palordrolap

Set one up when I used a different handle but literally never used it. Thought I had a short ID number but, for reasons I’m not sure of, the piddly scrap of paper I wrote the number down on has always been in a particular place (and has been there for well over a decade), and it was 9 digits.

Must have been thinking of that handle’s Slashdot ID. That was 6 digits.

… and technically still is. Wow. The account is apparently still there. Not sure I’m going back there any time soon, but took this opportunity to reset the password just in case.

Be aware that for some removable (or otherwise non-local) media, some systems will create a .Trash-### directory on the media itself in the root directory.

This prevents unnecessary copying of files from the media to a local disk, and only a few media-specific location indicators actually need to be changed for the Trashed file(s).

The ### is generally the user’s ID number as stored in /etc/passwd, and, on Debian derivatives at least, is usually 1000 for the first user, 1001 for the second, etc., but I have heard of some systems that just use .Trash with no suffix, or did so at some point in the past.

Is it still the norm to go to the dev’s office, yank their power cord and when they ask what we’re doing, tell them we’re shipping their machine to the client because it’s the only one that the code runs on?

And can we do that with whatever server ChatGPT-4o is running on?

I’m assuming that this response from 4o isn’t real and was invented for the laugh, but it would be tempting to throw this scenario at it if it decided to give this response.

My guess is a “solution” to the age-old problem of needing to store a secret in a file that the user can download, thus making the entire system insecure.

This “solution” appears to be either that the string itself is so outrageous that the user would not believe that it’s the real secret when it is in fact the real secret, leveraging security through obscurity, or else it’s there in place of the real secret that cannot be revealed under pain of death firing, and therefore is accidentally being used instead of that intended secret… so it’s not secret after all.

Unless they’re doing something incredibly clever to substitute that secret string for the real thing when the time is right and doing it in such a way that the user can’t intercept, someone’s getting fired.

Someone told me every processor used 0xEA

Not sure if this is a riff on the joke or not.

Back in the day I dabbled in 6510 code, and up until today hadn’t even bothered to look at a chart of opcodes for any of its contemporaries. Today I learned that Z80 uses $00 for NOP.

Loth as I am to admit it, that actually makes sense. Maybe more sense than 65xx which acts more like a divide-by-zero has happened.

The rest of the opcode table was full of alien looking mnemonics though, and no undocumented single byte opcodes? Freaky, man.

But the point is that not even Z80 used $EA. If the someone was real they probably meant every 65xx processor.

Ha. No, I don’t think it was Linus, but it might have been someone else European. Really hard to be sure at this point. SATA has been around for a while.

And I’ve unearthed a memory of the other, other pronunciation that I know I’ve heard: “serial ay-tee-ay”. Why make it an acronym when you can say one of the words and then the initials of the others!

I must have heard “saata” somewhere because that’s my head-pronunciation, and it doesn’t match how I say data (dayta). Not sure I’ve ever said it out loud.

Could be an “avoiding saying anything like ‘Satan’” kind of thing, not because of religion, but more to avoid lame jokes.

In addition to other advice here: If you want to save on keystrokes, set yourself up a shell alias that’s short but unlikely to be a valid command anywhere else.

I have one that’s kind of the inverse of yours, called mntStorage (no prizes for guessing its purpose). It wasn’t intentional, but mixing case like that is pretty rare in important commands too.

Somewhere around here I have a 1960s or '70s Star Trek annual with a story where machines like this end up converting an entire planet into one enormous city, and the people that live there can’t stop it.

The story is basically a warning about turning everything over to AI, not that they call it that specifically.

Unforchunetly, Ingglish speling duzn’t laiyn up with saowndz wun-tuh-wun.

Spelling things how you say them can lead to people misunderstanding or causing unintended(?) pain.

There are already stories about companies being sued because their AI gave advice that caused the customer to act in a manner detrimental to themselves. (Something about 'plane flight refunds being available if I remember correctly).

Then when they contacted the company to complain (perhaps get the promised refund), they were told that there was no such policy at their company. The customer had screenshots. The AI had wholesale hallucinated a policy.

We all know how this is going to go. AI left, right and centre until it costs companies more in AI hallucination lawsuits than it does to employ people to do it.

And all the while they’ll be bribing lobbying government representatives to make AI hallucination lawsuits not a thing. Or less of a thing.

Depends on how you define “scripting language”.

Older techs remember when it was only browser-based and they thought of, and perhaps still think of, “scripting languages” as something that would run from some command-line or another. Starting a GUI browser to run a mere script was a ridiculous concept. (There was also that JavaScript had no filesystem access. At least initially. And then it became a gaping security hole, but I digress.)

Today, there exist command-line accessible versions of JavaScript but even there (I figure) most people wince and choose anything else instead. Maybe even Perl.

But another definition of “scripting language” is “(any) interpreted programming language” and where it runs is unimportant.

From that perspective, sure, JavaScript qualifies. And so does QBASIC.

Statistics. It’s a menu option.

If you look, be thankful it only shows per-world information. And there’s no count of server time once you lose access to a server’s world.

No-one can know.

English is an open-source project with no overarching plan and several major variants that has had literally millions of contributors over thousands of release cycles per branch. There’s bound to be some cruft in the code.

Anyone who suggests reform is enacting that one xkcd about standards. And no-one will use their variant except for a few enthusiasts who think it’s the best thing since sliced silicon.

I turned the volume down to a more comfortable level.

It’s not about whether other people are willing to accept it. It’s about whether I’m willing to generate it. This is the other half of the principle.

Maybe I want to say it without saying it. There’s no rule against doing that, but people somehow think there is - or that there ought to be.

Most of the time I don’t swear, so it makes me uncomfortable to use the word. There have been and undoubtedly will be exceptions. When the mood takes me. When the word, unfettered, feels right. Today was not that day.

Funny how the partial omission offends some people more than the original word does. Adapt your parsers.

The Robustness Principle may seem like little more than a suggestion, but it is the foundation on which many successful things are based.

To boil it down to meme-level old-school Torvaldsry: Assume everyone else is a f–king idiot who can barely do what they’re supposed to and expect to parse their files / behaviour / trash accordingly.

If you do not do this, you are, without doubt, one of those f–king idiots everyone else is having to deal with. If you do do this, it does not guarantee that you are not a f–king idiot. Awareness is key.

Examples where this works: Web browser quirks mode; Driving a car; Measure twice, cut once. This latter one is special because it reveals that often, the f–king idiot you’re trying to deal with is yourself.

Assume everyone else is worse.

Fun corollary: In altering his behaviour towards f–king idiots people who should know better, Linus has learned to apply the robustness principle to interpersonal communication.

That started out as a fictional implementation in the turn-of-the-century webcomic User Friendly (main site died a while back, unfortunately), and then someone decided that it would be fun to implement it for real.

The one in the comic was deliberately created to be evil. Not sure about the real-world implementation.

LMDE is already on pipewire as far as I can tell. I have a process running by that name, as well as one called pipewire-pulse which I assume is providing some or all of the old pulseaudio functionality for whatever might be expecting it.

No problems I’m aware of. I thought I was having problems early last month, but that turned out to be hardware failure.