Posts by Frumious Bandersnatch

Linus Torvalds forgot to release Linux 6.14 for a whole day

The man is a genuine living legend.

Yawn. Wake me up when he finishes TAOCP and takes a brief diversion into creating T_EX.

(sarcasm, obviously, but in the best possible taste... legends, both)

Developer sabotaged ex-employer with kill switch activated when he was let go

Re: Speaking as a Java programmer of 30 years

:(){ :|:& };: is shorter

Hisense QLED TVs are just LED TVs, lawsuit claims

Quantum is the smallest possible measureable amount, so in that case they may well be accurate

Off the Planck with you!

How nice that state-of-the-art LLMs reveal their reasoning ... for miscreants to exploit

Re: guardrails

You and me both know that anyone who uses the word "guardrails" in anything but disparaging terms is using it as a form of self-hypnosis. Have an upvote.

Horses have an infinite number of legs

• Horses have four legs
• Four is an even number
• Horses have two fore-legs (product 8) and two hind legs (product 2)
• Therefore the total number of legs is 10 legs
• Ten legs is certainly an odd number of legs for a horse to have
• The only number that is both odd and even is infinity
• Therefore, horses have an infinite number of legs

Does this thing run on a 220 V power supply? Oh. That puff of smoke suggests not

Re: Dreamcast Economics & Limitations

(basically it's a heart-felt response to something that up with she cannot put)

Re: Dreamcast Economics & Limitations

Minor pedantry alert... the Japanese is "yurusenai"...

• Base verb "yurusu", 許す,
• potential form, "yuruseru", 許せる
• negating suffix "nai", 許せない

The English translation is close enough to "I can't forgive you", so that's cool. An alternative translation might be "intolerable!"

Linux rolls out the welcome mat for Microsoft's Copilot key

oh, it's in there now, isn't it?

talk if you can

Microsoft declares 2025 'the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh'

I was gonna post a comment here

that was so withering it would put certain private horse fetishist email groups to shame.... but it's like shooting fish in a barrel, innit?

Million GPU clusters, gigawatts of power – the scale of AI defies logic

Re: "the entire industry is chasing the AI dragon"

Nope, it's getting high on its own supplAI

Data broker amasses 100M+ records on people – then someone snatches, sells it

This is just the age we're passing through

We've had the long-ish period from that guy from Sun (I think it was) saying that privacy is basically dead to the current time where breaches like this have especially become criminals stealing from other criminals. William Gibson nailed it... the future is here, but it's just not evenly distributed.

I wish I could give a cheery outlook and say that everything is going to be all right, but I'm sort of equivocal on that. At least I can offer some wisdom from Leonard Cohen: "There's a crack in everything... that's how the light gets in." ("light" is kind of cheery, no?)

Stay safe, be well, y'all.

Japan to allow limited rideshare services starting April 2024

Re: Good luck with that!

It's not only that. If you want to be a "scofflaw" (as per the article) in Japan, you either strike out on your own (high risk, high reward, particularly attractive to western immigrants) or roll in with the existing local grey/black economy. (or do some other lower-level shit like promoting bitcoin or selling pornography). And if you're a non-western immigrant, you just keep your nose down and do your regular (healthcare, restaurant, combini, etc.) job so that you can eventually gain citizenship (and besides, you're not going to be able to change jobs without putting your visa at risk).

This foreign attempt at setting up a new grey economy is destined to fail.

Japanese brewery using generative AI to dream up new beverages

bucky + soda stream

as title

'Return to Office' declared dead

Re: Loud minority

THE UNIONS FOREVER! DE-FEND-ING OUR RIGHTS. POWER TO THE FACT-RIES! THE WORRRKERS UNITE!

"Down with the blackleg," surely? (I can't believe I had to apply the strike tag and all)

(Yes, "There is power in a factory, power in the land, power in the hands of a worker" but you are misquoting)

AI threatens to automate away the clergy

Re: Surprised....

THX

I checked it to make sure I was right, but for a while there I couldn't decide which order was correct. Letter blindness set in.

Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater

web4 succeeds!

... but before we can enjoy it we all die a femtosecond later, smeared into the lambo event horizon

Revival of Medley/Interlisp: Elegant weapon for a more civilized age sharpened up again

LISP never really grabbed me

Prolog, on the other hand... Paraphrasing Alice, it's a poor sort of predicate that only works with call by (already-instantiated) value.

BOFH: Groundbreaking discovery or patently obvious trolling?

Re: Ideal platform

It sounds like the ideal platform for performing fuzzy logic.

Yeah, but on a mobile device in bed

(someone should patent that, quick)

------>

Setun up for us, will you?

X looks back at year of so-called 'engineering excellence' under Musk

Re: So pay to play

At least Hercules cleaned out the Augean stables. I don't see any shit being cleaned out on Twitter.

Re: Move on already

*Weyland-Yutani (FTFY)

BOFH: WELCOME TO COLOSSAL SERVER ROOM ADVENTURE!!

It is pitch black.

You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

Elon Musk launches his own xAI biz 'to understand reality'

Re: There’s that term again

gotta get up,

gotta get out

gotta get home

before the morning comes

what if I'm late

got a big day

gotta get home

before the sun comes up

...

Free Wednesday gift for you lucky lot: Extra mouse button!

Re: shift-insert for paste

Unfortunately, not all apps implement shift-insert in the same way. I would love it if all apps pasted what you have just highlighted (ie, do the same as mouse middle click), but Firefox, for one, pastes the contents of the main copy/paste buffer.

