palordrolap
@palordrolap@fedia.io
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
- Comment on If you're a parent, how do you prevent your kid from watching AI slop? 11 hours ago:
"If I find out you've been watching AI slop, there will be consequences. And don't think hiding it from me will make sure I don't find out. Watching slop makes people stupid in a very particular way, and you can't stop yourself from catching stupid from it, so I'll be able to tell."
It's up to you what "consequences" means in this instance. You could even reveal that the consequence was the stupidity they developed along the way, and now they have to live with that.
(By all means, modify this message to be less cold and more kind and loving. I am not good at that sort of thing.)
- Comment on Techie banned from client site for outage he didn’t cause 11 hours ago:
That first tale is clearly a case of when tech aura goes bad.
I mean, we like to let the non-techs believe that our mere presence can cause technology to behave, and we might even like to believe that ourselves, but that comes back to bite us if the hardware breaks instead.
... I'm not saying the tech should have grabbed something heavy and made a show of threatening the device, but I don't think it would have hurt!
- Comment on What are the limits to masked so called ICE agents? Are they just let off the hook and disobey laws while not identifying themselves? Why can't I be in the right by them stopping me first and shoot? 1 day ago:
Non-uniformed police that don't identify are not police.
As such you can call (uniformed) police on them.
If they say they know that ICE are operating in that area, ask how you can know that the people you're reporting are actually ICE and not impostors that turned up after the real ICE left.
- Comment on Is geolibertarianism left wing or right wing? 1 day ago:
The plural of "axis" is "axes", pronounced "AX-ease".
- Comment on UK government starting to think about leaving X 2 days ago:
Where are their communications? Who visits a government website without needing to?
To me it makes sense that they should cover as much ground as possible and have accounts on all major platforms as well as making announcements on TV and radio.
And in order to do so they should have their own accounts on there in order that their message gets across directly without having to go through a third party that has an account on there.
Now, when that site starts espousing "free speech" of the sort that only they like, then it might be a good idea to not use that particular platform any more, because that brings in the third party interference that wasn't there in the first place, even if the site was technically third party.
But hey whatever, now let's make, say, the BBC the mouthpiece of the government - it's not like the Tories didn't try really hard to do that when they were in power - and have everyone report on that. Far better.
- Comment on UK government starting to think about leaving X 2 days ago:
Government creates announcement feed. No-one knows about it because they can only advertise it on their own announcement feed.
What now?
- Comment on The Console That Wasn’t: How the Commodore 64 Outsold Game Consoles 2 days ago:
Terry Davis tried to do for the PC with TempleOS what the C64's BASIC and KERNAL did for its hardware.
Terry was all the more a mad lad because he didn't get to create the hardware spec he was working with.
Could you imagine someone doing the same as Commodore did but starting with 64-bit era hardware?
Taking it another direction, there are free and paid "easy programming" platforms that provide a sandbox not unlike a modern version of what it was like to program a C64.
At a pinch, DOSBox and a copy of QBASIC might suffice.
- Comment on The Console That Wasn’t: How the Commodore 64 Outsold Game Consoles 2 days ago:
The 64GS was one of Commodore's last gasps at trying to make some money using the 8-bit parts they still had left in stock. The whole thing was a disaster.
It wasn't based on the C64. It was a C64. Without a keyboard and some of the other ports missing. A fact that came to bite anyone who tried a C64 cartridge game that needed keyboard input.
And IIRC one of the games that came bundled with it was a game like that.
They were at least smart enough to have the BASIC startup pointer (the one that otherwise caused READY. to appear) in the ROM patched to go to a neat little graphic telling people to turn it off, plug in a game and turn it back on again.
What Commodore saved by releasing the GS, the customer ultimately paid by needing to buy games in a format more expensive than disk or tape that would run on a regular C64.
... and given the time period, lots of people were buying PCs and offloading their regular C64 hardware and a ton of games for the price of the GS and its handful of games. And that C64 would run any GS game that was likely to come out.
