Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurgitating it, trying to be amusing and informative.

Lurked Digg until v4. Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.

Was on kbin.social (dying/dead) and kbin.run (mysteriously vanished). Now here on fedia.io.

Really hoping he hasn’t brought the jinx with him.

Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish

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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: August 13th, 2024

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  • 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.



  • 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.



  • 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).







  • Among other problems, this fails to account for non-typing activities performed by the monkey, such as damaging the typewriter or attacking the researcher.

    285 years increases to a few thousand if you alarmingly frequently have to clean the contents of a monkey’s colon out of a typewriter.

    And at some point you’d want to further “refine” your selection process by “repairing” the typewriter to have fewer keys and/or causing the typewriter to jam after the required key press. Monkeys like to press the same key over and over again. Good luck getting them to stop once they’ve pressed a key once.

    TL;DR monkeys are chaos, and this will not be easy.


  • I’m British, so black tea with milk (or substitute) and some kind of sweetener to taste is what most of us (and most of Ireland too) go for.

    As for which black tea, we don’t really consider that unless we’re at least a couple of levels into serious tea drinking. Most supermarkets sell own-brand and name brand tea bags that we gladly grab every time we’re in a supermarket, but what’s in them is generally a blend made for taste more than anything else.

    I am not sure how tea purchasing works in other countries. Sometimes what we drink is called “breakfast tea” or “builder’s tea”, if that helps.



  • The Internet suggests that caffeine might be interfering with your adenosine receptors, and may actually be making you more sleepy.

    Try tea occasionally instead. It has other compounds that can offset caffeine effects, even if it also contains caffeine. Or try decaf coffee and see if it paradoxically causes you to be more alert.






  • palordrolap@fedia.iotoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    8 days ago

    North Korea did this already. I expect that Russia’s effort will be as good if not better. Bonus comedy points if they use NK’s effort as a starting point.

    But I wouldn’t try to use it if my Internet location was outside Russia. Or maybe even if it wasn’t.

    Also: something something falling out something something Windows.