palordrolap

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.

Who knows what data type they’re using. Based on the values given, it’s already getting close to 128 bits, and most languages don’t have a data type that large in their standards.

I figure it will be more like “Vasily! Print another page of zeros!”

Not sure I’d want to see that, tbh. It would only introduce more avenues for DDG to make questionable choices when they’re already on thin ice.

The secret to Mastodon is to follow hashtags, not people. (It took a while for that feature to mature, which made that difficult earlier on.)

You can follow people too, but with the population there being lower, it generally makes more sense to follow a topic and hide accounts you don’t want to see.

Caveat: I don’t spend a lot of time on microblogging platforms, Mastodon or otherwise. The above knowledge might be stale, but used present tense to not give the impression the platform is dead.

I’m all for capitalism, as long as we’re allowed to pick three at random from the richest ten every year, shoot them and redistribute their assets to the poor.

Yeah, I know this is as full of holes as I’d like the “winners” to be, but I think it could be made to work as well as capitalism does.

Not if Microsoft have deleted it off your computer.

Sounds like a job for a USB trial run on a rainy weekend when you’re not doing anything else.

Nvidia supply OEM drivers for the Debian family (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint), if not others, assuming the open-source drivers don’t cut it for you. Microcode updates are released for both Intel and AMD.

You’ll probably run into issues with some games. Things are getting better on Linux, slowly and steadily, but many games are written specifically for Windows with no Linux port available. Steam’s store, for example, shows which games are SteamOS compatible, which usually means they’ll run on Linux too.

For other games it’s worth checking the Internet - e.g. www.protondb.com to see if anyone else has a particular game running under Linux. You’re probably aware that there are programs that attempt to provide some layer of Windows behaviour that form part of the solution. Some of the solutions may or may not involve command line use.

WHY IN GODS NAME ARE YOU LEAF-BLOWING AT 8AM ON A SATURDAY

These people are usually the sorts who rise at 5am regardless of day and have become bored after 3 hours awake. If they think about it at all, they believe that everyone who is not yet up by 8am is a fool who ought to be out of bed, thus that is the perfect time to make noise.

As to why they rise at 5am, take your pick from: i) Old and unable to sleep for long periods - Will be asleep again in an armchair by 11am once they’ve gone back inside; ii) Military bearing or wannabe - Probably has reveille.wav for an alarm; iii) Abject a-hole who gets a kick out of it. Honourable mention: iv) someone with no choice under direction from one of the above.

The video’s suggestion of /dev/null makes that super easy.

Assuming 1) you want things to be colder, 2) your budget can accommodate a bit of extra electricity usage and 3) the following actually exists on your appliance, many freezers have a dial somewhere that can be used to set the temperature.

Sometimes it’s coupled to the setting for an attached refrigerator section. Sometimes, yes, it’s an unchangeable setting whether there are other settings elsewhere or not. Might still be worth double-checking.

I think I’ve seen a couple of their videos, and have no idea which of them Adam would be (can’t even call any faces to mind right now to be fair), so I’m pretty sure those phrases are in my head from elsewhere.

The “Please stop” is pretty generic, but got a lot of traction that time Hyperbole and a Half told a story involving it. “Hey! Quit it!” is probably Lisa or Bart from some episode of The Simpsons. “Stop it! NOW!” is probably something that was actually said to me at some point as a kid.

Never got shot though, so I must have started behaving at that point.

(For legal reasons, that last part is meant to be tongue-in-cheek. I am also using “for legal reasons” mostly humorously. Mostly.)

Linux has at least four levels of decreasing pleasantry: -1, -2, -15, and -9, aka HangUP, INTerrupt, TERMinate and KILL or “Please stop”, “Hey! Quit it!”, “Stop it! NOW!” and *loud gunshot*.

Sometimes processes will clean up after themselves and leave when asked nicely. Or sternly told off. Of course, if you don’t need or want that, load up your, uh, -9 shooter.

What does “lift” mean in this context? A web search turns up a Doris Day musical from 1951 which is kind of funny to think about but I’m guessing is not what you mean.

As for the general case of modifying the Sun - or any star - in some way, it’s all but certain to need a huge number of resources (or amount of energy, or both), and considering the Sun is on the order of a million times larger than Earth, far more than can be obtained from Earth alone.

I mean, I’d like to be proven wrong and there’s some exotic-physics way of causing the helium in the Sun to spontaneously turn back into hydrogen, but if that was easy, you’d expect that we’d see stars do that by themselves occasionally. We don’t, which implies there would still need to be some kind of energy input required to get it started.

Without exotic physics, we’d pretty much need on the order of the energy that the star had output from birth up to that point, and if we had that, we’d be better off using that energy in other ways.

We could get all Earth life off Earth and into a self-sustaining, space-faring habitat with a minuscule fraction of the resources. We might be better off aiming for something like that.

The gravitational collapse of a cloud of mostly hydrogen in the vacuum of space.

And anything falling together under gravity was given that kinetic energy from somewhere* and ultimately it can all be traced back to the Big Bang.

As for where that energy came from, it’s possible we’ll never know. Most organised religions (and no doubt a few disorganised ones) have their theories, of course. You may subscribe to one of these.

* This is the principle most commonly simplified as “what goes up, must come down”