palordrolap

2140000000 for decimal round number enjoyers

0x7FEEDBAC for hexadecimal pun enjoyers

That this happened around April Fools’ makes me think that someone forgot to instruct it not to partake in any activities associated with that date. The fact it chose The Simpsons’ address in its (feigned?) confusion is a dead giveaway (to me) that it was trying to be funny.

Or rather, imitating people being funny without any understanding of how to do that properly.

Its explanation afterwards reads like a poor imitation of someone pretending to not know that there was a joke going on.

I’m one of those people with a low tolerance for depressing reality. I’m on medication for depression and anxiety, for what good they do me. Wires and chips in the brain is a step too far.

The reason I’m in the state I’m in is that I suffered a work-stress related breakdown, but the cracks have always been there. As you might imagine I am not ready to be forced back into work which I will find unbearable. Combine that with body horror and you might be able to understand my reaction and stance to this.

I’m one of those people with a low tolerance for depressing reality. I’m on medication for depression and anxiety, for what good they do me. Wires and chips in the brain is a step too far.

The reason I’m in the state I’m in is that I suffered a work-stress related breakdown, but the cracks have always been there. As you might imagine I am not ready to be forced back into work which I will find unbearable. Combine that with body horror and you might be able to understand my reaction and stance to this.

How about cultivating a world that is less depressing before jamming wires into people’s skulls to “fix” a problem that might not originate there?

Oh no, that won’t do, the people who have low tolerance for depressing reality have to be turned into drones for the corporate machine just like everyone else. If we can turn off the emotions that derive from a sense of self-preservation, they’ll be more willing workers for the constant grind.

In before employers require that their applicants must have one of these implants. People without will not be hired.

By the 24th century we won’t be Star Trek’s Federation, we’ll be an unholy hybrid of the Ferengi and the Borg.

Wow. You were lucky. That abort might have been what saved you there.

It sets permissions (ch ange modification rights) on all files (-R = recursive, stepping down through directories) in the file system (hence starting at /) so that they can be read, (re)written and executed as programs by all users (the 777 part). 000 would be no permissions for anyone (except for the root user), which would be just as bad.

And yet, paradoxically, it is far more intelligent than those people who think it is intelligent.

Updating databases to support anything other than that which would run on a 1970s mainframe costs the sort of money that eats into C-level’s yacht funds, so it won’t happen. These are the people who when faced with the “pick two from done right, done quick and done cheap” will never pick the first one.

Or in other words, if your name contains something outside the English alphabet’s A-Z, you’re out of luck. They’ll give you an approximation you don’t want and you’ll like it. Lower case? What’s that? You’re Irish and your surname has an apostrophe? F**k you, that’s in the bin, you’re OBRIEN now.

I was about to suggest SHXWMATHKWAYAMASAM as something that would be bound to work, but it’s 18 characters, and, being two more than a power of two, that all but guarantees that someone will truncate it at 16. Sigh.

Obligatory DO NOT RUN THIS ON YOUR COMPUTER (or anyone else’s).

You’d think with fully open permissions, everything would work better, but many programs, including important low level things, interpret it as a sign of system damage and will refuse to operate instead.

If you do run it, you’d better have a backup or something like Timeshift to bail you out, and even if you do have that, it’s not worth trying it just to see what will happen.

It’s not quite as bad as deleting everything because you can boot from external media and back up non-system files after the fact, but the system will almost certainly not work properly and need to be repaired.

You have been warned.

when

can

Almost. You did well, but it’s too hard for me, except maybe for short phrases like this, which, regardless, still requires effort well above my comfort. It’s the sixth most used letter by some measures. Seek out the typesetters’ placeholder phrase where the first “word” has it as last (sixth), place, before the successor “SHRDLU”, which show the order of the most used letters of, uh, latter-day British? Oof. Edit: Modified to avoid a superfluous usage.

This hurts, so it’s time for me to stop.

“N-words” plural? I can imagine edgy students going out of their way to avoid all words starting with that letter as a result of that rule, just to be difficult.

The sign itself lacks words starting with that letter other than the rule which bans it, and the separate quoting of one word that has one in it somewhere suggests they’re allowed as long as they’re unspecified on the list (otherwise that entry would have been omitted), so it’s entirely possible to misinterpret.

On the other hand, avoiding all words starting with that letter seems like a fun idea, but will people even be able to tell? And it’s surprisingly hard to express some concepts without it.

As far as I know. But if you really want to p*ss people off, deliberately self-censor when you do.

When you’ve been around a while, you begin to notice certain trends.

This particular trend being the one where the young, bright, ethical start-up turns into the sort of monster they originally rallied against, ensh*ttifying their product and spouting all the same reasons for it.

Signal is relatively young, bright and ethical. The cynic says “for now”.

From the ground up has been done at least once, but given there are multiple layers of interface and driver, it might not be at the right level for whatever hardware you have.

I’m thinking specifically of how pipewire recently came along and basically took over the functions previously provided by pulseaudio, to the point of pretending to be Pulse where necessary so that things don’t break.

FWIW, I recently learned that my motherboard has features that weren’t unlocked by default in my distro. Not related to sound, mind you, but nonetheless, I’ve gained access to that now. It required loading an extra kernel module. The same might be required to get the best out of your sound card.

Once you get out of a monoculture, you start to better appreciate that ‘best’ is a subjective term.

Some distros are better for some users (and purposes) and others for others.

But it’s got to be Mint ;p

There have been periods where one of my accounts was getting an ad-length black screen with buffering throbber (I hate that name) and, the most recent time, it was accompanied by a pop-up asking me if I’d like to find out why that was happening. Yeah. I know why that’s happening, thanks.

Then that stopped happening again. Either they gave up or UBo have worked around it somehow. Never ending arms race.

FYI: Depending on your politics, you may also want to avoid Proton.

There’s no way Windows would just access non-readable partition

I knew that was true back in the day, but I haven’t tried dual booting in a long, long time. Also, I wouldn’t put it past Microsoft’s current incarnation to “accidentally” decide that that “empty” partition would be great for virtual memory and the hibernation image.

Fair point. From what I can tell, refined tungsten is actually an order of magnitude cheaper(!) than refined silicon, but molybdenum is over two orders or magnitude more expensive. ~300USD per ton, ~2000USD per ton and ~60000USD per ton respectively.

I assume that if this got up to scale industrially, savings could be made by recycling high purity molybdenum waste, but yes, it’s not going to be cheap.