At least shift-insert works the way I want in terminal programs. It's particularly handy for mouse-free copy and paste between an emacs buffer and a terminal. Still very useful if I have to use mouse to select text in other source apps.

Boss such a tyrant you need a job quitting agent? It works in Japan

Re: taishoku daiko - the actual mechanics?

I am rather curious as how the taishoku daiko perform their task. In person? Can imagine it would be excruciatingly formal.

Not only in terms of business etiquette, there's also a higher level of language formality to deal with. Sounds like a difficult job all right.

Apologies JP speakers if I have commited a "the hoi polloi" on "the taishoku daiko."

No, it's not a "the hoi polloi" error on your part ("hoi" literally translating to "the?"). Japanese has no definite or indefinite articles, so when translating from Japanese to English it's OK to add one or some other surrogate word ("these", "such") as appropriate.

Creator of Linux virtual assistant blames 'patent troll' for project's death

I guess you mean s/invidious/vexatious/?

The Twitpocalypse may have begun, as datacenter migration reportedly founders

Re: Unrelated to this story,

I think there's been more than just two stories recycled over the last few weeks...

Twitch bans AI-generated Seinfeld show for making transphobic jokes

Re: Is the intelligence really artificial?

like "The Puerto Rico Day" or whatever they called it?

(obviously not trans- or homo- phobic, but extremely dismissive of Puerto Ricans)

No more free API access, says Twitter: You pay for that data

Re: They just did this in the wrong order

Yeah, and Travis Bickle was organasized.

(I don't know what kind of point I'm trying to make here, tbh)

It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system

Re: Learn both?

"you had to guess if it looked new enough to be km."

You mean you didn't notice that the new signs were a different colour?

"forced to glide the aircraft, containing 69 souls"

While we're on the subject of archaic units of measurement ...

Tone deaf? Microsoft must have booked Sting for Davos because he's a good singer

"the do do do, the 'da, da, da'"

Sorry, Comrade. (no, we won't be reimbursing you for burial expenses)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNYcviXK4rg

Time Lords decree an end to leap seconds before risky attempt to reverse time

Re: Didn't someone previously propose

mmmm... if I could still edit, I'd move that "presumably" up a bullet point...

oyasumi!

Re: Didn't someone previously propose

No, what's "clunky" is that the OP:

* thought that some post was interesting

* (presumably) reached into his/her knowledge of Japanese and pulled out "omoshiroi"

* decided to post it using Japanese script (mostly .... that space between the words tells a different story, though; I call cut and paste)

* added a superfluous attempt at "being polite" (as they imagined they should) (that "desu")

Other low-effort interpretations are possible, but they mainly revolve around the OP not really knowing Japanese.

If something is genuinely interesting and you want to express it in Japanese, it's just 面白い (+ Japanese exclamation mark, which I'm not set up for at the moment). Same as "itai", "mazui", "umai", and so on. Tacking on unnecessary "politeness" defeats the purpose and actually sounds sarcastic.

Re: Didn't someone previously propose

面白い + です = grammar fail, sorry.

omoshoroi no desu, otoh ... (or even "omoshirou gozaimasu" if you're a certain kind of purist/pedant)

Twitter is suffering from mad bro disease. Open thinking can build it back better

Re: Immunize the Mastodon

Yeah, deserves an eschaton of upvotes.

NSA urges orgs to use memory-safe programming languages

Re: Best of all

Yeah, I agree. My objection against Rust was somewhat confected. I'm really a Rust fan, but I think that it's always good to preserve the "Reflections On Trust" Advocate position.

Re: Best of all

The advice is sound. Given that memory corruption often allows RCE, it makes sense to use a language where memory corruption is simply not a concern.

But even rust grandfathers C/C++'s (what you might call) cargo cultism around order of execution (memory barriers and whatnot). The problem is that order of execution is a non-trivial (unsafe) problem where you're cribbing from C/C++, where your compiler can't check for non-compliance when it comes to translation of the standard, and the CPU can make up its own mind ...

But yeah, in general Rust is a whole lot better. Just not perfect.

Microsoft's Lennart Poettering proposes tightening up Linux boot process

Re: *I* propose ...

He's clearly never heard of "least privileges"

"Zero Truss" as we call it around these parts...

(too soon? too late? Welcome to Groundhog day...)

Removing an obsolete AMD fix makes Linux kernel 6 quicker

Re: The older the OS...

Upvoted for the use of the "Þ" and knowing NOT to put a "Y" there instead.

Yes, shout-out for thorne!

That emoji may not mean what you think it means

Re: Eggplant

And of course this is highly variable depending on the country or your specific ingroup. In Japan the poop emoji can mean 'lucky'.

Yeah, but the kou'un -> unkou -> unko passage is pretty twisty...

China's blockchain boosters slam crypto as Ponzi scheme

Re: Dumb as a sack of rocks

(sorry ... wrong conman ... but still worth reading up on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Lustig)

Re: Dumb as a sack of rocks

Speaking of Ponzi and the Brooklyn Bridge, the Eiffel Tower is still standing as far as I know

(#onlyconnect)

Re: "Blockchains have a useful purpose outside of crypto."

which reminds me of a comment about religion and morality ... "name me one ethical/moral problem that religion solves that isn't solvable by Humanism?"

Bitcoin is just another cult, IMO.