere.

A console was a terminal that was serving some kind of purpose and showing some kind of interface for humans to interact with. Without the interface software, a terminal is not a console. Without the hardware, you wouldn’t have either.

It’s easy to see how these things became blurred.

And now it’s worse because we’ve extended the meanings a bit. The program in our fancy GUIs called “Terminal” and which we often just call “a terminal” is actually a terminal emulator.

And to a lesser extent, so is the thing you can access on many distros by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1. This sometimes gets called “the console” because it’s even more like those old terminal interfaces. Full screen. Text only. Largely monochrome. No GUI.

And deeper still, a terminal, console, or terminal emulator doesn’t have to mean “a shell” which is another thing entirely. Shells just happen to be one kind of interface that can run there, and is often the default option in a GUI terminal emulator.

From a console, the default program is generally some flavour of login prompt. And then the system automagically loads whatever is configured as that user’s shell once they log in.

You know how slackers tend to make more of an effort to at least look like they’re doing what they should be when the boss walks by?

This is the same relationship between the computers and the IT department.

And the real truth may be somewhere in between. The user may suddenly regulate their behaviour and take extra care, or at least act sufficiently differently, when the IT person is watching over their shoulder.

They don’t do the thing that makes the computer complain. Everything looks normal. IT person goes away. User reverts to original habits. Computer complains.

Or else the IT person uses the computer themselves, but does not emulate the user sufficiently well, so the computer behaves.

I know it’s not always this but it goes a long way to explaining how tech aura became a thing.

I’m going to miss xdotool (and wmctrl) when my distro eventually ditches X11.

I don’t use them often, but I do use them, and their functionality is nice to have.

There are partial replacements out there, but last I checked, they were very weak approximations.

DJT. The Big Cheeto. Fatty CIC. Narcissus Egregious. King Fake News. Forty-seven. Diaper Don. Wiggy. The Annoying Orange.

Elongated Muskrat. Trillionerk. X marks the clot. Emeraldus Egregious. King Grok. The least-nice South African. EM Interference. Plugs. Mr Makes-everyone-leave.

I was going to suggest using pro-ICE rhetoric dripping with over the top sarcasm, but there are too many sufficiently smart pro-ICE people who’d see through it and too many anti-ICE who might have trouble discerning it. And then there’s the issue of getting the tone right in a stressful and dangerous situation.

Insignificant by comparison to the things others have gone through, but I’ll tell it anyway.

The plane flew and landed on time, but when we got off the plane we were on the outskirts of the airport in the dark and nowhere near a terminal. Thus, a seatless bus. A what?!

I’d never heard of such a bus or such a thing even being possible. What the heck is going on?

Everyone else seemed to think this was normal or were doing a very good job of hiding their confusion as I tried to play along. I can’t see a thing out there, but what I can see and feel tells me we’re moving. Am I even supposed to be on this bus?

I’d just followed everyone else. No-one had said anything. Where are we going?

Fears were unfounded. We were dropped off at a terminus. Inside, it became clear our bags were taking their own sweet time and journey to the building. Waiting. More waiting. No-one really said anything. No-one was panicking, so I didn’t either. No point making a scene. It’s late. We’re all tired.

Bags did eventually turn up.

I was lucky to be able to get the last trains of the evening back to my home town because it was getting very late. I do not know what I would have done if that hadn’t been possible. I have heard of people having to sleep at airports and train stations. That might have been me.

Yes, I know this makes me sound like someone who has (or had) literally no idea about airports or travel. And you’d be right. That flight home was my second flight ever. There’d been no weird little bus on the way out and I’d never seen them in TV shows or in movies featuring airports.

Anyway by the time I got to my home town, buses had stopped for the night, so I needed a taxi. Thankfully there was no shortage of those.

I haven’t travelled since. Not for any of the above reasons particularly because I know more of what to expect now. It’s been more of a mental health, financial thing.

Unmentioned by other comments: The LLM is trying to follow the rule of three because sentences with an “A, B and/or C” structure tend to sound more punchy, knowledgeable and authoritative.

Yes, I did do that on purpose.

Even in river valleys, the cabling tends to be well insulated and underground here. Again, unless it’s especially rural.

I’ve seen places where basements / cellars have been completely submerged by freak floods and all the old electrical infrastructure (cables, meters, etc.) is still in place and back in use once everything has dried out, save perhaps for a few minor repairs.

But I get it. Where it’s cheaper and the health and safety / OSHA / whatever it’s called where you are, rules don’t disallow it, overground is going to happen.

Where I live, all the power, except major cross-country transmission, is underground.

You do find more minor transmission lines out where it gets rural, right down to telegraph-style wooden poles, but you’ll pretty much never see it in cities or suburbs. (Wooden telephone poles are a different matter).

The only advantage of power-by-pole is ease of repair. Once it’s underground, it has to share trunking with the other utilities in the area, and I’m pretty sure the number of times a road needs to be dug up varies as the square of the number of utilities under it.

But at least it’s relatively safe under there when the road isn’t being dug up for the fourth time in a year.