palordrolap

@palordrolap@fedia.io

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there an anti- sleep-paralysis device?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Try to take deep breaths. If it's low blood oxygen as others say, that could help.

  Alternative if your brain/body won't allow it: Try holding your breath. You might have control over that. The aim is to hold long enough trigger a gasp reflex which will, hopefully, shake you awake.

  The hard part is finding the presence of mind to remember things to try when you're in an altered state of consciousness.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨xkcd #3156: Planetary Rings⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  This actually got me to check something.

  I used to spend a lot of time in a location where all of the satellite dishes seemed to point towards a major non-satellite broadcast mast. People in the area were, and probably still are, somewhat suspicious, because that's where their regular roof aerials also point.

  However, that mast happens to be largely south, or, you might say equator-wards of there. In the same direction as a ring of satellites orbiting above the equator, perhaps.

  So I've just been on street view to check for satellite dishes roughly an equal distance south of the mast. They also point south. Regular TV aerials point the other way, to the regular broadcast tower.

  Suspicion debunked!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft wants you to talk to your PC and let AI control it⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Are you sure? They're both unvoiced th, which is what thorn is for if you intend to distinguish.

  I can't tell whether Old English used eth for those words early on - though the unvoiced quality in modern English makes that seem unlikely. Did we also devoiced them? Eth died out fairly quickly in favour of thorn in all cases, voiced or not. Possibly because its name is "eþ" not "eð". It doesn't even use itself. (Though, ironically, 'w' also doesn't and it replaced ƿynn, which does.)

  There was another commenter - actually might have been the same guy, I'm not all that sure - who did use eth for voiced instances, to similar controversial effect in comment sections.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft wants you to talk to your PC and let AI control it⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  We have a diacritic in English text already. Rather than above or below, it goes to the right of the letter it modifies and looks an awful lot like a letter h.

  And if you don't quite buy that, remember that a lot of diacritics started life as letters that were eventually moved above a preceding letter and then simplified. The tilde on ñ was an n itself; the ring on å was another a; and in at least some cases the umlaut was an e.

  Modifying-h may be only stuck where it is because technology did away with the need for economical scribes before they had a chance to start messing with it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨DirecTV screensavers will show AI-generated ads with your face in 2026⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Hahaha, that's not dystopian at all, hahahaha.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do deaf people know they have a deaf accent when speaking?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Deaf people will almost unavoidably copy the mouth shapes they've seen when other people have spoken. This means that how they sound will be at least somewhat informed by any hearing people they observe as well as indirectly through other deaf people who have also learned from hearing folks.

  So yes, aspects of voice accent do carry over to deaf people.

  There's also the concept of "accent" within sign language too. How people move between signs, carry themselves and act when expressing an emotion, which is usually exaggerated for the sake of clear communication, can vary from community to community, even if the base sign language is the same.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New release of Plan9 successor 9FRONT now available⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Well that's good to know at least. Still not sure I would have opted for that name, but then, these are clearly the games of sharper minds than mine.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New release of Plan9 successor 9FRONT now available⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  That name puts me in mind of things like "Stormfront" and "National Front", if not also things like 4chan / 8kun.

  ..but that might be the point?? If so, I can't tell if it's a joke or serious. Disturbing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Aight. Let's be honest. How many of you dress for yourselves, and how many dress for others?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  If I'm going out, I change from cosy indoor clothing to tidier clothing so that I don't look like I'm wandering around in public in my pyjamas, so I guess I'm fitting to a societal expectation, and thus dressing for other people in that regard.

  That said, I wouldn't want to sully my indoor clothing with the outdoors anyway, and I don't like going out as a rule, so I think I prefer to be dressed for myself.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨For a while Microsoft was the King of PC stuff. How come they didn't just cozy up to the PC but had to do the XBOX and pretty much lose their ass with all the cash grabs?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Xbox was an indication of what Microsoft have always really wanted to do, what Apple have always done, and what Microsoft have tried to do with the Win 11 roll out:

  A narrowing of the technical specification and focus in order to minimise support and required testing. That costs money.

  Cost bad. CEO mad.

  Each Xbox release has been a release of a bunch of clones. Yes, they are based on PC hardware, but it's one set of identical hardware to support across tens of thousands of instances, as opposed to hundreds of thousands of actual PCs, barely any two alike.

  Then note that many people don't want to use a computer at home. Computers remind them of work. They want to play games and goof off in their spare time. A games console is ideal.

