palordrolap

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

Like Mandarin, it may be that cat-speak is tonal. What sounds to an untrained ear like the same word could in fact be something entirely different. Even if your untrained ear is trained in another tonal language.

Cat says “Hi”, you think you’ve imitated perfectly but accidentally imply something crude about their mother. Or possibly a horse. Who can tell?

I’m not saying it’s not a good thing, I’m implying how much of a good thing it is.

Imagine someone robs your house, causes untold damage, takes all your valuables and shoots your wife, your child, and your dog.

The robbers voluntarily give back the clock you had on the mantelpiece and $20, claiming they feel bad. You get nothing else but those things. The clock is blood-spattered and cracked. But hey, that $20 counts for something, right?

She seems nice.

You make a valid point, but the root word is Latin which obeys specific, much simpler rules about pronunciation.

These are unavoidably mangled by passing into post-GVS English, sure, but nonetheless, this is, uh, clearly a case where the spelling does reflect an intended pronunciation.

If it was to be pronounced “nucular”, it would have been spelled that way. The spelling indicates that “nuclear” derives from the already corrupted term and should be pronounced as such.

If you really want to be etymologically correct, nuclear and nucular are both wrong and it should be nuculear (new-queue-le-ar), which is similar to and indeed also, a bit peculiar.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Wait. Tiny Batman head?! How often do they deviate from the standard format like this?! Part of the gag is that it’s exactly the same six panels with different text each time. Now there’s Batman?!

Police police police police. Police police police police police police.

(The people who monitor and ensure the good behaviour of (i.e. “police” as a verb) law enforcement (the police) are called the “police police”. The people who do the same for the police police must therefore be the police police police. The original phrasing structure is “2 verb 1. 3 verb 2.”)