- Comment on UK government starting to think about leaving X 3 days ago:
It may not be a public place per se, but it is a place where a very large cohort of the general public go.
Perhaps my analogy should have been "This is bit like saying that governments shouldn't make announcements on television and radio stations not under government control."
The same logic applies there. Of course they should. A large cohort of the general public watch television and listen to the radio (less so these days in the age of the Internet, but people do still watch and listen there.).
- Comment on UK government starting to think about leaving X 3 days ago:
This is a bit like saying that governments shouldn't post notices in public places.
- Comment on How do you "process" hundreds of tabs you haven't gotten a chance to look through? 3 days ago:
I get anxious if I have more than three open per window. How other people don't is incomprehensible to me.
My phone is an ancient flip-phone, so I can't be sure how things would go there, but I can't imagine it would be much different.
- Comment on Why is kissing? 3 days ago:
It's touching a highly sensitive part of your anatomy to part of another being. This proves that you trust them.
The touch is gentle. This proves that you are to be trusted.
Both contracts are those of mutual safety.
There are multiple types of kissing. There's the kiss, perhaps on the head, that you might give a pet or a young relative.
And there the other sorts of kisses that would be incredibly inappropriate in those instances because it breaks part of the contract of trust.
But if between consenting individuals who trust each other in other ways, then all is well.
- Comment on xkcd #3192: Planetary Alignment 3 days ago:
Where is this woman from? I don't think the galactic economy has recovered enough for the Magratheans to have been awoken again.
- Comment on UK government starting to think about leaving X 3 days ago:
Surely you're not saying they shouldn't have had a Twitter presence?
Or is this more of a "they should have left when Elon took over" kind of thing? In which case, they probably thought that the majority of people who follow(ed) them on there wouldn't have left immediately - not least because there weren't any good alternatives* at the time - so it would have made sense to maintain a presence, which I think is what's actually going on.
* Yes, Mastodon existed, but you've got to think about the average person here. There's a reason the first people on there were academics and tech folks.
- Comment on Non-Americans: what would you do in a situation where a foreign country run by a extremist dictator began producing nukes? 1 week ago:
Based on the actions of my own government, the correct behaviour is to appease, play nice and hope he uses lube when he ultimately comes to f--k us.
- Comment on Microsoft Office has been renamed to “Microsoft 365 Copilot app” 1 week ago:
Copilot copilotted your Copilot. Something something marklar.
- Comment on I am so scared of nuclear war, how do I cope with it? 1 week ago:
We lived through the Cold War in the '80s. It seemed like a very real threat and eventually even though nothing really changed until the wall came down, everyone kind of got used to it and went on as best we could.
Like we have more recently with Covid. That's still there and hasn't gone away. It's still as serious a threat as it was at the beginning. You know how you'd mostly forgotten about it but not really? Same deal.
If you can't form or find a community, find distractions.
And if you find out where the first bomb's going to hit, let me know because I want to be under it.
- Comment on TIL Russian students are being presented with an ultra-nationalist curriculum, full of militarism and hatred toward Ukraine. 'Mr Nobody Against Putin' 2 weeks ago:
Self-hatred. Being bullied.
I can see that turning at least some of those people into the worst anti-Ukrainians. They may even believe it.
- Comment on Today in “Google Broke Email” 2 weeks ago:
Frankly, I'm surprised an old-school juggernaut like Zawinski doesn't already have his own mail server. It's not like he lacks the technical ability to set one up.
- Comment on Librarians Are Tired of Being Accused of Hiding Secret Books That Were Made Up by AI 2 weeks ago:
Are you sure that's not pre-Python? Maybe one of David Frost's shows like At Last the 1948 Show or The Frost Report.
Marty Feldman (the customer) wasn't one of the Pythons, and the comments on the video suggest that Graham Chapman took on the customer role when the Pythons performed it. (Which, if they did, suggests that Cleese may have written it, in order for him to have been allowed to take it with him.)