  And if that console happens to be based on PC hardware, the games can eventually be ported to the myriad actual PC options. But they can get the game out and running quickly on that one well-supported platform and cash in quick.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Framework supporting far-right racists?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You are [...] implying that people of (generally) Asian religions need to change their iconography

  That is not and was not my intent, and I was less sure of yours until just now. (This may be reading (in)comprehension on my part, to which I'll be happy to admit fault.)

  So, let me make sure I'm understanding you. Are you saying that you think that any and all gains from bigoted or unethical sources should be thrown away and that we should have nothing to do with them?

  I understand why people would be extremely uncomfortable with some of these and I even think that where we can, we should avoid them, but we can't get rid of everything.

  If we must insist on everything then the whole of humanity needs to get in the sea because we're all products of humanity's inhumanity if you go back far enough. In many cases, it's not that far.

  If we say "nothing" then we give way to terrible people and let them have free reign.

  So tell me. Where is the line? I still think that's a fairly difficult question, even if you don't.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Framework supporting far-right racists?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You say it's a solved problem in one area as though it should be a solved problem elsewhere. That puts your comment on unsound footing.

  As for the comparison you don't like, there are often only so many ways to write certain things in code. Some of those are invariably going to be very similar to that which was written by a bigot. That might be OK (like continued Hindu and Buddhist use of the swastika). Outright using that which was actually written by the bigot though?

  People may say "please don't do that".

  And there's the rub.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Framework supporting far-right racists?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This is a tricky one. If a bigot says the sky is blue, they're not wrong about that. Other things, sure, but not that.

  Maybe we could take their efforts and use it against them somehow. That is to say, we might deliberately use that code for anti-hate purposes, perhaps, subverting the bigot's preferred goals. Make it so that any gain they might have had is overtaken by their disgust at how it's being used.

  On the other hand, taint is by association. There's a really neat and geometrically useful symbol; fourfold symmetry, previously used by Hindus, that picked up an extremely negative association around 90 years ago, for example, and short of humanity forgetting history, we're never getting that one back.

  If you were someone helped by that code being used against bigotry and you found out where it came from, you're probably going to have mixed feelings about it when you finally get the time to reflect.

  You might understand why people would want to avoid it, even if it is correct.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft is plugging more holes that let you use Windows 11 without an online account⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The alternative alternative existed before Linux and still exists today: BSD

  In a world without Linus Torvalds, all those people who have devoted time and effort into Linux might well have found themselves working / hobbying in the BSD ecosystems instead.

  I think it's almost certain that Linux's niche would have been taken by it. It worked for Apple, after all.

  Or, who knows, maybe GNU Hurd might have become viable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do boycotts work?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ouch. AMD and Intel are both US based. Intel was easy enough, but I'd have to do a lot of soul searching and research to give up AMD, their graphics cards and the x86 architecture.

  And this is from someone in Britain, where ARM - probably the next best alternative - is based. (As in located, not the new sense of based. Though they might actually be that too.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Warm freshly baked white bread is 10/10 for a bread lover.*

  Supermarket own-brand plain white sliced loaf is generally ordinary, basic and inexpensive, but nonetheless acceptable. 5/10.

  This knowledge may raise more questions than answers, but it may help narrow the scope.

  * Scale may extend past 10 for sufficiently exotic bread. Ask the continental Europeans offended by that 10/10 rating.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨xkcd #3149: Measure Twice, Cut Once⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Top right quadrant is full of forgetful carpenters.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New U.S. gov't rule says chipmakers have to make one chip in the US for each chip imported from another country to avoid 100% tariffs — Trump admin allegedly preps new 1:1 chip export rule under new t⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  No idea. I did find that WDC are still making a variant of the 16-bit successor to the 6502, so I hadn't considered that the tech might not still be around for the earlier generation.

  It was only very recently that they stopped making Z80 cores for embeddable use, so if that tech was mothballed rather than thrown out it, theoretically it wouldn't take long to spin all that back up again.

  That "theoretically" might just be an uninformed dream though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New U.S. gov't rule says chipmakers have to make one chip in the US for each chip imported from another country to avoid 100% tariffs — Trump admin allegedly preps new 1:1 chip export rule under new t⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ha. What are the odds that someone resurrects the Z80?

  (I'm a 6502 boy, but it would be interesting to see the rival come back)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Should you copy a person's accent when pronouncing their name?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I saw something about this the other day, but I forget exactly where. They spoke about two famous people, both with given name "Craig" where one was British and the other American. They said that they would deliberately pronounce the name differently for each person in order to reflect that person's preferred pronunciation.

