palordrolap

As I’ve said before, once Linus is gone, we might well end up with splits at the kernel level rather than at the distro level. And we would be wise to avoid any one organisation’s stock kernel, even if there are some very large organisations providing a lot of code for the kernel at present.

I can see a future where, say, GNOME, start producing their own kernels to support their vision of the Linux desktop from the ground up.

And it’s all but certain that Canonical and Red Hat would be very interested in things going their (respective) way(s) when the time comes.

Any C-levels, current or former, who were in charge during the unethical behaviour should be made to pay this. Either they knew or they should have known. Seize their assets, take them back to basic income and lifestyle and only then take the remainder of the fine from the company.

Yeah, I know this is a pipe dream. These people have their arms lodged so deep in politicians it makes their mouths flap, so it’ll never happen, but it would stop this sort of behaviour right quick.

A question I am yet to see satisfactorily answered: Why would a corporation want to show ads to someone who cannot afford their product?

I was going to suggest using pro-ICE rhetoric dripping with over the top sarcasm, but there are too many sufficiently smart pro-ICE people who’d see through it and too many anti-ICE who might have trouble discerning it. And then there’s the issue of getting the tone right in a stressful and dangerous situation.

New head canon: This is where the Birthday Skeleton lives.

Scientists can and do lie. And they also make mistakes. And when their work leaks before going through peer review, gullible people think that any retraction must be some conspiracy to cover up the truth.

Consider the whole vaccines versus autism debacle.

Now we could enter into a semantic “no true scientist” argument, but again, we’ve got to consider those gullible people, who’ll take anything as undeniable truth as long as it comes from an apparent authority and it aligns with their beliefs.

You may now stab me if you wish.

Conclusion: No-one who is capable of complaint, should.

…which is utter nonsense. Complaint often brings about improvement.

Or else we should instead beat people who are complaining into a state where they are no longer capable of complaint, which seems to be a trend these days.

Not pictured: The song that autoplays immediately afterwards that smiles as it punches you in the gut.

Anyone remember a series of Korean(?) comic strips with themes like this, except the art style depicted the emotion in a more extreme way? Exaggerated facial expressions (even for a comic). Foot up on a step and staring into the distance when caused to think about their own internal contradictions.

My search skills are failing me.

Smurfs have very small feet.

… so you don’t think Mastodon is a worthy competitor?

How about Bluesky?

This rhymes if you are Australian.

How wrong would it have been to give the tongue a lisp?

My zero discrimination self says no, but my sense of humour says yes.

I think this might actually be the one I was thinking of! I had misremembered how and when he freaks out. That happens if you click on him to try to use the urinal he’s already stood at.

Makes sense in retrospect

Does anyone remember the Flash game that “taught” urinal etiquette? It would go through phases of what to do given which, if any, urinals were already occupied.

If you tried the scenario in the last panel here, the guy you stood next to would freak out, wave his arms around and look seriously annoyed. Edit: I had misremembered how and when he freaked out. See responses.

The whole thing was easy to get right on the first try, but like all good computer games, part of the fun was goofing around and doing things wrong on purpose.

Sigh. That was probably a quarter century ago now.

Let’s assume that they should have colours and that the three colours picture here are the correct ones, then, IMO, Ro should be red and carrying a rock, Sham should be yellow and carrying the scissors, and Bo should be blue and carrying the paper.

It’s not clear who is who here, but they don’t fit with my colour-item pairings.

Reasoning: Sham is vaguely like French “jaune” which is yellow. B and P are related sounds. There’s a bit more to it but the rest is mostly obvious.

Long was it known fact: Windows versions and OG Star Trek films. Every other one was terrible.

… but I note there are a few important releases missing there. 3.0, Win2K and 8.1 especially, and we might argue for 3.1 and 98SE and maybe even the unreleased Longhorn too.

Using AI to find errors that can then be independently verified sounds reasonable.

The danger would be in assuming that it will find all errors, or that an AI once-over would be “good enough”. This is what most rich AI proponents are most interested in, after all; a full AI process with as few costly humans as possible.

The lesser dangers would be 1) the potential for the human using the tool to lose or weaken their own ability to find bugs without external help and 2) the AI finding something that isn’t a bug, and the human “fixing” it without a full understanding that it wasn’t wrong in the first place.

It’s a fairly common trope in science fiction, and might even be science fact. The idea is that realities split from every decision point, some we’re aware of and some - due to quantum fluctuations - we’re not. Indeed, it might only be the quantum weirdness that’s valid and human decisions are merely emergent phenomena.

If you take a look at any quantum experiment, you get things like particles interfering with themselves and apparently appearing in many places at once. Tissue thin neighbouring universes along some probability axis interfering with each other, one for each possible position of a particle, would explain what’s known as the “many worlds interpretation”. The MWI doesn’t talk about a probability axis though. That’s the fictional part until proven otherwise.

It would still be a dimension even if things were more discrete though. Like, separately identifiable parallel universes where no intermediates exist. Hopping from one to the other could still be interpreted as moving within some extra dimension, and there’s nothing really stopping us from calling that probability.