palordrolap

“Hurt me, daddy.”

“OK, now you’ve made it weird.”

“Aw yeah, that’s the stuff.”

That’s a thorny question: Do comments need to be in the base standard, or can that be offloaded to those building on it? It doesn’t look like it would be hard to have (comment "foo bar baz") in an expression and have a re-parser throw that out.

Is the complaint that no two groups of people will use the same comment standard if left to their own devices? It’s not like the other data from different sources will always match up. What’s one extra, and fairly easy to handle SNAFU?

That said, yes, I think I’d be more comfortable knowing there was an accepted comment format. The aesthetic seems to be Lisp-like, and I notice that the Lisp comment marker, the semicolon, is currently a reserved character, that is, it’s illegal to use it unquoted. Maybe they’re thinking of adding that at some point.

Time for a law to be passed that kills off this bad idea permanently.

With governments (of all alignments) in the pockets of, or otherwise under the influence of, the very large corporations whose advertising would stand to benefit from this, I have only the following to say: Good luck with that.

“They’re back! In POG form!”

But seriously, with the way web search seems to be going these days, webrings coming back might actually be useful.

What does “lift” mean in this context? A web search turns up a Doris Day musical from 1951 which is kind of funny to think about but I’m guessing is not what you mean.

As for the general case of modifying the Sun - or any star - in some way, it’s all but certain to need a huge number of resources (or amount of energy, or both), and considering the Sun is on the order of a million times larger than Earth, far more than can be obtained from Earth alone.

I mean, I’d like to be proven wrong and there’s some exotic-physics way of causing the helium in the Sun to spontaneously turn back into hydrogen, but if that was easy, you’d expect that we’d see stars do that by themselves occasionally. We don’t, which implies there would still need to be some kind of energy input required to get it started.

Without exotic physics, we’d pretty much need on the order of the energy that the star had output from birth up to that point, and if we had that, we’d be better off using that energy in other ways.

We could get all Earth life off Earth and into a self-sustaining, space-faring habitat with a minuscule fraction of the resources. We might be better off aiming for something like that.

The gravitational collapse of a cloud of mostly hydrogen in the vacuum of space.

And anything falling together under gravity was given that kinetic energy from somewhere* and ultimately it can all be traced back to the Big Bang.

As for where that energy came from, it’s possible we’ll never know. Most organised religions (and no doubt a few disorganised ones) have their theories, of course. You may subscribe to one of these.

* This is the principle most commonly simplified as “what goes up, must come down”

Given that magic eye pictures are basically a certain convolution of a repetitive source image (or random noise) and a depth map, it ought to be possible for an AI, if not a standard procedural algorithm, to at least attempt to “factor out” the source and map from the result image.

Whether that even counts as seeing and whether this guy’s neural network could do this, or maybe “see” in some other way is open to question. But I’m guessing it’s a no.

Yeah, that’ll go great when the car is suddenly driving 14 miles down the driveway of the house I lived at as a child - a driveway that is walkable in less than a minute - before entering the garage which is a large house that slightly resembles a place I used to work and has a view over a clock tower that may or may not be larger when you look at it from a different angle and I think I’ll nap in this bed that’s here.

Now tell me: Where is the car relative to its position when that five-second-long dream sequence began, and will that pedestrian ever walk again?

Off the top of my head - handwashing before surgery/delivering a baby reducing patient deaths (though you mention germ theory), plate tectonics, the evolution of species, heliocentricism.

Any tool someone invents will be used to train an AI to circumvent that tool.

In fact that’s how a lot of AI training is done in the first place.

Because you touch y… wait no. That doesn’t work here.

Let me channel my inner Microsoft and think of the most asinine…

OK, yeah, you’ll have to touch and hold the right hand side of the screen for three seconds, then the left and the right for a further three, let go of the right and keep touching the left for three more, let go and then the settings will pop up. I call it “Son of sticky keys.”

There will be no other way to get to those settings.

That free idea reduces (potential) ad watch time which reduces money, so there’s no chance they’ll implement it.

If they thought they could get away with serving an ad every 15 seconds, they’d do it.

My money’s on Microsoft Frontpage

Cost or no cost, IoT should not be able to brick devices on the whim - or unexpected dissolution - of a faceless corporation.

Unfortunately too many people are trusting of monolithic entities which promise the moon and then decide what they really meant was “bend over”.

I may be channelling a bit of Louis Rossman here.

That said, the other comments here suggest that the device in question still has all features when accessed from the front panel, which is a step up from a lot of other IoT behaviour. Owners who don’t want to pay for the app should still disconnect it from any connectivity and keep it that way just in case the manufacturer decides to remove that functionality as well.

And if it stops working altogether without network connectivity, take the L and maybe mail it back to the company’s head office with no return address. Let them deal with the e-waste.

Most people don’t need multiple profiles either.

Dude, if that’s all-caps HARD, then I don’t know how you’d classify, say, compiling things from source and fixing any problems that might crop up along the way. Or fixing missing DLL / OCX hell when trying to get an old Windows game running under Linux, because let me tell you, I’ve done both of those and had to give up. firefox -P is heaven by comparison.

You could even put it into a shortcut and you wouldn’t have to type it any more.

Yes the interface sucks, but HARD is not it.

“Hard” is a strong word. It’s not built into the default interface, granted, but it’s not that hard to use FF’s command line: firefox -P

They have said they’re thinking about rejigging the whole thing though.

Well, it could be you, or it could be me, as I’ve hit the same waypoints.

fedia.io wasn’t taking sign-ups at the time I went to kbin.run, but they are right now, so that’s where I’ve ended up this time.

If this one dies too, I guess I’ll take the jinx with me back to Reddit and see what happens there.