  Approximating that within your own accent wasn't mentioned, but I assume that would be acceptable.

  Another one that springs to mind is the name "Colin". There was that well-known US politician who insisted that his name was to be pronounced with a long 'o' not a short one, which deviated even from the standard US pronunciation.

  If I remember correctly, he insisted that if it was to be pronounced the other way, it should have had two L's in it. Makes me wonder how he spelled/pronounced travel(l)ing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I get texting and driving being a danger. But back in my day you could eat drink change radio stations etc. Why weren't laws implemented back then?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In some countries there's definitely a catch-all law for this. It's called Driving without due care and attention where I live.

  I can imagine that in jurisdictions where the police are more likely to be predatory, retaliatory or have quotas to meet that such a law might be considered too powerful by a judiciary that isn't quite as corrupt, so that could be why such a thing doesn't exist. Assuming that it's true that no such law exists, anyway.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Notepad gets AI features like Summarize, Write, and Rewrite, using local and cloud models.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Markdown varies a little from instance to instance, but you ought to be able to get away with a backslash before a problematic character (like that dot) or else backticks around something to get monospace text.

  edit\.com → edit.com
  `EDIT.COM` → EDIT.COM

  Try not to twist your brain on how I managed to get the left hand sides of those arrows.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Republican senator targets overseas facial recognition site(PimeEyes) over ICE doxing⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You know America is well down the pan when people almost certainly in the pocket of the CCP are actually talking sense about it.

  But then, this does make a convenient distraction from the similarly atrocious things they're doing, and planning to do, in their own back yard.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Notepad gets AI features like Summarize, Write, and Rewrite, using local and cloud models.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, yes, but actually no. It's more like MS-DOS's EDIT.COM since it runs in a command line / "DOS" window.

  In fact, since EDIT.COM went through a couple of distinct variants back in the day, you could say that this is the third variant of it.

  The other two being 1) the BASIC-deactivated side of QBASIC.EXE which was an editor and programming language in one, and then 2) a stand-alone, from the ground up, version (with no BASIC to disable) which came along with Win9x / MS-DOS 7.

  I keep a copy of the latter in my DOSBox config. It's only 70kB.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If you had to buy a new TV, what brand would you get?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There's at least one supplier here in the UK that still sells free-to-air-only dumb TVs. Digital of course, because we turned off analogue TV signals years ago, but no smarter than that. Definitely no Internet connectivity.

  If I decided I was going to become a regular TV watcher again, I'd probably get one of those.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Taliban leader bans Wi-Fi in an Afghan province to 'prevent immorality'⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That's just a symptom of moral prescriptivism, which in turn is a symptom of otherwise impotent desire for control over a weird and scary world.

  That doesn't mean they're making good choices, but it does explain why they're making them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If these twisted statements are provably false - even if they contain elements of truth - then this is a case of libel.

  Creating accounts everywhere someone is in order to track what they do and say is stalking.

  Making repeated efforts to ruin a person's day is harassment.

  Contact law enforcement and/or legal representation. I'm not either of those but it seems like there's a strong case here.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft is testing full-screen Microsoft 365 ads in Windows 11 for expired subscriptions⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Tricky. Microsoft currently use two different executable formats and only one of them is compatible with WINE. That still doesn't mean that a compatible one will work properly though.

  On the other hand, people who make ads want their ads to be literally everywhere, so they might make it Windows 3.11 compatible with all library functions baked in just to be safe. WINE would almost certainly run that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft still can't convince folks to upgrade to Windows 11⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I thought Win2K was peak Windows, but I begrudgingly got comfortable with XP (using the classic Windows theme) then Win 7 after they ironed most of Vista's kinks out.

  Been on Linux since then.

  But it would be unfair to say that masochist tendencies aren't a requirement to be a Linux system owner.

  All systems require some level of that. It's just Linux has been rushing towards "less masochism" and Windows even quicker towards "more", and we find ourselves at that sweet spot where they've the same level of requirement.

  Frankly, I'd prefer this sweet spot to be more towards "less", so I'm hoping Linux continues its trend.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit is dropping subscriber counts on subreddits: Users will now see seven-day metrics that track active visitors and contributions instead.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  This kind of already happens there though. Video view counts are visible and often way below a channel's sub count.

  Sure, there are exceptions (viral video views often far exceeding the sub count), but by and large they're a good metric for seeing how a channel is actually doing.