Posts by JulieM 1284 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Nov 2014
And that's why attempting individual self-sufficiency is actually a bad thing. You will always end up with more of something than you can make use of and not enough of something else. A much more viable strategy is collective self-sufficiency, with enough diversity to allow a surplus for one member of the group to end up cancelling out another member's deficit.
Snap, Flatpak and the like are Trojan horses, designed for the explicit purpose of encouraging people to install pre-compiled software on their machines.
Do not fall for this!
If you need a package that is not in your distribution's repositories, the proper course of action is download the Source Code directly from the developer (who will treat you as an equal) and build it yourself.
ISTG one of these days I am going to lock myself in a room and not come out until I have written a tool for automatically determining dependencies, downloading them including any necessary -dev / -devel packages and building the package.
Yep. Nearly 30 years ago, I had an idea for an improved gas multipoint water heater that required neither an electrical supply nor a permanent pilot burner. No-one was interested in developing it (and I had connections in that industry in those days).
Several years and a change of jobs later, I found a Continental manufacturer selling "my invention".
In this country, no-one cares about a new idea unless it makes the already-rich even richer.
I gave this "vibe coding" lark a try, but I really don't think it's for me.
I ended up in a terrible state; eyes going funny, voice hoarse, and it took me awhile to get my breath back. Not to mention the questions from co-workers about what I was doing taking a laptop into the toilets. And I didn't even get much code written .....
You are making a huge assumption that the content users are seeking is available anywhere else that's not enshittified.
It's like the signs they have on buses, thanking passengers for travelling with this particular bus company to a destination that is not served by any of the other bus companies.
Actually - what would you do once you were on the Moon ? Take the totty and join the 250,000 mile high club ?
I would send a text message to a bunch of mathematicians about to announce how many digits of pi they had calculated, reading "355/113 was good enough to get us here!"
I'm not sure.
I'd be perfectly happy with the rich getting scammed as long as the money ended up going towards some cause that seeks somehow to repair some of the damage done by the marksunwitting donors in the first place.
When it's merely the rich scamming each other for personal gain (and as likely as not without the full amount of VAT being paid), I can't really summon up much enthusiasm for it.
That's literally how the gutter press work. Whatever will get attention has always been afforded a higher priority than what's strictly accurate.
There used to be a time, though, when stories had to be at least vaguely plausible.
Now they know no-one is going to be able to test how true the story is, *and* they have plausible deniability that they fabricated it out of whole cloth.
It doesn't just make things you could do before easier. It also enables things you could not do before.
If some sicko wants to look at a publicly-available picture of me (which will definitely include clothing) and imagine what I look like undressed while he's having a Thomas Tank somewhere in private, well, that's obviously extremely distasteful; but there's nothing I can do about it, because all the bad stuff is going on entirely within his own imagination -- and the inside of a person's head is the most private space there is.
The moment the aforementioned sicko does anything that exposes what belongs in his imagination to the world of reality, though, a line is crossed.
At University, many years ago, I witnessed two supposedly grown adults decide that, in the absence of any obvious way to eject the floppy disc from the Apple Macintosh computer they were using before inserting another, the correct course of action was to insert it anyway.
All my instincts were screaming at me to high-tail it out of the room and minimise the likelihood of being either (a) asked for help with the entirely-foreseen (by me, at any rate) consequences of this, or (b) "Post Hoc ergo Propter Hoc"-ed for them.
I do that all the time in Konsole, when (e.g.) I'm assembling a command or SQL query by pasting a bunch of things into it!
I'll copy what goes between two things using ctrl+insert (to paste with shift+insert); then highlight each of them in turn with a left-drag (to paste with a middle-click). The shift+del/ctrl+ins/shift+ins and highlight/middle-click paste buffers are independent of each other, so the separating phrase doesn't get lost each time.
Dragging over text with the left button held down, then positioning the mouse over another text entry element and pressing the middle button is how you paste text!
It was bad enough when they decided it wasn't good enough for a text entry to begin accepting text straight away, as soon as the mouse pointer was over it, and you had to click on before you could begin entering text.
There's a rare genetic condition where you can have two lots of DNA in your body and therefore four chromosomes; at least two of which will be X, and up to two of which can be Y (and yes, you can even have a 3-1 split -- which will cause you to test as both reproductive sexes depending where the sample was taken from).
I worked for an engineering firm in the late 1990s / early 2000s.
If you got a lift in a car belonging to an engineer or a technician -- as opposed to a manager -- it would usually be held together with bits of string, and require a starting procedure that would qualify as an anti-theft device -- but there probably would also be an inverter and at least one BS1363 socket. (Except for one guy who had an old ambulance, partially converted to a camper van, with a 3kVA generator installed in it .....)
There was most definitely a real, live person doing the announcements on one of the trains from London St Pancras to Sheffield last Wednesday.
And I hope the management were sympathetic, because the entirely human emotions on display were absolutely, fully justified under the circumstances.
Yep.
There is precisely one way to know what any given piece of software will do: Read and understand the source code (or show it to a sufficiently-competent programmer whom you trust), and make an informed decision.
Any person who actively denies you the opportunity to do that, should be held entirely responsible for all consequences of users' actions.
All these things are only problems because the software is multiple levels of proprietary, and no-one has access to the complete Source Code.
And all this is only made worse, when back-bedroom "developers" use pirate copies of programming languages and don't read the dire warnings included in the printed manuals about how properly to interact with other software. Which means they end up (perhaps unwittingly) using exactly the same techniques used by viruses and malware, and run into security software.
Open Source software just works -- or else it gets fixed, or just not used.
We could just pass a law requiring suppliers of any product to release all the information necessary for third parties to repair it (including properly-annotated engineering drawings and software Source Code) or manufacture one like it, the moment they cease supporting it.
If you are not taking proper care of the things you have been trusted with the custody of, they should be taken from you and given to someone who can make better use of them.
Bit-buckets implemented in CMOS almost never end up becoming full in practice, because with two-way active drive, the ones and zeros tend to annihilate each other as long as they occur in equal numbers. If the bit bucket contains only zeros, "adding a one" to it actually removes a zero; and if the bit bucket contains only ones, "adding a zero" to it removes a one.
Sometimes an auto-cleaning cycle is still necessary, if too many zeros are encountered in succession without a one, or too many ones without a zero.
You edit the Source Code for the password manager to specify a font where the upper case I, lower case L and digit 1 are visually distinguible, recompile it and carry on.
(If you didn't have the Source Code for your password manager, you wouldn't be able to be sure it wasn't doing nasty things like sending plaintext copies of your passwords somewhere.)
It is a good thing!
I'm the human being, and I know what I am doing. If I'm asking a computer to add things, I want it to do its damnedest to find a way of adding those things, trying the most sensible things first (Do you see something that would be a valid numeric value, followed by junk? Ignore the junk, pick up on the number) and then getting desperate (Do you see a non-empty string? Increase the last character code and maybe propagate a carry to the preceding character), not just give up on me and go off in a sulk because the things weren't served on exactly the right shaped plate.
I know for a fact that it can parse the string "2" and get an integer, or maybe a floating-point number, because it was totally happy to do that without the speech marks. Sure, I could explicitly call a function to parse that string as a number; but as long as that's possible somehow, just the fact that I used the addition operator should be enough, and I only want to be told it's an error if the string cannot be parsed as anything that can sensibly have a number added to it. As long as whatever it does is deterministic
As for your "22", there is no circle of Hell deep enough for anyone who dares try to use + for string concatenation.
Well, you typed all the right letters, just not necessarily in the right order .....
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