palordrolap

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.

IPv5 existed. It was called the Internet Stream Protocol. The fact IPv4 used 4 octets was a happy coincidence more than anything, so v5 wouldn’t necessarily imply a ninth chevron fifth octet.

But IPv4+, whatever that might have been, could have been an extensible system like, say, Unicode, and taken advantage of the unallocated/reserved 240.0.0.0/4 block to flag that the address is longer and the rest is encoded elsewhere in the packet.

I mean, if you want to go completely crazy, you could specify ~2^28 further octets with such a system… although requiring a 256+ megabyte MTU might be slightly too extreme.

history | grep -E '(sed|grep|awk|perl)' | wc -l 107

Dang. That’s out of 1000. I need to up my game. Also three of those seds are part of something with a -basedir and don’t count.

So yeah, about 10% of my commands are iterating shell pipe things for poops and giggles, I guess.

… and this got me going down the rabbit hole of writing a filter for my history to pull out the first command on the line. This is non-trivial because of potential preceding variable assignments. Most used commands are currently apt and man and ls. I think apt is a Spiders Georg situation because the system is fairly fresh and I keep finding things that I haven’t installed yet. Also I went through a patch of trying to parse its output.

… oh, er… unga bunga.

Where are their communications? Who visits a government website without needing to?

To me it makes sense that they should cover as much ground as possible and have accounts on all major platforms as well as making announcements on TV and radio.

And in order to do so they should have their own accounts on there in order that their message gets across directly without having to go through a third party that has an account on there.

Now, when that site starts espousing “free speech” of the sort that only they like, then it might be a good idea to not use that particular platform any more, because that brings in the third party interference that wasn’t there in the first place, even if the site was technically third party.

But hey whatever, now let’s make, say, the BBC the mouthpiece of the government - it’s not like the Tories didn’t try really hard to do that when they were in power - and have everyone report on that. Far better.

If 1) you’re smart or practised enough to be able to generate what you’re asking the AI to do for yourself, 2) you’re able to take what the AI generates and debug, check and correct it using non-AI tools like your own brain, 3) you’re sure this whole AI-inclusive process will save time and money, and 4) you’re sure using AI as a crutch won’t cause you brain-rot in the long term, go nuts.

Caveat: Those last two are tricky traps. You can be sure and wrong.

Otherwise, grab the documentation or a bunch of examples and start hacking and crafting. Leave the AI alone. Maybe ask it a question about something that isn’t clear, but on no account trust it. It might have developed the same confusion that you have for precisely the same reasons.

So anyway, Linus clearly fits 1 and 2, and believes 3 and 4 or else he wouldn’t be using an AI. Let’s just hope he hasn’t fallen into the traps.