- Comment on Raspberry Pi Gets Desktop Form Factor 2 weeks ago:
Actually yes, but I didn't expect they'd go down the same avenues with the Pi.
I actually considered getting one of the computer-in-keyboard versions precisely because I'm of that same generation, but I couldn't justify the expense.
- Comment on How much money should one person realistically make or have? 2 weeks ago:
If you have more accessible money right now than the poorest person in your country would ever need to survive to the age of country's life expectancy, then you have too much money.
If you think of: the maximum fines leviable by your government for committing a crime; as mere inconvenience - rather than a life-ruining financial burden - then you also have too much money. (Weird punctuation for easier parsing).
These two things may not be mutually exclusive.
- Comment on Raspberry Pi Gets Desktop Form Factor 2 weeks ago:
This would appear to indicate that someone in charge of product design at Pi HQ is a Gen X-er or Boomer desperate to relive computing history through their own products.
Computer on a board. Bigger computer on a board. Computer entirely within a keyboard.
And now a computer in a PC-like case.
Prediction: The next step will be some kind of ARM-based cloud service.
- Comment on Been a long time since I smoked but if I opened the door to my fireplace and tossed in a kilo of pot and just let the smoke fill up the house will everyone in my house get high? 2 weeks ago:
^ The link above goes to...
a video of a BBC reporter trying to report on drugs being destroyed by burning but he's a little too close to all that smoke...
- Comment on How often do you change your towels? 2 weeks ago:
Someone who thinks that it'll be easier or more efficient to wring out if it's 1.4 times as long. And who has a bad memory. And who thinks the first two times were surely a fluke.
- Comment on How often do you change your towels? 2 weeks ago:
I wash them whenever I've dirtied enough for a full load, and if I don't, I'll often throw the bathroom mats in there with them. Frankly though, still nowhere near often enough. If they pass the sniff and squint tests (smell and look fine), I'm usually OK using them again. And again.
There was already a towel wash pencilled in for this week or next, oddly enough, before this question showed up, or else it might have shamed me into considering it. Other laundry is first in the queue though.
As for throwing them out? Never had need in the 20+ years I've had my own towels, and some of those were hand-me-downs.
I remember one particularly large brown bath towel starting to fall apart at my parents' house long before I moved out, and I still kind of miss it, which is kind of funny.
Now, washcloths made of towelling material - I've ruined a fair few of those with careless wringing. PSA: Don't fold them diagonally before wringing them out.
- Comment on I love it 3 weeks ago:
Knee-leeks and spear-leeks. Delicious.
Etymology time!
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Knee-leeks is basically what onions were called before we adopted (or were made to adopt) a version the French word
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the old English name for "spear" was "gar"*. "Garlic" is literally just a modern interpretation of "gar-leek".
What about regular leeks? They're just, well, leeks.
* Spear(wielding) Danes are mentioned as "Gardena" in the third word of the commonly seen image of the first page of Beowulf.
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- Comment on Bell Labs 'Unix' Tape from 1974 Successfully Dumped to a Tarball 3 weeks ago:
The real question might be whether the compiler was smart enough to change
var++andvar--into++varand--varwhen the initial values aren't needed.As compiler optimisations go, it's a fairly obvious one, but it was 1974 and putting checks like that in the compiler would increase its size and slow it down when both space and time were at a premium.
- Comment on What happened if the 5th attempt failed? 4 weeks ago:
- Comment on Why are there so many Christmas songs, yet hardly any New Year's ones? 4 weeks ago:
I think the point is when it came to secular things pertaining to Christmas, the church would have said "No", and the state would have gone along with that, even if most people weren't religious.
The same happens everywhere, regardless of religion or how prominent it is. If you attempt to do something that the elders of a religion say are offensive to that religion, the state will discourage it, and so people don't bother in the first place.