AnyOldName3

The context: the UK ended slavery within the empire by taking out a huge loan to buy all the slaves in the empire, then freeing them. The loan wasn’t fully paid off until recently, so UK taxpayers were effectively paying for money that had been given to slave owners. However, it quickly and decisively put a stop to slavery in a lot of the world without much fuss or objection, when it otherwise could have triggered wars.

One of the stills from one of the videos that the BBC showed identifying it as a Tomahawk showed it at a very un-cruise-missile way up, so it could just have malfunctioned during terminal guidance or been clipped but not destroyed by air defence, and then hit the wrong target. It could also just have been a governmenty-looking building close enough to an intended target that whoever was checking it didn’t notice it wasn’t the target. It’s a lot easier to get everything right when the whole mission is to hit one person with one missile when everyone’s got enough time to do their job perfectly and everything’s been rehearsed than when there are thousands of targets and people are doing things in a rush, especially if orders are coming from people who don’t care about international law.

There’s nothing inherent to small components to suggest that you have to review them. If they’re small, it’s easier to tell yourself that the LLM probably got them right and you’re justified in not checking.

Using an LLM to write tests and small components is still vibe coding.

Cultural appropriation is something like McDonald’s advertising a new Indian burger and it’s just a beefburger with some chillies in it, i.e. someone’s attempting to gain from a bastardised caracature of the culture that wouldn’t be something someone from that culture would participate in. Right wing pundits intentionally misrepresented it as things like eating a traditional dish from another culture to make it sound stupid so people would dismiss it, and then people who’d only heard the misrepresentation but wanted to do the right thing or at least appear to be doing the right thing started acting like it was immoral to participate in any culture you weren’t born into.

While you can generally also earn them through gameplay, it’s normal for lootboxes to be available for sale, either directly with money or via an intermediate currency that can be bought with money (which is generally specifically to skirt anti-gambling law or to force you to buy an amount of the intermediate currency that doesn’t exactly match anything you can buy with it).

I think it’s possible that loot boxes (and real-world equivalents like trading cards) don’t violate existing anti-child-gambling laws, but if so, that’s a flaw in those laws that needs to be fixed rather than an indication that they’re totally fine and should be allowed to exist in their current form. They cost money and give an unpredictable reward where different options have different perceived value, so they’re quite clearly gambling to anyone who defines it based on its characteristics rather than an individual territory’s specific legalese.

CV padding and main character syndrome.

You can get loads of frames per second with cloud gaming, just not necessarily from the right second.

Password managers are supposed to be designed to resist a situation where they’re compromised, and are only ever supposed to see a mysterious blob of encrypted data without ever having access to any information that would help decrypt it. The headline’s more like M1 Abrams Tanks Vulnerable to Small Arms Fire - it’d be totally expected that most things die when shot with bullets, but the point of a tank is that it doesn’t, so it’s a big deal if it does.

If it’s the problem that I’ve seen people complain about in the past, it’s effectively the same as HTTPS ‘not supporting’ end to end encryption because it runs over IP and IP packets contain the IP address of where they need to go, so someone can see that two IP addresses are communicating, which is unavoidable as otherwise there’s nothing to say where the data needs to go, so no way for it to get there. Someone did a blog post a couple of years ago claiming Matrix was unsecure as encrypted messages had their destination homeserver in plaintext, but that doesn’t carry any information that isn’t implied by the fact that the message is being sent to that homeserver’s IP.

I reckon it depends on how warm someone’s home is and how good their circulation is. If I don’t have shoes on indoors, then for half the year it feels like my feet have been stabbed because they get so cold (slippers are not enough), but I don’t wear the same shoes indoors as outdoors. I suspect that if we set the heating higher and the house wasn’t constructed in a way that makes the floor always much colder than a few inches above the floor, this wouldn’t be a problem.

Investors managed to pour billions into making the metaverse bubble, even though that was just video games being invented a second time by people so uninterested in them that they hadn’t noticed they’d already been around for decades. There’s no reason to think that investors know what they are beyond something on a computer, so obviously they’d see something else on the computer as a viable competitor.

With energy prices in the UK being what they are, it’s only raw potatoes that are cheaper than bread. At least toast toasts quickly, so isn’t that energy-intensive compared with boiling a pan of water.

I dug up a manual for the Windows 3.1 SDK, and it turns out that it had the same GetVersion function with the same return value as the Windows 2000 SDK, and it’s just that the live MSDN docs pretend that Windows 2000 was the first version of Windows, so show that as the earliest version that every function that came from an older version of Windows. http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/microsoft/windows_3.1/Microsoft_Windows_3.1_SDK_1992/PC28914-0492_Windows_3.1_SDK_Getting_Started_199204.pdf page 31.

I then looked at a manual for the Windows 1.03 SDK, and it, too, has a matching GetVersion function.

The only change to GetVersion over the entire history of Windows is that at some point it switched from returning a sixteen bit value with eight bits for the major version and eight bits for the minor version to a 32-bit value with bits split between major, build number and minor versions, and then later on, GetVersionEx was added to return those numbers as members of a struct instead. There has never been a version of Windows where string comparisons of the display name were appropriate or recommended by Microsoft.

If you’re checking for Windows 9 in order to disable features, which is what the jump straight to ten was supposed to protect against (when running a 16-bit binary for 3.1/95 on 32-bit Windows 10, it lies and says it’s Windows 98), then you’re using at least the Windows 2000 SDK, which provided GetVersion, which includes the build and revision numbers in its return value, and the revision number was increased over 7000 times by updates to Windows 2000.

There was a function that would give you a monotonically-increasing build number that you could compare against the build that any given feature was added in that people should have used, but there was also a function that gave you the name of the OS, and lots of people just checked if that contained a 9. The documentation explicitly said not to do that because it might stop working, but the documentation has never stopped people using the wrong function.

And the context was a sentence that was correct if you used OED sense 1, or MW sense 1, but you decided to parse it as MW sense 2b and then complain that the sentence was incorrect.

OED:

1. totally or partially resistant to a particular infectious disease or pathogen.
2. protected or exempt, especially from an obligation or the effects of something.

Merriam Webster

1. : not susceptible or responsive

   especially: having a high degree of resistance to a disease

2. a: produced by, involved in, or concerned with immunity or an immune response

   b: having or producing antibodies or lymphocytes capable of reacting with a specific antigen

3. a: marked by protection

   b: free, exempt

So unless you pretend that MW’s 2b sense is the only valid one, the immunity is immunity.

If you have a sample of HIV at 37°C in blood, but with all the immune cells removed, it’ll still all become inert after around a week simply due to chemical reactions with other components of blood etc… It’s pretty comparable to a population of animals - if you take away their ability to reproduce, they’ll die of old age when left for long enough even if you’re not actively killing them.

Edit: fat-fingered the save button while previewing the formatting

• this is a shitpost community, not a biotech publication, so immune here means the dictionary definition, not any domain-specific technical jargon, otherwise people can’t make shitposts about diplomatic immunity
• lacking the receptor that HIV uses to hijack the regular immune response in order to reproduce means the regular immune response destroys it
• even in a normal person, after exposure, a lot of HIV gets destroyed by other parts of the immune system, often enough to eliminate it before an infection gains a foothold. Once an infection takes hold, it outbreeds the immune response as it’s the part best equipped to deal with a large viral load that it interferes with.
• if you’ve got the virus in your body, but due to the lack of the receptor, it can’t reproduce, then it doesn’t remain viable for very long as each viron accumulates damage over time, and ceases to function once it’s too badly damaged. People carrying a disease have enough viral reproduction going on to balance out the virus being destroyed.