palordrolap

@palordrolap@fedia.io

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft still can't convince folks to upgrade to Windows 11⁩ ⁨⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ 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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's the Bechdel test equivalent for images?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I'm not sure that counts, considering which subset of the population is the largest consumer of it. That in and of itself doesn't make it fail*, but the fact that the makers of it know this and thus might be tailoring it for that audience does kind of make the the whole thing about men.

  Basically, we're just swapping one meaning of intercourse for another.

  * in the same way a group of men watching a regular movie that passes the test wouldn't change that fact.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google's plan to restrict sideloading on Android has a potential escape hatch for users⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Option 1 is a potential cause of "lost" revenue.

  Late stage capitalism absolutely forbids anything that could cause that, even if the cost of implementation outweighs any potential gain.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mark Zuckerberg, the Lawyer, Is Suing Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Serious answer: A surprising number of people, especially those who still have Facebook accounts in 2025, are susceptible to scams where someone pretends to be a rich and/or famous person asking for favours or money.

  They get a message from a fake Zuck, and because they are dangerously credulous, they believe it is the real Zuck.

  Zuck says they've been selected, or won a prize, or should send a photo or some such, and then suddenly Zuck's blackmailing for a compromising photo or otherwise requesting Amazon gift cards or Bitcoin to "unlock" the prize or whatever.

  "Zuck's a rich man who owns the platform. He knows what he's doing. I'd better look into how to do this Bitcoin thing."

  Facebook knows all this and so any Zucks that are not the Zuck get flagged as scammers and have their accounts shut down.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨xkcd #3137: Cursed Number⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, this is embarrassing. This is what I get for mathing after midnight.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨xkcd #3137: Cursed Number⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Felt like noodling a little with some numbers. I have a nice candidate. 22301. Pretty small, right? It's prime. That's not troubling to most anyone's sanity.

  There's something that can be done to that number four times (but no more) which results in a prime each time and the fourth step results in a 70 digit number that I may have looked at slightly tOo LoNnNg.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I Love Reading 1980s Computer Magazines, and So Should You⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  So your cross your fingers and ran it and got an error.

  And eventually we learned to understand the programs we were typing in, knowing what those errors meant and how to fix them without looking back at the listing. Magical.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨what does it mean being nice to your coworkers to you?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I think they're going for "What does 'being nice to your coworkers' mean to you?"

  As someone who is also neurodivergent, to me this meant leaving them the heck alone unless they were only person who could help me with something, which is also how I expected to be treated in return.

  Neurotypicals might ask others about their day, make hot drinks for others, or even do out-of-work favours, but I never had the urge to do that, even if it might have been be appreciated. There are probably other things that they do that I was and might still be oblivious to.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I Love Reading 1980s Computer Magazines, and So Should You⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I was given a bunch of old Compute!'s Gazettes by an uncle who'd moved onto PCs from his Commodore 64. I did not get the benefit of the tape or disk option unfortunately, but as a result many of those magazines are bedaubed with felt-tip where I marked my progress whiling away hours typing in those programs.

  I learned so much about the Commodore 64 from those magazines.

  By the time I got my C64C in the '90s, magazines had long since stopped publishing code listings due to cost. If they'd continued to do so, magazines would have been twice the price and they wouldn't have been able to sell twice as many to make up for it. As it was, the magazines were, by that point, at least partially subsidised by game companies who wanted to get a demo out on the tape or disk.

  I'm still annoyed my subscription to one of those magazines ran out the month before the last ever issue. I could probably get one on eBay for a reasonable price, but it's the principle, dammit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Dennis is one of those (fictional) people who I clearly remember being much younger than, briefly being the same age as, and now being much older than. The two main others are Gordon Freeman (27) and Homer Simpson (under 40).

  Now if only my mental age had kept up...

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨xkcd #3134: Wavefunction Collapse⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  "Problems that go away by themselves come back by themselves."

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK that you can usually tell news site's bias based on how complimentary the picture they attached is⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The reverse is true of pictures of sports folk, who are almost always pictured with their mouths open in celebration.

  There used to be a saying here (UK) along the lines of "the back page of a newspaper always has a picture of a man with his mouth open" and that's why. Sports at the back. Almost always men's sports. Main picture was usually some leading point scorer celebrating.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's the thing video players do after lag where they speed up the footage to catch up to the current frame before playing as normal?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  "Rubber-banding" maybe?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Word documents will be saved to the cloud automatically on Windows going forward⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Are there ways of doing table things in LibreOffice, even if that specific feature isn't there? That's been why they haven't added things in the past... but then eventually caved in and added them.

  I'm thinking mainly of the fact that for long enough either LibreOffice (or its predecessor OpenOffice? It might have been that long ago) would try to add all one million vertical cells as a data range to a chart if the user selected an entire column, and the devs refused to "fix" that to only use everything down to the last non-blank cell.

  But eventually someone got on the dev team who was willing to do that.

  No harm in asking again.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Word documents will be saved to the cloud automatically on Windows going forward⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This is a call for those people who are missing a feature that they absolutely must have in LibreOffice, to 1) check whether it has been added since they last looked (when was that, again?) and 2) to put in a feature request if it isn't there.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there a word for the happiness in finding the exact right word?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The adjectival form is "felicitous". (fe-LI-si-tus)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Where did the word and concept of "derpy" come from and where is it going?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It's the onomatopoeia associated with a stupid person trying to think with an emphasis generating -p suffix, in the manner of well → welp and no → nope, then modified further into an adjective with a further -y suffix. Der + -p + -y.

  Wiktionary doesn't currently talk about the -p snap suffix at derp, but it does at welp. While I don't quite have the gall to edit it into derp myself, I'm convinced it's the same thing.

  (One definition of "herp" is, of course, derived in the same way, doubly emphatic due to the unnecessary aspiration on a hesitation noise. h- + er + -p. Thus was born phrases like "herp-a-derp" for someone acting with a ridiculous lack of care.)

  Also: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=derp

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In before OP finds a similarly curious lesbian and the next thing you know they're married with three kids.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stop children using VPNs to watch porn, ministers told⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That's what they're aiming for, yes.

  They want to know where everyone is and what every person is doing at every possible moment of every day, be that in public or on the Internet. They are paranoid and know that their entire system is in danger of collapse with the common man gaining control over the rich and powerful.

  Thus they resort to extreme control of the commoners to ensure that won't happen.

  Child protection and anti-pornography stances are perfect excuses because they're very difficult to argue against.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is This Social Media?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  When I was able to work, I liked to pretend that Reddit - which was still reasonable back then - wasn't social media to get around the rule that social media wasn't allowed. I had intended to explain that I thought Facebook, LinkedIn and possibly Twitter were social. Since I didn't have friends or follows on Reddit, and since I was anonymous, clearly it didn't count.

  I was never called out on it.

  But I definitely thought, and still think, that there's definitely a social element to it. I mean, what's happening right now?

  This isn't Reddit, of course, but it amounts to the same thing. I'm responding to something written by a human who might actually read it. Conversations happen in the comments. As far as Internet goes, that's social.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you read analog clocks to the exact minute? How do you do this quickly?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Eventually you learn to recognise the hand positions almost like they're symbols in their own right. You can tell the difference between an apostrophe and a comma, right? And in certain typefaces they're identical symbols other than their position.

  For the same reason, you can tell the difference between an hour hand just past the 12 and an hour hand just past the 6. Then you learn what the other positions look like.

  Then you can read the minute hand to whatever precision you need.

  After that it's just practise, practise, practise. Your read times will tumble and before long you'll be completely used to it and be just as fast as with digital.