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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  • 121 Comments
Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: August 13th, 2024

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  • palordrolap@fedia.iotolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldIdc
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    4 days ago

    macOS is a derivative of BSD Unix. Linux was a from-scratch Unix-alike. The fundamental core, including the literal kernel, are different even if they act the same in many ways.

    If you’re using “kernel” in a non-standard sense to mean “share some common tools, mindset and behaviour” then maybe, but that’s stretching the definition a long way from what technical people would expect.


  • You haven’t watched or read much dystopian fiction (or fact, as below), have you?

    My mind always goes to that one scene in Roots where, below decks on the slaver ship, the captured slaves-to-be stage a revolt and resolve to swim to the bank of the river the ship is sailing on. They succeed in reaching the top deck, a masterpiece of planning, only to become dazed both by the daylight as well as the fact there was no riverbank in sight.

    Those poor bastards were from inland, had probably never been more than a few miles from their villages. They literally couldn’t conceive of something as large as the Atlantic ocean.

    Likewise you’re failing to conceive all the ways that your plans won’t work. You really think you’ll get to someone’s crotch or eyes? And if you do, that you’ll not be overcome and won’t get that opportunity next time?

    The only hope is a whole heap of incompetence on behalf of the captor. And in that case you will still not win the fight. Run.

    And hope there’s a riverbank nearby or else you’re cooked.




  • LMDE Cinnamon user here. There’s a setting in the power options that tells the computer to switch to hibernate if it remains in suspend for a certain amount of time. Hibernated computers suspend to disk rather than RAM and are basically switched off, so need to POST to come back online.

    It took me a while to find that setting, and it might be the same case with whatever you’re using.

    What’s more, it only took effect if I used the GUI to put the computer into suspend mode. I usually use a keyboard combo to suspend the computer at night, but occasionally I’d use the GUI and come back in the morning to a hibernated computer.

    Thought I’d been taking crazy pills or that there was something wrong.

    My main gripes are that inconsistency between suspend methods and also that there’s no setting for how long to stay in suspend before hibernating. I have no idea if that’s a UEFI thing or something that could be set elsewhere, but I’d probably use that feature if I could set it.

    As it is I’m giving the hybrid option a try. Basically it suspends like normal, but also sets up a hibernated restart for if the power goes out. That hasn’t happened yet, so can only assume it’ll work when the time comes.

    Late edit: The delay between suspend and hibernate is set in /etc/systemd/sleep.conf with the setting HibernateDelaySec=. Manual page reading is required, but even so, this feature is not well documented there or out on the Internet.

    There may be syntax available to specify other units of time with a suffix. For example, my computer’s related SuspendEstimationSec= option is given as 60min in the example and not 3600.



  • not sure what they’re trying to do here

    Maximise profits and minimise losses. My guess is that someone important at Microsoft thinks that this will do just that, and if not that, will make them, personally, a lot of money. That person has no-one who will dare challenge their authority and so we go down this road.

    They (that individual or Microsoft as a whole) almost certainly have a stake in the companies that provide newer hardware, and if they didn’t before this decision, they will have by now.

    It theoretically makes Micosoft’s job easier too. A huge chunk of backwards compatibility maintenance goes out of the window, if you’ll pardon the pun.

    “Oh you have 5 year old hardware? We don’t support that.”

    Sounds fairly similar to Apple’s business model if you think about it that way.


  • Current AIs often suffer from what’s sometimes called “the strawberry problem” and can be easily confused into doing mathematics incorrectly. There’s also the human element of “if it comes out of a computer it must be right”, forgetting the “garbage in = garbage out” principle.

    The strawberry problem is a colourful name for the fact that LLMs turn sentences into something else internally and can’t then go back and re-examine the input to make checks and comparisons. Thus if you ask an LLM how many 'r’s are in the word “strawberry”, it often gives the wrong answer, unless it has been explicitly told what the right answer is. And now you have no idea what else it has and hasn’t been told is right and wrong.

    As for mathematics, they have to be explicitly programmed to be able to use a proper calculator if they’re to do mathematics correctly. Otherwise you’ll get something that looks good enough to fool someone who doesn’t know any better.

    LLMs are basically lossy compressions of knowledge. At a high level of abstraction, the creation of an LLM is fairly similar to how a raw image is turned into a JPEG*. There’s a necessary, deliberate bottleneck in the creation process that keeps the size down, and that’s going to show up in the output if you look closely.

    Using the output of an LLM is a bit like editing the JPEG rather than the raw image. Some of the things you do will invariably enhance those artefacts.

    For a JPEG that’ll do nothing worse than make an image “deep-fried” or otherwise ugly. Put an LLM in charge of people’s lives and it’ll do the same to them.

    * JPEG has a lossless encoding variant, but that’s not the right analogy here.


  • palordrolap@fedia.iotolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldVersatility wins
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    18 days ago

    Being dangerously close to the truth is a hallmark of certain kinds of humour. I appreciate it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Most days it isn’t mine either.

    He died of drugs. Priscilla was 14 when she met Elvis. Lots of bands do unspeakable things with groupies. I am deliberately not connecting any dots there.

    The dog thing, I have no idea where I got that. Probably one too many cartoons as a kid or exposure to horror tropes because I’d be horrified if someone did that for real.


  • palordrolap@fedia.iotolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldVersatility wins
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    18 days ago

    That’s the smile of a man who did something incredibly illegal and all the other guys are trying to get him out of there ASAP while worrying about the consequences if anyone finds out.

    As for what that illegal thing was, well, this is just me putting a concept to a picture that might have had no illegal acts preceding it whatsoever, but you know. Drugs maybe. Full on making out with an underage groupie who was loving the experience, but then their dad entered the next room looking for them, necessitating a rapid getaway and a s**t-eating grin. Grabbing a dog’s tail from the inside and, roink, turning it inside out or making an audacious internet comment with a sound effect like “roink”. Those sorts of things.









  • I remember making one of those.

    It had a faux URL bar at the top of both the left and right frame and used a little JavaScript to turn each side into its own functioning browser window. This was long before browser tabs were a mainstream thing. At the time, relatively small 4:3 or 5:4 ratio monitors were the norm, and I couldn’t bear the skinny page rendering at each side, so I gave it up as a failed experiment.

    And yes I did open it inside itself. The loaded pages were even more ridiculously skinny.



  • If the British civil service, even operating under previous administrations, can put together a multi-functioning government domain that runs reasonably well without JavaScript, there’s no reason Google can’t continue to do the same with a ducking web search.

    The former works better with JavaScript, that’s true, but it works OK without and that’s the point.

    Then again, the civil service were ordered to do it largely out of spite because the government didn’t want to give the plebs any excuse for not being able to use the site.

    I’m not sure how to get Google to lose the need for scripting in the same way.