palordrolap

Pretty sure my own education had a Tanenbaum book in amongst it, from which I learned a number of things. In another world, one where my brain isn’t its own worst enemy, I could well be one of those IT managers. There the FUD would have been the main factor in my decision. Probably. Because I’m not sure I’d be completely happy if it was a Linux buried in the chipset either. Especially one largely outside my control.

m’user

Lemmy and the Fediverse as a whole is a microcosm that doesn’t make much of a difference one way or the other. We can stab at the tankies all we like, but it wasn’t their influence in the Fediverse that caused the result, even if they did manage to hoodwink a few into voting for fake tan man.

The whole ring -3 / MINIX business a while back put a serious amount of FUD into the market and Intel has been on the wane ever since.

This is not necessarily unfounded FUD either. MINIX is literally there, lurking inside all modern Intel processors, waiting to be hacked by the enterprising ne’er-do-well. (NB: This is not to say that there aren’t ways to do similar things to AMD chips, only that MINIX is not present in them, and it’s theoretically a lot more difficult.)

Then bear in mind that MINIX was invented by Andrew Tanenbaum, someone Linus Torvalds has had disagreements with in the past (heck, Linux might not exist if not for MINIX and Linus’ dislike of the way Tanenbaum went about it), and so there’s an implicit bias against MINIX in the data-centre world, where Linux is far more present than it is on the desktop.

Thus, if you’re a hypothetical IT manager and you’re going to buy a processor for your data-centre server, you’re ever so slightly more likely to go for AMD.

Clee-ent? Unsure if AI, a non-native English speaker leaking their native pronunciation, or, as allegedly happens later, someone having a minor mental malfunction.

I’ve been around just long enough to suspect that this will be part of a cycle going back and forth between tactile controls and touchscreens.

That is, give it a decade and touchscreens will be the in-thing again. And another decade and someone will have the “fantastic new idea” of bringing tactile controls back.

And there’ll be a combo breaker of some sort where a new technology comes along (probably no screens, or controls, only voice control) which a small few will absolutely love - due to sunk cost fallacy mostly - and no-one else will buy (compare: 3D TVs), and the cycle will begin again.

Bonus points for: 1) Manufacturers managing to have cycles out of step with others because the market forces aren’t quite enough (people not having the money to buy new cars) to bring them all into line. 2) External factors like, say, the world ending, breaking the cycle.

Looks like Guerilla Mail still exists. Been around for years at this point. No idea if there’s any controversy about them, but there are reviews out there giving them high marks.

Christianity of all denominations is losing followers at a church-worrying rate. Yes, you’ll always get those who are zealous or make it part of their identity and will never quit, and of course, the quiet - if you’ll pardon the pun - masses who are ever faithful, but the churches don’t fill up quite how they used to.

By getting the kids hooked on an ideology through a relatable, maybe even exciting, child-like character, they’re hoping to (eventually) get people back into churches and get business booming again.

I’m imagining that your first name is something like Vijay and your middle initial is J, and so no wonder you wouldn’t notice.

Fears grow? Really? That’s what it’s been about for decades at this point.

Funny. I had a boss who thought that use of initials was pretentious. Or maybe I’m putting words in his mouth and it was specifically my use of a middle initial he didn’t like. Harry S Truman’s name would presumably have given him a headache.

Either way, I countered that having a customised number plate on a car was surely just as bad, to which he had no answer.

• Partial tip: There’s often the suggestion of concentrating on breathing, usually with some kind of regular pattern. This is an alternative to try.

You’ll need to have been in bed for a while, mind racing. Take how extreme that racing is and then taking a similarly extreme, almost uncomfortably deep breath to match it. This requires having been in bed for a while.

Hold it for a bit. Don’t count seconds - avoid numbers. As soon as you get the vaguest hint from your body that you need to let it out and breathe normally again, do so. Try to relax as much of yourself as possible as you do that. This is not a “hold your breath till you pass out” thing. You want to go back to breathing normally.

If the breath was too deep and that freaked you out a bit, try going a bit more shallow on the next one.

This has sometimes worked for me, especially if I’ve been asleep already and can’t get back to sleep.

Sometimes I’ve tried a regular breathing exercise after that.

Other times I have got out of bed and done something mindless for a while until I felt tired again. No doomscrolling.

• More traditional tip: No caffeinated beverages for at least 6 hours before you go to bed. Yes, six. Nine’s even better.

William would become king, but then things get weird. I strongly suspect there’d be a rushed act of parliament on behalf of the dead Charles, to whom the parliament was loyal, in order to - ahem - reign in this inexplicably power-mad William and perhaps even try to seek to apply some kind of punishment.

I could see a cross-party vote to not recognise William as king because of the grievous act and instead choose to recognise the next in line who was not in favour of that grievous act. This might mean that parliament chooses to recognise George as king and seek to appoint a regent in his stead until he was of age, for example.

Whatever was to happen I don’t think there’d be a civil war over it, but there’d probably be a referendum on becoming a republic fairly soon afterwards so the whole thing could be sidestepped.

If it turned out William wasn’t acting alone then I still think there’d be an investigation as to who was in favour and maybe expunge William’s line from succession altogether… but then I don’t think the powers that be would want Harry as king either. Or Andrew.

Edward would be unwilling, but I think he’d make a good, if quiet, king.

Anne would be f**king hilarious.

But all of this is moot. The chance of Wills becoming a homicidal maniac is about as likely as his gran coming back from the grave and doing the job herself.

Is it just me or is this response the wrong response? I would have expected:

not everyone speaks bri’ish english

(that missing “r” in “ameican” inspires the use of the “improper” option here). It’s American English that uses “tire”, after all, and the rest of the Anglosphere that has “tyre”.

Find yourself a language that allows negative indices to count back from the end of an array.

In those languages, index 0 is usually the first element, but if you’re particularly perverse and negate your indexing, you can start at 1, or rather -1, at the other end and work backwards.

0-indexing originally comes from needing to add to the array’s base memory address to locate elements. If you have an array at memory address 1234, you might expect to find the first element at that address, which would be 1234+0, and the next at 1234+1, etc.

1-indexing started as either a deliberate abstraction from that idea, and/or else there’s something else stored at 1234 that the array data type needs and the real elements start at 1234+1.

All that said, there’s at least one language that insists the indices of an array be of a subtype of some Integer type that must have a limited range. Then you can start and end wherever you like, and the whole 1 vs 0 business is meaningless (except to whoever writes the compilers for that language anyway).

Retired racing driver Damon Hill approves this post.

Watched a few back in the day. Wasn’t really my jam - I was too old for it even then - even if the tangentially related _asdfmovie_s are somewhat entertaining when they appear.

Oof. I’d never even thought about it in terms of race, but now you mention it, I have to wonder if I ever heard it in that context.

… and, not that I remember, probably have. sigh

Started by turning off adblocker, but not NoScript. Allowed everything except the obvious advertising domain “blogherads”, and no significant increase in usage.

Allowed that and it added a whole bunch of domains to the list, meaning that it polls all the other ad providers and tries to run their scripts. Tried enabling those a bit at a time and noticed nothing in particular. The ads did start taking up a small amount of extra memory but no runaway effect.

I didn’t get around to allowing them all, but I did notice that at one point I tried to scroll the page and it loaded ad section after ad section indefinitely as I scrolled.

If you have an extension that tries to load a page right to the bottom, then that would almost certainly cause a runaway effect. It would try to load an infinite number of ads below where you were viewing the page.

Massive overbite. Great for scraping off barnacles.

(In before the reinterpretation of that last word as a Greek name.)