palordrolap

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)

Because LMDE stands for Linux Mint Debian Edition

Interesting. LMDE seems to be more like MS Windows in that things like kernel updates insist on a reboot, and certain other things are easiest restarted with a reboot too, for example, X.Org changes.

I’m sure there’s still a way to bootstrap a new kernel on the bare metal without needing to reboot, likewise for restarting X.Org, but I foresee problems with any programs and daemons that were children of the original processes. For example, convincing them not to exit when their parent does and then getting them to play nice under a new session.

I mean, I guess you could just not update, or have a long period where they’re unnecessary and that’d work too. That could well be what this meme is getting at. Can confirm sessions (caveat: with standby and hibernate) that have lasted well over a month.

But this all raises the question: Does anyone actually not reboot when system changes happen, and what’s the workflow for bootstrapping without rebooting there?

In before Microsoft break out the FUD tactics and a year or two of cheap licenses.

Any where stress doesn’t affect me negatively.

Sigh. At this rate I can see a day where I end up switching to WebKitGTK’s MiniBrowser as my main rather than having it as a “secret” backup.

4’33" by John Cage

Preferably with me as far from the stage as possible. In fact, I’m staying home. Enjoy.

Tea. Specifically, what’s known in other parts of the world as “English Breakfast (Black) Tea”. Because I’m British and grew up with it.

Although I vary quite a bit from average. Mine’s usually decaffeinated with sweetener and soy milk for health reasons.

Kratom

uh-oh

It’s also my experience that KPatience doesn’t skip unwinnable games. It also occasionally generates one where it can’t determine whether the game is solvable or not, which is probably due to search space limitations. I’ve won a couple of those, but they’re risky to start in the first place!

I can see the logic for not skipping unsolvable games.

KPat uses a seed system (called “Numbered Deals”) to “shuffle” the cards before a game. The seed can be generated (pseudo-)randomly, which is the default, or entered manually. In theory, a manually-entered seed could be unsolvable, and there would then need to be completely different logic flow for random and manual seeds after the shuffle and deal.

It’s way simpler to just generate a new game seed randomly as necessary and then have the rest of the program be clueless as to whether it was typed in or not.

This is one of those things that’s going to depend heavily on the sort of people the parents are, and to some extent the (adult) children.

I remember the first Christmas I woke in my own home rather than my bedroom at my parents’ house and I was simultaneously devastated and glad that my parents hadn’t broken into my home (I lived across town) to leave gifts in a pillowcase. The tradition was that it was put at the foot of the bed (or outside the door as I got older).

I was well into my 20s before I moved out, so I have no idea how long that would have continued if I’d never left. It might have required me to ask them explicitly to not do that any more.

Now I go over at some point over Christmas and we exchange gifts during the main day, or as close as possible to it.

in America

And you can almost cross out “with monopolies” too because there’s a lot of tacit price-fixing in industries where there is competition.

You do not want to see an old-school greybeard dressing like this.

You might think you do when you first imagine the concept, but no, you really don’t.

Source: Am at the very least greybeard adjacent.

This. Anything that’s recognisably from a previous era, even if it’s just a hairstyle or a fashion trend, can be a re-enactment of that era if someone knowingly and willingly chooses to style themselves that way.

There’s a version of the game out there that someone made after the fact (well after; we’re talking 2020), but I couldn’t get it to accept my commands. Not even the ones it suggests in the intro screen. I’d post a link, but it might be someone’s idea of a sick joke.

If I had spare cash I’d definitely be donating to Archive.org (The Internet Archive), so instead, I try to mention them when topics like this come up.

I’d probably also donate to Linux Mint, who I assume are also non-profit, because I’ve been using their offerings for a long while at this point.