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

  • 0 Posts
  • 321 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: August 13th, 2024

help-circle
  • It’s also my experience that KPatience doesn’t skip unwinnable games. It also occasionally generates one where it can’t determine whether the game is solvable or not, which is probably due to search space limitations. I’ve won a couple of those, but they’re risky to start in the first place!

    I can see the logic for not skipping unsolvable games.

    KPat uses a seed system (called “Numbered Deals”) to “shuffle” the cards before a game. The seed can be generated (pseudo-)randomly, which is the default, or entered manually. In theory, a manually-entered seed could be unsolvable, and there would then need to be completely different logic flow for random and manual seeds after the shuffle and deal.

    It’s way simpler to just generate a new game seed randomly as necessary and then have the rest of the program be clueless as to whether it was typed in or not.







  • So, there was this TV experiment where they served soup to a well-known scientist*, but, with his agreement, they stirred it first with an unused - and I stress unused - toilet brush.

    He couldn’t bring himself to eat it.

    Metaphorically speaking, our world is full of amazing things but they’re all stirred by clean toilet brushes. Sometimes, it’s worse than that and they’re used.

    Do not want.

    * Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, he was later cancelled for being old and out of touch on women’s issues among other things, which is kind of an example of this same trope when you think about it. His opinions and reactions on soup and food disgust aren’t linked to any of that but you might be tempted to ignore the result because of it.

    But then, that puts him in the same category as Louis CK and that’s what I’m responding to. Food for thought.




  • YouTube change things on the back end so frequently that I bet there’s always at least one bleeding-edge distro that has an outdated yt-dlp in its repository.

    But if you’re on a Debian / Ubuntu / Mint, yeah, you’re gonna have a bad time without the stand-alone version.











  • The SI prefix thing stems from a joke anyway. Allow me to trot out the etymology again:

    Once upon a time in the 1980s, there was created a program for reading ELectronic Mail called Elm.

    Someone created a rival mail reader called Pine, which followed both the tree pun as well as the fact it was a recursive acronym: “Pine is not Elm”.

    Pine had an editor called the Pine Composer or Pico for short. Pico is both a typographical term as well as an SI unit. They may have been going for both. Too perfect a pun to pass up, perhaps.

    Due to licensing uncertainty, someone else created a from-scratch clone of Pico called Nano, cementing the continuation of puns, but in the SI direction.

    And then apparently someone else has decided to get on the bandwagon with Micro.